VOL. 04
SUMMER 2026 · 6 SPREADS

The Silicon Lookbook

Six chips. Six spreads. The flagships our own engineers buy when they spec their personal machines — photographed bare-die, written without copywriter euphemisms, priced honestly.

ISSUE TELEMETRY

VOLUME
04
EDITION
SUMMER 2026
SPREADS
06
BRANDS
INTEL · AMD
BIN FLOOR
A · A+
YIELD
98.7%
JUMP TO ›01Intel Core i9-14900K02AMD Ryzen 903Intel Core i7-14700K04AMD Threadripper PRO05Intel Xeon w9-3495X06AMD Ryzen 7
Intel Core i9-14900K
01SPREAD
INTELA+ · X3D-ready substrate

The thread-rich monolith

Intel Core i9-14900K

Raptor Lake-S Refresh · LGA 1700

Cores

24 (8P+16E)

Boost

6.0 GHz

Cache

36 MB L3

TDP

125–253 W

The 14900K is what happens when a company refuses to leave a node behind. Raptor Lake refined, re-binned, and pushed to 6.0 GHz on a single ring. Heterogeneous cores — Performance for the spike, Efficient for the floor — schedule themselves around your workload while you keep typing.

“Six gigahertz. No asterisk.”

FROM

$649 CAD

Open spec sheet
END SPREAD 01 / NEXT ›
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
02SPREAD
AMDA+ · Verified golden sample

Stacked cache, doubled latency budget

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

Zen 4 · 3D V-Cache · AM5

Cores

16C/32T

Boost

5.7 GHz

L3 cache

128 MB

TDP

120 W

Eight cores with a tower of vertically-stacked L3 sitting directly on the die. Eight more cores without — for the workloads that prefer raw frequency over locality. The 7950X3D doesn't choose; it routes the work and lets each half do what it's best at. Frame-time variance collapses; benchmark charts go quiet.

“Cache so deep it changes the conversation.”

FROM

$779 CAD

Open spec sheet
END SPREAD 02 / NEXT ›
Intel Core i7-14700K
03SPREAD
INTELA · Hand-screened

The pragmatic apex

Intel Core i7-14700K

Raptor Lake-S Refresh · LGA 1700

Cores

20 (8P+12E)

Boost

5.6 GHz

Cache

33 MB L3

TDP

125–253 W

Eighty percent of the i9 at sixty percent of the price. Twenty threads, a 5.6 GHz boost, the same Z790 platform — Raptor Lake's middle child has matured into the smart-money flagship for builders who can read a spec sheet without flinching.

“The chip the spec-sheet readers actually buy.”

FROM

$479 CAD

Open spec sheet
END SPREAD 03 / NEXT ›
AMD Threadripper PRO 7995WX
04SPREAD
AMDPRO-grade · ECC validated

Workstation absolutism

AMD Threadripper PRO 7995WX

Zen 4 · sTR5 (WRX90) · sTR5 / WRX90

Cores

96C/192T

Boost

5.1 GHz

L3 cache

384 MB

TDP

350 W

Ninety-six cores. One hundred and ninety-two threads. Eight-channel ECC DDR5. One hundred and twenty-eight PCIe 5.0 lanes. The 7995WX isn't a desktop CPU pretending to be a workstation — it's a workstation that happens to fit in a workstation. Render farms collapse into a single tower.

“Ninety-six cores. The render farm fits under the desk.”

FROM

$11,499 CAD

Open spec sheet
END SPREAD 04 / NEXT ›
Intel Xeon w9-3495X
05SPREAD
INTELPRO · AMX-validated

Enterprise-grade silicon, desk-grade form

Intel Xeon w9-3495X

Sapphire Rapids-WS · LGA 4677

Cores

56C/112T

Boost

4.8 GHz

L3 cache

105 MB

TDP

350 W

Built for the workstation user who refuses to fork the codebase between dev box and production: AVX-512, AMX matrix engines, eight-channel DDR5 RDIMM, and the ECC every long render quietly depends on. Xeon under your desk means Xeon binaries everywhere.

“ECC, AMX, eight channels. Production parity, under your desk.”

FROM

$7,899 CAD

Open spec sheet
END SPREAD 05 / NEXT ›
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
06SPREAD
AMDA+ · Gaming-bin

The frame-rate special

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Zen 4 · 3D V-Cache · AM5

Cores

8C/16T

Boost

5.0 GHz

L3 cache

96 MB

TDP

120 W

Eight cores, ninety-six megabytes of stacked L3, locked-in cache locality. The 7800X3D quietly displaced every other gaming CPU in the bracket: lower power, lower temperature, higher 1% lows. It will not win a Cinebench shootout. It will win every benchmark you actually run.

“Lower 1%-lows than anything else in the bracket.”

FROM

$499 CAD

Open spec sheet

MASTHEAD

Hand-binned

Every flagship in this volume cleared our wafer-sorter v3.4 at the A or A+ tier. No re-marked seconds, no warehouse-floor rejects, no "engineering sample" surprises.

Telemetry-true

Frequency, TDP, and cache figures are vendor-published — but the bin grades and yield numbers come from our own bench. We publish what we measure, not what we wish we measured.

Editorial, not advertorial

These are the chips our own engineers buy. The shortlist matters more than the longlist — and the longlist is in the catalogue if you'd rather decide for yourself.

SHOP THE ISSUE

Every spread is in stock. Take it home.

Sealed, hand-binned, dispatched within 24 hours of order. Free standard shipping over $99 CAD.

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