New gaming rig build

[FlyingPenguin]

Pulled the trigger today as parts are all available. I'm upgrading the gaming rig as the RTX 3080 is rather CPU limited with a 6th Gen Core-i7 in the old rig.

This will be my first AMD rig. I ordered everything from Amazon except the CPU, which was out of stock on Amazon except from 3rd party resellers (which I'd rather not deal with), but Newegg had it in stock direct from them, and it was a bit cheaper there anyway.

No PSU since I just bought a modular Corsair 850 for the old gaming rig, so I'll just pull it for the new rig along with the RTX 3080, and I'll throw a modular Corsair 550 in the old rig, that I have lying around, to replace it, along with my old GTX 760. Going to save the old rig at this point as a spare PC for the guest house.

No OS since I have a couple of unused Win 8 Pro retail licenses that should be accepted for a Win10 install, and I also have an unused retail Win10 Pro license, if all else fails.

My most commonly used games will go on the NVMe, and then I'll just transplant the two 2TB SATA SSDs from the old rig, that are full of Steam games.

Everything should be in by Friday.

- AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8 GHz
- Corsair 110Q Mid-Tower Quiet ATX Case, Black, Solid, Standard
- Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4 X 8GB) DDR4 3600 (PC4-28800) C18
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition CPU Air Cooler (later, replaced with a Noctua NH-D15)
- Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD (7000 MB/s read, 5300 MB/s write when using a PCIe Gen4 motherboard, which this is)
- ASUS TUF Gaming X570-PRO (WiFi 6) PCIe Gen 4 Motherboard

[Losbot]

Looks good! Let us know how it performs.

[Executioner]

Going on the dark side huh?

[Err]

Nice. Post pictures when you get it running.

[FlyingPenguin]

No brainer. AMD is the better CPU bang for the buck right now. Also only AMD chipsets fully support PCIe Gen 4 right now, which is supported by RTX 30xx (top end Intel boards should support it soon). The performance gain is minimal in most except the latest games, since most existing games purposely limit texture transfers, to avoid bottlenecks, but hey future proofing.

The big bonus is, M.2 SSDs are limited to 3500 MB/s under PCIe Gen 3. If your M.2 SSD supports it, PCIe Gen 4 doubles that.

Only reason I've stuck with Intel in the past is because Windows has generally played better with Intel chipsets, but that's no longer the case.

[Nuby1Canuby]

Nice!! You'll probably want to slap another 140mm Case fan in there somewhere, since it only comes with one 120mm case fan.

[FlyingPenguin]

Oh case fan comes out and will be replaced with a couple of 120mm Noctua NF-F12 Quiet Fans, like I do in all my rigs. One intake, one exhaust.

[FlyingPenguin]

Wow. Everything came in today. Five separate shipments, and they all came in the same day. When's the last time that happened?

At first I thought I got ripped off on the CPU because the box was so light, and then I remembered that the 5800x doesn't come with a factory cooler. Funny that they still use the same box. Seems like a waste of space.

[Losbot]

Now the fun begins!

[FlyingPenguin]

IT LIVES!!!!!

I was going to patiently wait until the weekend to start working on this... but the parts kept calling to me... could not resist.

Spent several hours yesterday putting together a setup checklist (I always work off checklists) based on the checklist for the previous install, and modified for the new hardware and apps I need to install. It's relaxing to me to have a checklist to go down, and when the install is complete, I've made notes in the checklist as I go along, and that checklist file stays on the PC and gets added to every time I make a change in the future. It's the way I work. If the CMOS gets wiped for some reason, I have notes of what settings I used in the checklist.

It's just getting burned in on the bench for now. I never install a mobo in a case until I've made sure everything is working, the CPU cooler is okay and I don't have to mess with it again, and it's been burned in. No sense putting it in a case BEFORE you know if the thing is even going to fire up. Then you won't know if maybe it's some metal standoff in the case shorting something out.

I just have a spare 550 PSU and my spare GTX 760 installed right now for testing, and only one pair of RAM. Memtest86 is on it's 3rd pass with no problems, so it looks like the RAM timing is probably stable. I'll stick the other pair of RAM in later and run Memtest86 all night.

Once I get a basic Windows 10 install in there, I'll burn it in with Prime95.

Some minor pitfalls and observations:

- AMD REALLY needs to switch from pins to Intel style pads connectors on the CPU. Damn, but I haven't had to deal with pins in a long time, and I was terrified of bending them. SO MANY PINS!

- Modern Mobos (like this one) appear to have an 8 pin and a 4 pin connector for CPU power (first I've ever seen an 8 pin). Problem is, none of my PSUs (even the new 850) have an 8 pin, just two or four 4 pin connectors (in pairs). The manual says nothing, as usual. A little googling confirmed that you just use the two 4 pin connector pair on one cable and insert it into the 8 pin. TECHNICALLY you only need to populate the 8 pin if you're not overclocking, and can leave the 4 pin empty. I went ahead and plugged them all in even though I'm not overclocking.

- Instead of XMP to configure RAM timing, AMD uses their proprietary D.C.O.P. which basically is their own technology that just reads XMP data from the RAM sticks, and converts it into their standard (thus avoiding paying licensing fees to Intel, although the word is AMD is going to just start using XMP in the next generation of mobos since it's an industry standard). So I enabled D.C.O.P. since otherwise, the bright and shiny 3600 MHz RAM I bought, defaults to 2333. What the manual doesn't say is that D.C.O.P. doesn't work on Asus boards unless you also turn on the AI Overclock Tuner. Doesn't matter that you're not overclocking the CPU, but it has to be turned on because, basically the mobo considers any RAM timing over 2333 MHz, an overclock. Took a while to figure that out, and I did it wrong the first time and locked up the board and had to reset CMOS.

- Nice feature on these Asus boards is that you can flash the BIOS without even having a CPU installed by plugging in a flash drive into a specific USB port and pressing a button. I thought I might need to do that because early firmware versions on this board didn't support the 5800X, but this board did have an October firmware and it did recognize CPU, and then I just did a normal BIOS upgrade from the BIOS menu to the latest one released just a few days ago.

- Good thing this mobo came with a heatsink for the NVMe drive. These super fast PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs will not attain full transfer speed without a heatsink. Most of the $200+ mobos seem to come with NVMe heatsinks.

FYI: Do your research before buying a mobo. I *ALMOST* bought another mobo that looked good, and was recommended somewhere, but when I dug deeper I found out that installing an NVMe drive disables two of the six SATA ports because they share the same PCIe lanes. Apparently a common way to cut corners. I have a full 8 SATA ports available on this baby (I have 3 SSD SATA drives for games, and a HDD for backups and images). I'm not bothering with a DVD burner since I never use one on the gaming PC.

[FlyingPenguin]

Installing Windows, not connected to Internet as is my habit. It avoids having Windows nag you for a Microsoft account, and disables a lot of the silly social/phone home crap I would just disable later anyway. Also prevents Windows from auto installing any updates or drivers before I can disable it in Group Policy (I never want Windows installing drivers automatically). Went ahead and installed the latest Win10 October 20H2 build.

Never seen this before, but apparently there's a way for the mobo manufacturer to embed Wifi drivers into the UEFI BIOS, that Win10 recognizes, because right after install, networking was available and this message popped up. Probably a UEFI thing, because I've never done a Windows install with UEFI before. I prefer legacy BIOS for simplicity, but NVidia's Resizable BAR technology requires a UEFI installation.

[Losbot]

Franken-Rig lives!!

[Err]

Nice. Once you get your 3080 in, you can enable BAR support in the Bios. It's supposed to give a 5 to 10% framerate boost in games that support it. You will need to update the 3080 Bios though.

[FlyingPenguin]

Burned in with Prime95 for 30 minutes. No issues, I can see all 16 threads maxed out and the CPU hit 75C and the fan's not having to turn much (still sitting on the bench so, in a restricted case that fan will ramp up). I'll probably make the fan curves more aggressive anyway. Ram and CPU are running at their proper speeds.

Then I ran the Heaven 3D gaming benchmark, just to make everything work hard, and got the expected 65 FPS with the spare GTX 760 on a forgiving 1400x900 monitor.

Here's some early benchmark comparisons, which are encouraging me that everything is working fine, since the new PC is blowing the doors off the old one.

First off, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus NVMe SSD is most certainly making full use of all the bandwidth PCIe Gen 4 can provide, as you can see below. The Samsung 970 Pro in the old system (no slouch) is limited by PCIe Gen 3's 3500 MB/s bandwidth limit:

Old PC, Samsung 970 Pro NVMe:


New PC, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus NVMe:



CPUMark benchmarks:

Old PC, Intel Core i7-6700 4 cores/8 threads:


Old PC,AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 cores/16 threads:

[FlyingPenguin]

Still on the bench, but about to put it in the case and swap in the 850 watt PSU and the RTX 3080.

I've been burning it in using several games and, surprisingly, my trusty, eight year old spare GTX 760 runs all six of my main games easily at ultra visual settings..... at the 1600x900 native resolution of my 20 inch bench monitor. Aye, there's the rub. Just makes you appreciate how much these big honkin' new video cards are really needed just for pushing more pixels to our ever bigger screens.

But hey, we all used to play on 19 - 20 inch CRT monitors once, and the biggest gaming laptop you can get is 18 inches.

But it does make me wonder why anyone would need 4K, and would you be happy with the performance at 4K? My current 3440x1440 ultra wide is considered 2K. Most gaming benchmarks show about a 50% drop in the framerate going from 2K and 4K. Most games can barely bench 60 FPS at 4K at Ultra settings, even with an RTX 3080, which in the real world means dips into 30's occasionally, which feels lousy in a first person shooter. I tend to tweak all my games for a target of 80 - 90FPS, if possible, which keeps the dips in the 50 - 60 range.

So yeah, I don't see 4K as practical, unless you use upscaling. But with DLSS ,and whatever the AMD equivalent is, if you can get 2K performance with visuals indistinguishable from native 4K, I guess that's where we're all going.

Trevor in all his 1600x900 Ultra glory: