The magazine’s lab tested Intel’s “Arrow Lake” desktop chips against AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D series. The surprising result? For gaming, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D was still king, but Intel won in productivity tasks like 7‑Zip compression and Adobe Premiere rendering. However, the magazine flagged a BIOS bug on some Z890 boards causing stuttering—and provided a step‑by‑step fix using Intel’s own tuning utility.
For veteran tinkerers, a five‑page article revisited DRAM overclocking. With DDR5 now mature, the magazine showed how to tighten secondary timings (tRFC, tFAW) on Hynix A‑die modules to reach 8000 MT/s stable on a mid‑range B650 board. A reader’s submitted result: +18% minimum FPS in Rainbow Six Siege after a weekend of tweaking. Download PCGames Hardware No022025 pdf
The issue’s centerpiece was an exhaustive 12‑page guide to the newly launched NVIDIA RTX 50‑series (e.g., “Blackwell”) and AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards. It compared raw rasterization versus ray tracing performance across 20 games, but more importantly, it revealed how to undervolt each model to save power while losing less than 5% frame rate. A table showed that the RTX 5070 Ti could run 11°C cooler with a 90 mV reduction—no performance hit in Cyberpunk 2077 . However, the magazine flagged a BIOS bug on
One popular column, “The Hardware Lab,” built three gaming PCs at €800, €1500, and €3000 price points. The €1500 “Sweet Spot” rig used a Radeon RX 7800 XT with a Ryzen 5 7600X3D (a Germany‑exclusive CPU) and outperformed the €3000 build from two years ago by 40% in Starfield . The story emphasized that spending more no longer guarantees linear gains—smart part selection does. A reader’s submitted result: +18% minimum FPS in
In early 2025, as the first quarter tech reviews rolled in, one German magazine stood out for PC enthusiasts: PCGames Hardware issue 02/2025. This wasn’t just another news digest—it was a deep technical manual for anyone building, tweaking, or overclocking a high-performance PC.
The issue debunked a common belief: “360mm AIOs are always better.” Their thermal camera tests proved that a top‑tier air cooler (Noctua NH‑D15 G2) matched a 240mm AIO in noise‑normalized cooling for CPUs under 200W. Only for Intel’s 14900KS or overclocked Ryzen 9 did liquid become mandatory. The story closed with a maintenance guide for liquid‑cooled systems after two years of use.
