First time poster and first time SFF builder. I decided this was the year to upgrade my family's computers (had been 5-8 years). My 18 yo son wanted a gaming rig, so I purchased an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/RTX 2070 Super rig from CyperPower for him. It seems solid and the RBG+watercooling makes for a pretty PC. My wife obviously doesn't need something like that, so I purchased a Z25 i7-8700 configuration from Velocity Micro for her. I have also been impressed with that one.
I got it in my head that I wanted to build a SFF pc for myself. I don't actually need one (my previous computer of 8 years was a i7-2700k in a generic tower case), but I really wanted to get a machine that could sit on my desk underneath the monitor/monitor stand. I sort of fell in love with the Silverstone Milo series. I found a boutiquet shop, AVA Direct, that offered the ML09B case so I placed an order for a Ryzen 7 3700X build. It was ordered about a week before Christmas and through delays due to the holidays and the fact that their configurator allowed me to order parts that would not fit together, it didn't actually get built until around the 2nd week of January. They called me and told me that they were seeing temps of 96C in their stress testing. We talked through some options and settled on ditching the SFF case and building in something that could handle watercooling. Overnight, I ended up having a computorial midlife crisis and just canceled the order the next day. I would just build it myself...like I always used to.
After hours more of researching, I came back to a similar Silverstone case, ML06-E. I didn't see a lot of evidence that the Ryzen 5 3600 really ran very much cooler than the Ryzen 7 3700X, but there was a lot of love for the chip due to this power/performance ratio and I thought...maybe it would be a little better for thermals?? In my ML09B build, I had tried to use a Noctua NL-L9a as the cooler. This time around I was going to try the Noctua NH-L12S. I was ready and placed the parts order (which ended up being quite a bit cheaper).
Parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/txporter/saved/88BPVn
I sit here thinking about writing up the build and I have a lot that I could say since it wasn't 100% smooth sailing, but in the end it really wasn't horrible and turned out to fit together fairly well. And really, I came here to post some questions about SFF cooling/undervolting/etc that I haven't gotten to yet. Suffice it to say, that I was able to fit everything other than the two 80mm x 15mm fans in without an issue. The 80mm fans and the GPU fans were rubbing together, so I pulled them. I would need 10mm fans if I wanted to add more case cooling.
Ok...so I have everything together and installed windows (yes, the B450 motherboard already had the latest BIOS so the CPU was recognized), it was time to do some stress testing to make sure that my creation wouldn't flame out. I read that Prime95 Blend w/o AVX was a hard test but less rigorous than those with AVX enabled. I would start with that. I started up the run with the case cover off and my CPU cooler fan immediately went to 100%. My temperature reported around 80C and quickly climbed up to 95C after about 10mins when I ended the testing. Damn.
I read about Ryzen Master and the ability to test different CPU setups without needing to bail out to the BIOS for tweaking. I downloaded it and began tinkering. I also saw that they offered something they were calling Eco-mode that purported to run CPU at the next step down in TDP (so Ryzen 5 3600 65W would run at 45W). That sounded perfect. But I have been unsuccessful in turning on the option in Ryzen Master. The apparent trick is to enable PBO in the BIOS and it magically appears. There are two locations in the BIOS where I find PBO, the AMD Overclocking menu and AMD CBS (I think). I tried enabling both, one or the other, disabling both, disabling one or the other. Basically every combination I could think of, and Eco-mode never showed up. Ok..no problem, time to just try playing with voltages.
I tried a number of things, but what I tried that seemed to have a real impact was running a Manual overclock in Ryzen Master with a lower voltage and fixed frequency. My fan stopped racing immediately when doing basically anything somewhat computationally intensive and I was able to run Prime95 for 10 mins and not hit 95C. However, I am not really sure that I am not just handicapping my processor in order to reduce thermals (which is frankly probably fine...but why do it if you don't have to). I decided that I would download Cinebench and Passmark and try to do some testing to make sure that I wasn't loosing too much performance.
Here are a few results to share with some follow-up questions afterwards.
Default BIOS settings / Default Ryzen Master settings:
Manual 1.1V @ 4.0GHz in Ryzen Master / PBO disabled in BIOS:
Manual 1.1V @ 4.0GHz in Ryzen Master / Default BIOS settings (only ran CPU Mark...cause getting lazy):
I liked where this was ending up, but soon learned that there is no way to run Ryzen Master at start-up. So need to actually manually tweak in BIOS. I ended up settling at a slightly higher Vcore setting (1.15V) because I didn't notice a lot of difference and really haven't done a lot of testing to make sure that undervolting was stable.
Current settings, 1.15V @ 4.0GHz in BIOS.
So the follow-up questions:
I got it in my head that I wanted to build a SFF pc for myself. I don't actually need one (my previous computer of 8 years was a i7-2700k in a generic tower case), but I really wanted to get a machine that could sit on my desk underneath the monitor/monitor stand. I sort of fell in love with the Silverstone Milo series. I found a boutiquet shop, AVA Direct, that offered the ML09B case so I placed an order for a Ryzen 7 3700X build. It was ordered about a week before Christmas and through delays due to the holidays and the fact that their configurator allowed me to order parts that would not fit together, it didn't actually get built until around the 2nd week of January. They called me and told me that they were seeing temps of 96C in their stress testing. We talked through some options and settled on ditching the SFF case and building in something that could handle watercooling. Overnight, I ended up having a computorial midlife crisis and just canceled the order the next day. I would just build it myself...like I always used to.
After hours more of researching, I came back to a similar Silverstone case, ML06-E. I didn't see a lot of evidence that the Ryzen 5 3600 really ran very much cooler than the Ryzen 7 3700X, but there was a lot of love for the chip due to this power/performance ratio and I thought...maybe it would be a little better for thermals?? In my ML09B build, I had tried to use a Noctua NL-L9a as the cooler. This time around I was going to try the Noctua NH-L12S. I was ready and placed the parts order (which ended up being quite a bit cheaper).
Parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/txporter/saved/88BPVn
I sit here thinking about writing up the build and I have a lot that I could say since it wasn't 100% smooth sailing, but in the end it really wasn't horrible and turned out to fit together fairly well. And really, I came here to post some questions about SFF cooling/undervolting/etc that I haven't gotten to yet. Suffice it to say, that I was able to fit everything other than the two 80mm x 15mm fans in without an issue. The 80mm fans and the GPU fans were rubbing together, so I pulled them. I would need 10mm fans if I wanted to add more case cooling.
Ok...so I have everything together and installed windows (yes, the B450 motherboard already had the latest BIOS so the CPU was recognized), it was time to do some stress testing to make sure that my creation wouldn't flame out. I read that Prime95 Blend w/o AVX was a hard test but less rigorous than those with AVX enabled. I would start with that. I started up the run with the case cover off and my CPU cooler fan immediately went to 100%. My temperature reported around 80C and quickly climbed up to 95C after about 10mins when I ended the testing. Damn.
I read about Ryzen Master and the ability to test different CPU setups without needing to bail out to the BIOS for tweaking. I downloaded it and began tinkering. I also saw that they offered something they were calling Eco-mode that purported to run CPU at the next step down in TDP (so Ryzen 5 3600 65W would run at 45W). That sounded perfect. But I have been unsuccessful in turning on the option in Ryzen Master. The apparent trick is to enable PBO in the BIOS and it magically appears. There are two locations in the BIOS where I find PBO, the AMD Overclocking menu and AMD CBS (I think). I tried enabling both, one or the other, disabling both, disabling one or the other. Basically every combination I could think of, and Eco-mode never showed up. Ok..no problem, time to just try playing with voltages.
I tried a number of things, but what I tried that seemed to have a real impact was running a Manual overclock in Ryzen Master with a lower voltage and fixed frequency. My fan stopped racing immediately when doing basically anything somewhat computationally intensive and I was able to run Prime95 for 10 mins and not hit 95C. However, I am not really sure that I am not just handicapping my processor in order to reduce thermals (which is frankly probably fine...but why do it if you don't have to). I decided that I would download Cinebench and Passmark and try to do some testing to make sure that I wasn't loosing too much performance.
Here are a few results to share with some follow-up questions afterwards.
Default BIOS settings / Default Ryzen Master settings:
Manual 1.1V @ 4.0GHz in Ryzen Master / PBO disabled in BIOS:
Manual 1.1V @ 4.0GHz in Ryzen Master / Default BIOS settings (only ran CPU Mark...cause getting lazy):
I liked where this was ending up, but soon learned that there is no way to run Ryzen Master at start-up. So need to actually manually tweak in BIOS. I ended up settling at a slightly higher Vcore setting (1.15V) because I didn't notice a lot of difference and really haven't done a lot of testing to make sure that undervolting was stable.
Current settings, 1.15V @ 4.0GHz in BIOS.
So the follow-up questions:
- Running at a fixed voltage and frequency seem to be running solidly and I don't seem like I am loosing any performance. The fan sounds are MUCH better, no racing and lower overall RPM. What am I missing/overlooking? This seems too good to be true.
- I haven't played with memory speeds/timings. Does anyone have any experience/is it worth it?
- What are the actual Vnom specs for a Ryzen 5 3600? I have had trouble locating. When running stock, the Vcore would go up to 1.4+ V. I am trying to understand how much I am actually undervolting the chip.
- I do see that running a fixed voltage and frequency has basically eliminated the boost clock. Can it also no longer run at a very low voltage/idle?
