Warning! Nerd content ahead!
New PC toys! Literally. I didn't
need this machine, but I wanted something to do and really badly wanted to screw around with AMD's new architectures (Zen and when I can get my hands on it, Vega). I'm also really excited for the prospect of a cheap, quiet, overclockable quadcore that performs pretty reasonably in gaming for 119?.
A while back I was renovating my office and coinciding with that, I moved the big i7, 1080ti SLI, 4ktv gaming machine to my home theater room for couch gaming duty only. It's more comfortable, but in that use case, FPS, builder, strategy games are out of the question. So now I wanted to build this low cost machine and use it for desktop gaming, where mouse & keyboard controls are preferable.
- Asus Prime B350-Plus motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 3 1200, 4C/4T 3.1 GHz, boost 3.4 GHz stock
- 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHz CL16 DDR4 memory
- Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD
- Fractal Design Define C enclosure
- Windows 10 Home retail license of course
Additionally I dismantled my old primary gaming PC and used the following parts for this:
- Corsair HX650 PSU
- Asus GTX660 DCII GPU
- Kingston SSDNow 120GB SSD
Finally, for cooling, I used the Noctua NH-D15 CPU heatsink with one fan, and 2x 14cm Fractal Design case fans which I'd upgraded from in the i7 machine and just had them lying around doing nothing productive. For the Noctua I needed to purchase the AM4 installation kit. I could've gotten one for free from Noctua as free support in exchange for a picture of my motherboard invoice, but because I didn't want the whole project stalled while Noctua was delivering the package from overseas, I decided to cough up the 8? and get the kit locally.
Beauty shot of the Ryzen processor installed on the B350-Plus. It sure is a sexy looking processor like all the Ryzens.
First order of business for any PC build: test all the parts outside the enclosure to make sure they aren't DOA.
Second order of business specifically in any Ryzen build: upgrade the motherboard BIOS and with it the AGESA microcode. The most important purpose of this is to improve RAM support. Unfortunately in my case it didn't help much.
Ryzen is notoriously difficult to pair with high speed memory. For the B350-Plus the memory compatibility listing has almost no 16GB 3200MHz kits and the few that there are, are not available for me. Unfortunately I got pretty unlucky too and my choice of Corsair isn't playing nice. I can get 2800MHz at most with occasional bootloops (otherwise stable).
At this point it was already clear how quiet the machine was going to be. The D15 is of course total overkill for a low wattage quadcore. At stock with the fan
idling the temps were in the low 40s Celsius under full prime95 burn. It could easily be run passively with this heatsink with lesser overclocks than mine.
Everything tested, time for the build:
Define C in stock form. It has two 12cm 1200rpm fans, one front inlet and one rear exhaust. It's very minimalistic in the main compartment as it doesn't have optical drive bays or HDD bays. I also like the PSU shroud which further reduces the visual clutter. The cable throughputs with the rubber grommets are really nice as usual with Fractal, it's the same with the Arc XL that I have.
I upgraded the case ventilation to these 14cm 1000rpm fans that were preinstalled into the Arc XL.
New ventilation setup. Two inlets. The rear doesn't have a 14cm fan install space, though I would've gone with dual inlets anyway. It's good enough as the air escapes naturally with overpressure, and visually more appealing this way I think.
Funny wiring for the case fans. Noctua extension - splitter - ULN adapter (ultra-low noise, i.e. voltage reduction adapter). In the end while I'm using the machine the fans are running at 700rpm, which is very quiet.
Everything installed.
Rear, no problems at all with cable management. The biggest problem could've been clearance for the SSD power connectors but there was so much clearance that even that wasn't a problem.
Overclocking and stability testing.
I was able to boot up and run some benchmarks at 3950MHz and 3975MHz (on Ryzen CPUs the multipliers go in 0.25 increments). But those frequencies are not stable. 4.0GHz wouldn't even POST.
After the iterative process that it always is, I ended up at 3.9GHz with +0.2V voltage offset. That works out to roughly 1.39V in practice. Ryzen CPUs have internal voltage management and the voltage fluctuates a lot during regular use.
Memory is at manufacturer recommended voltage of 1.35V. Funnily enough it defaulted to 1.25V.
With these settings I tested everything to be 6 hours Prime burn stable with CPU temps peaking at 71C, with the machine still relatively quiet, at least compared to the i7 6-core machine which is insanely noisy under full burn.
So how good is the cheapest of the cheap Ryzen lineup?
If you're really interested, read reviews, but I was able to test against some other random hardware I have; mobile Intels in my laptops and the i7-5930k.
So basically in a multithreaded workload it's battling in a similar performance bracket as a laptop i7 quadcore. The big i7 hexcore desktop machine I have is about twice as fast.
Similar story with the Fire Strike Physics test.
Of course I didn't buy the CPU for heavily CPU-dependent workloads, I bought it for gaming. For that, it's good enough. That's actually amazing considering the 119? price tag. I really like this little processor.
For gaming, this PC will really only come into its own when I can get the GPU situation sorted. Currently I'm using the 4.5 years old midrange GTX660 which is totally the bottleneck at the moment. Although I overclocked it for about 5-10% more performance it's still dreadfully slow for 2017. I'm using my Dell 3008WFP (11 years old at this point, geez time goes quickly) 2560x1600 60Hz monitor. So that is slightly heavier to run than 1440p60 which is still considered respectable today. I'd classify it as a midrange monitor where maybe a GTX1070 or 1080 would be appropriate. So an overclocked Vega should be a great fit as it directly competes with those cards in performance.
The problem is that Vega 64 cards are insanely expensive at the moment and not the "smart purchase". On the other hand, Vega 56 was only just released so it's pretty expensive too (599? compared to its MSRP about 400?) and not in stock.
So, the plan currently is to wait for Vega 56 to become available and more reasonably priced, and put it under watercooling (perhaps with
this Alphacool cooler).
Until then, I can do some light gaming and the framerates are what they are, basically console tier or worse. The situation will improve with a new GPU. If I
really absolutely must have more grunt I can take a 1080ti from the other machine and put it in this. But it's not strictly necessary at the moment so I'll just use it like this.
Some example gaming from games I'm playing at the moment:
Dishonored 2. Pretty high settings but autoresolution putting it on a really garbage resolution. It's borderline playable with really open-minded optimistic rose colored glasses on.
Deus Ex Human Revolution, yes the older one (the better one).
I'm slowly replaying it. Being 2 years older than the GPU, it's running great with 60fps on high settings.
Anno 2205. 20-30 fps on very high settings.
Transport Fever, also 20-30fps with maxed out settings.
That is all, total cost of the build around 800? with Windows and it does what it's supposed to (barely because of the GPU). Now I'm just waiting for Vega(tm).