- Joined
- Nov 12, 2014
- Messages
- 474 (0.14/day)
- Location
- Ilirska Bistrica, Slovenia
| System Name | Thermaltake |
|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 5 5800X3D @ 4.60 GHz |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2 |
| Cooling | Thermalright Peerless Assassin |
| Memory | 32 GB Crucial Ballistix @ 3600 MHz CL16 |
| Video Card(s) | XFX 319 Merc 6800 XT |
| Storage | Kingston 256GB SSD | Kingston 240GB NVMe | Samsung 1TB NVMe | Samsung F3 1TB HDD | Barracuda 2TB HDD |
| Display(s) | 34" ultrawide LG 34GL750B 144hz 1ms | 55" LG UR91 4k@60Hz |
| Case | Phanteks Eclipse P400 |
| Audio Device(s) | ALC 1220 120dB SNR HD Audio |
| Power Supply | Thermaltake GF1 850 W - 80 Plus Gold |
| Mouse | Logitech G502 HERO Lightspeed |
| Keyboard | Asus TUF Gaming K3 |
| Software | Windows 11 Pro x64 |
Hi guys! After a loooong time, I've kicked my PC gaming into next gear and I decided to upgrade.
NEW: Motherboard, CPU, RAM, NVME SSD, cable management, some style and a new monitor!
I've also re-arranged my gaming room and made myself a bookshelf with component boxes.
I have written about my PC years ago when I painted it white. I made a separate discussion about that here.
I have decided to provide a vast ammount of numbers for the build in a blog sort of way. What's been done and what's going to be done. I'll also be including benchmark results. That's the reason I've opened up a new thread, the discussion has "switched" orientation.
Some visual representation:
FPS layout
Racing layout
Night mode
Close-up Clappy trappy
Insides
@IceScreamer suggested to paint the Radeon sign black and I delivered, thanks! You sir, are a genious!
The "book" shelf
The idea is that this is a several year old build and she's my "baby". So, this is gonna get quite long: component-by-component analizing shit to explain the way I made her work. And in-advance: Any extra tinkering help is appreciated. I know much but not that much.
USED FOR CASUAL GAMING AND MULTIMEDIA WITH THE FUTURE IN MIND
Display:
I'm using a 29" ultrawide from LG. It has 75 Hz freesync and I use it to the fullest extent. That means all my games are limited to 75 Hz + freesync if supported. If not I limit my FPS in-game to 75. The native resolution of the monitor is 2560x1080 which is 33% more in pixel-count than 1920x1080. It feels buttery smooth to me and I think it uses the platform pretty well. This you need to know, to understand the performance standards I want here.
CPU:
Recently wanting to upgrade the CPU has left me no choice but to switch platforms. I was using an FX-8350 running at 4.8 GHz with a boost of 5.1 GHz which was great and the AC Freezer Extreme was cooling it well enough. I gave the CPU, MOBO and RAM to my brother of 10
Picking the CPU I wanted something that will last me for 4-5 years, so after seeing many reviews and reccomendations, I figured that the Ryzen 7 1700 would be a great enough choice for me. After seeing that the cooler boxed with the CPU is adequate for my needs (Thanks Kyle), I was also in for a 40-50 € save. Now I run the CPU at 3.6 GHz on all cores, with a 0.054 V undervolt. The reason for this is that during stress testing and recording using CPU, the CPU crashes with lower voltages.
Motherboard:
I was planning on buying a B350 chipset motherboard, because it enabled the overclocking features I thought I needed, but I found this X370 board that was tested and returned, so I said what the hell, if it doesn't work I can still return it and get refund. So far so good, the board in question is a Gigabyte AX370 Gaming K3. It has loads of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports, the Gen 2 ones, a bucket-load of SATA ports, and NVME port, not to mention all the FAN headers and so forts. Basically enough for a casual gamer with some multimedia work. The only thing that's missing and is keeping me from having the CPU FAN's light on, is that it's missing an RGB header. Bummer, eh? But that's okay!
RAM:
As far as the RAM goes, I was using Crucial Ballistix Elite before and I've decided to go with them again, since they failed to fail me, hehe. I went for an 8 GB stick of DDR4 Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400 MHz CL16. They look nice with the color of the motherboard. I'm buying another stick pretty soon, so keep that in mind. I've also "overclocked" the RAM to 2666 MHz and I'm planning on configuring the timings with RyzenRAM, I'll be needing some help with that!
GPU:
The GPU is an old R9 290X, reference cooler, 4 GB, I've played with the BIOS a bit etc. and well, it squeezes out the most it can with this cooler. I'd very much like to buy an aftermarket one, but not for 100 €. So if anyone is selling an aftermarket cooler for this card, I'd be happy to buy it, for a reasonable price of course. It's able to push most of my games at 75 FPS locked with Freesync at native 2560x1080 and almost every option turned up, except different AA, I see you wankers in BF1 better without it There is still some overclocking headroom without increasing voltages(huge power consumption), but the cooler won't let me. I've changed the thermal paste to AC MX-2 and it's keeping the card about 5° C cooler now. The memory timings have also been tightened.
Storage space:
The drive configuration of the system is pretty simple and smart, to give me the ability not to lose performance much when multitasking and have general better organisation. I'm using a Kingston SSDNow V300 120 GB SSD as the system drive. It contains only the Windows 10 installation and some core programs. Those include MS Office, Adobe Suite, benchmarking tools etc. I still have over 40 GB left on that drive and I don't see myself ever using it up.
Next is a 500 GB WD Caviar Black HDD where I store files I legally download on the internet and my source videos. Downloading files are stored on a separate drive so performance is not impacted on say game loading times. Game installation files are also stored on this drive, so I have faster game installation, because files are read from one drive and written on another. I'm using a separate drive for all my installed games.
Here we come to the 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 HDD game/rendered video disk. This is a drive where I install my legally downloaded games, and also Origin, Steam and Uplay libraries. When rendering videos this disk is also used for the finished rendering of a video. Here I'm also using the benefits of having two disks (performance).
I'm probably going to get a new 2 TB drive since they're awfully cheap these days, maybe even 4 TB, and use the 1 TB instead of the 500 GB.
Last but not least, here we come to the new 240 GB Kingston SUV500M8 NVMe SSD, which for some reason now has a not-working version of GTA:SA installed, but it's otherwise empty. I still haven't figured out what I'll be using it for, but I was going for gameplay recording.
PSU:
The power supply is a 530 W 80 Plus certified, with good reviews and I think the PC shouldn't really use more than 350-400 W of power, which is keeping things in the good zone of the efficiency curve so no planned upgrades here.
Case cooling:
I'm upgrading the 5 case fans I have to a red LED with higher CFM and lower noise ones, maybe also add another one. I just love fans and they're basically inaudible so.
There you go! This should get you a basic idea of what this PC is all about! Now that I've written this long post I need another coffee. Be ready to be getting some numbers!
I'm sorry if I missed something, be sure to correct my wrongness.
NEW: Motherboard, CPU, RAM, NVME SSD, cable management, some style and a new monitor!
I've also re-arranged my gaming room and made myself a bookshelf with component boxes.
I have written about my PC years ago when I painted it white. I made a separate discussion about that here.
I have decided to provide a vast ammount of numbers for the build in a blog sort of way. What's been done and what's going to be done. I'll also be including benchmark results. That's the reason I've opened up a new thread, the discussion has "switched" orientation.
Some visual representation:
FPS layout
Racing layout
Night mode
Close-up Clappy trappy
Insides
@IceScreamer suggested to paint the Radeon sign black and I delivered, thanks! You sir, are a genious!
The "book" shelf
The idea is that this is a several year old build and she's my "baby". So, this is gonna get quite long: component-by-component analizing shit to explain the way I made her work. And in-advance: Any extra tinkering help is appreciated. I know much but not that much.
USED FOR CASUAL GAMING AND MULTIMEDIA WITH THE FUTURE IN MIND
Display:
I'm using a 29" ultrawide from LG. It has 75 Hz freesync and I use it to the fullest extent. That means all my games are limited to 75 Hz + freesync if supported. If not I limit my FPS in-game to 75. The native resolution of the monitor is 2560x1080 which is 33% more in pixel-count than 1920x1080. It feels buttery smooth to me and I think it uses the platform pretty well. This you need to know, to understand the performance standards I want here.
CPU:
Recently wanting to upgrade the CPU has left me no choice but to switch platforms. I was using an FX-8350 running at 4.8 GHz with a boost of 5.1 GHz which was great and the AC Freezer Extreme was cooling it well enough. I gave the CPU, MOBO and RAM to my brother of 10
Picking the CPU I wanted something that will last me for 4-5 years, so after seeing many reviews and reccomendations, I figured that the Ryzen 7 1700 would be a great enough choice for me. After seeing that the cooler boxed with the CPU is adequate for my needs (Thanks Kyle), I was also in for a 40-50 € save. Now I run the CPU at 3.6 GHz on all cores, with a 0.054 V undervolt. The reason for this is that during stress testing and recording using CPU, the CPU crashes with lower voltages.
Motherboard:
I was planning on buying a B350 chipset motherboard, because it enabled the overclocking features I thought I needed, but I found this X370 board that was tested and returned, so I said what the hell, if it doesn't work I can still return it and get refund. So far so good, the board in question is a Gigabyte AX370 Gaming K3. It has loads of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports, the Gen 2 ones, a bucket-load of SATA ports, and NVME port, not to mention all the FAN headers and so forts. Basically enough for a casual gamer with some multimedia work. The only thing that's missing and is keeping me from having the CPU FAN's light on, is that it's missing an RGB header. Bummer, eh? But that's okay!
RAM:
As far as the RAM goes, I was using Crucial Ballistix Elite before and I've decided to go with them again, since they failed to fail me, hehe. I went for an 8 GB stick of DDR4 Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400 MHz CL16. They look nice with the color of the motherboard. I'm buying another stick pretty soon, so keep that in mind. I've also "overclocked" the RAM to 2666 MHz and I'm planning on configuring the timings with RyzenRAM, I'll be needing some help with that!
GPU:
The GPU is an old R9 290X, reference cooler, 4 GB, I've played with the BIOS a bit etc. and well, it squeezes out the most it can with this cooler. I'd very much like to buy an aftermarket one, but not for 100 €. So if anyone is selling an aftermarket cooler for this card, I'd be happy to buy it, for a reasonable price of course. It's able to push most of my games at 75 FPS locked with Freesync at native 2560x1080 and almost every option turned up, except different AA, I see you wankers in BF1 better without it
There is still some overclocking headroom without increasing voltages(huge power consumption), but the cooler won't let me. I've changed the thermal paste to AC MX-2 and it's keeping the card about 5° C cooler now. The memory timings have also been tightened.Storage space:
The drive configuration of the system is pretty simple and smart, to give me the ability not to lose performance much when multitasking and have general better organisation. I'm using a Kingston SSDNow V300 120 GB SSD as the system drive. It contains only the Windows 10 installation and some core programs. Those include MS Office, Adobe Suite, benchmarking tools etc. I still have over 40 GB left on that drive and I don't see myself ever using it up.
Next is a 500 GB WD Caviar Black HDD where I store files I legally download on the internet and my source videos. Downloading files are stored on a separate drive so performance is not impacted on say game loading times. Game installation files are also stored on this drive, so I have faster game installation, because files are read from one drive and written on another. I'm using a separate drive for all my installed games.
Here we come to the 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 HDD game/rendered video disk. This is a drive where I install my legally downloaded games, and also Origin, Steam and Uplay libraries. When rendering videos this disk is also used for the finished rendering of a video. Here I'm also using the benefits of having two disks (performance).
I'm probably going to get a new 2 TB drive since they're awfully cheap these days, maybe even 4 TB, and use the 1 TB instead of the 500 GB.
Last but not least, here we come to the new 240 GB Kingston SUV500M8 NVMe SSD, which for some reason now has a not-working version of GTA:SA installed, but it's otherwise empty. I still haven't figured out what I'll be using it for, but I was going for gameplay recording.
PSU:
The power supply is a 530 W 80 Plus certified, with good reviews and I think the PC shouldn't really use more than 350-400 W of power, which is keeping things in the good zone of the efficiency curve so no planned upgrades here.
Case cooling:
I'm upgrading the 5 case fans I have to a red LED with higher CFM and lower noise ones, maybe also add another one. I just love fans and they're basically inaudible so.
There you go! This should get you a basic idea of what this PC is all about! Now that I've written this long post I need another coffee. Be ready to be getting some numbers!
I'm sorry if I missed something, be sure to correct my wrongness.
Last edited:
