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With respect to technology, one of my favorite activities is having the opportunity to upgrade and build a new Test Bench for The SSD Review. It occurs probably once every two years or so and rarely….rarely does everything fall in place perfectly. Family doesn’t want to be anywhere near my office and things usually start in the early morning and end even earlier in the morning. It is the definition of a catastrophe. I will never forget this shot from several years back, but every build is exactly the same mess.
The reason behind this mess is not what you might think, although I have had some pretty strange things happen during that first press of the power switch. The reasoning, as an SSD reviewer, is that we have to squeeze EVERY ounce of performance from an SSD in order to post our reports. If I post a 12GB/s max speed result of a 14GB/s SSD, all hell will break lose. This build of the newest TSSDR Z890 Ultra Core 9 Arrow Lake was no different than the rest.
Looks pretty Good eh? I have to admit Corsair sent along some amazing gear for this build and we will get to that in time. Add to that Corsair iCUE PC monitoring and lighting control which sets this system right off. Believe me, the office never looked nearly as clean during this or any build. PCs like this simply aren’t possible without the sponsorship of companies like Corsair, Intel and ASUS. While Intel sent along both the Core Ultra 9 and 5 CPUs, ASUS provided the ASUS ProArt Z890 Creator. Corsair went to town as they always do sending the iCUE Link 6500x chassis, iCUE Link Titan 360 RX RGB Liquid CPU Cooler, H1000i Platinum Modular Ultra PSU, Dominator Platinum 64GB DDR5-6400 RAM, iCUE Link RX120 and 140 fans, K100 AIR Wireless RGB Mechanical Keyboard, and Corsair Dark Core RGB Pro Wireless Gaing Mouse.
We will be using external storage extensively with this system and the SanDisk Pro-Blade Station accompanied by a 4TB and 2-2TB blades has been invaluable to our needs. Last but not least, our SSD of choice for testing is the Micron 4600 Gen5 2TB SSD, although we repeated testing with a half dozen or so similar Gen5 SSDs.
This system is based on the ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator motherboard along with our ZOTAC Gaming White Trinity RTX 3080 graphics card, the Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, along with 64GB of Corsairs best Dominator Platinum DDR5-6400 Memory.
As we work through the components, clicking on the title of each will bring you directly to its Amazon sale link in order to do a price check. It’s us versus the world! Let’s start with our updated Passmark Rating that has us stable at 5400MHz!
This is the highest Passmark Rating we have ever had in a PC with all components coming in at the 99th percentile of systems tested to date or better. In fact, our last Z790 Test Bench only achieved a high of 12210 which, at that time, was the higher score we had ever reached. Turn the page and let’s check out some great equipment and metrics.