Building The TSSDR Z590 Core i9-11900K Test Bench – Unparalleled Performance Increase through Small Steps Back

There was a point when Intel was the undisputed leader of CPUs and their dominance over AMD was solid.  This changed when AMD released its Ryzen PCIe 4.0 CPUs just a little sooner than Intel expected and, over the past year and five months, they have controlled the Gen 4 space exclusively.  That has changed most recently with Intel’s latest release of their 11th Generation CPUs and we have in our hands today a Core i9-11900K to get a close look at Intel PCIe 4.0 offerings.

It also was only a few weeks back that we built and posted what, at that time, was our top PC system to date, sporting Intel’s 1oth Gen Core i9-10900K CPU amongst what could only be described as some of the best gear that we could get our hands on.  Today we hope to better that with a bit of a transition from that 10th Gen Intel Z490 Gen 3 Test Bench…to a bigger and better 11th Gen Z590 system.  The big question is whether all of out testing will improve, hold up, or actually decrease as we move from the 10-core i9-10900K CPU to the 8-core Intel i9-11900K CPU. It seems we may have stepped back just a bit…or have we?

Right off, a system like this simply isn’t possible without the help and sponsorship of Intel, Corsair, Zotac and Sabrent whom we thank wholeheartedly for their support. Our latest and greatest Z590 Test Bench is contained within an amazing Corsair 5000x RGB chassis which houses the Intel Gen 4 Core i9-11900K CPU set at 5.3GHz on the ASUS ROG Maximus XIII Z590 Hero motherboard.  With that we also have 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4-3200 memory, a ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity OC Graphics card and the Sabrent 4TB Rocket 4 Plus Gen 4 NVMe SSD.

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.

Our overall ranking remains the same as our 10th Gen Z490 Bench, in that, both results were in the top 1% of systems tested worldwide but…  Our newest score of 9763 betters the previous of 8249 significantly! Turn the page and let’s check out some great equipment and metrics.