The credit card bill was due today, so the system has been paid for in full and so far I couldn't be happier with the decision to go SFF for an AMD gaming rig.
I took the opportunity to order 4x Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM, now on their way from Austria. I need a few cables for Display and USB hub extension to get the NCASE in it's final resting spot.
So far I've just had the case on my desk without the Kraken X52 radiator just sitting on the desk - the air coming off the radiator is cool to the hand and I never hear the fans hit full speed. I've also had no issues with the AIO pump noise.
Another thing that's plagued the X570-i is the VRM fan, and I've not heard a peep out of it. As I'm running the case open I'm guessing the cooling is good enough. We will see once
I played around with a bit of overclocking of the Infinity Fabric and the G-Skill DIMMs, and have the X570-i rig running with:
- 3900X @ 1900 MHz FCLK
- RAM @ 3800 MHz 16-16-16-16-32
Running some basic benchmarks I was seeing modest improvements of 3-5%. Researching the parts before purchase this was basically my goal. I haven't been bothered to spend a lot of time doing OC on the CPU. From what I can tell so far, the Gen 3 Ryzen CPUs really tend to extract most of the available performance out of the box - I'm not sure bothering with going for an OC is going to really be worth it long term.
Running Linux, I'm not getting the Compute Core Complex temps, although I suspect this will be in the Linux kernel pipeline, some guy wrote some kernel modules to expose them. I'd like to benchmark by turning off the least performing Compute Core Complexes and seeing how the best CCD operates in terms of gaming performance.
The processor sits happily at low 40s at idle and during intensive workloads stays well under 70 degrees. The CPU boosts to 4.6 GHz fairly reliably and finding workloads to saturate the 12 cores has been challenging. Memory is operating around 28 GB/s using sysbench, which is respectable for Dual Channel Dual-Rank DIMMs.
The PCIe 4.0 Corsair MP600 is getting the 4+ GB/s sequential read and write as advertised, although the real world performance probably isn't worth the extra money of a high end PCI 3.0 drive, like the Samsung Pro series. In terms of boot speed, a large portion of the boot is getting through the UEFI POST - even with fast boot on this really slows the whole process down. Once I get into loading the Linux kernel it's somewhere between 5-10 seconds to get to the login screen. I would say the drive is a good improvement over the XPS Toshiba PCI 3.0 NVME, but it's not worlds apart.
The ASUS 2080 RTX Super was a bit of a lottery win. I didn't purchase the high end OC model, and my GPU with the factory OC switch which was already enabled boosts to over 2000 MHz out of the box when it was advertised to only hit 1700 and 1800 in OC mode - it drops to 1950~1970 under sustained load. Shadow of the Tomb Raider sits on 100 FPS average at Ultra settings at 1440p, Witcher 3 @ Ultra is mostly over 100 FPS. I have Quake Champions running at 162 FPS (limited to under 165 Hz of the GSYNC panel) solid with mostly High settings and low shadows, which is a great experience over the XPS which struggled on low settings to hold 100~140 FPS.
Looking forward to seeing the improvement of removing the GPU fans and going bottom exhaust configuration on general case thermals.
