Building a new desktop - part III

[maflynn]

This past 6 months, I've been going back and forth on upgrading my PC for a variety of reasons - I finally bit the bullet and built a new machine.

Prior builds:
Building a new desktop
Building a new desktop - part II

My goal was to to put together a somewhat inexpensive rig, reusing parts where applicable, in this case, it was the SSD and GPU. I also wanted a 65watt CPU which limited my options quite a bit. The rationale behind that was that I value quiet running, low fan noise over over pure raw peformance. With the 7600X3D, I get 3D cache for gaming and lower power consumption for overall quiet running.

I've been buying the parts piecemeal over the past few weeks, from Newegg, Amazon and Microcenter. The Microcenter bundle was the single biggest purchase, but it included motherboard, cpu, and ram.

New Parts list

• Cooler Master Qube 540
• AMD 7600X3D AM5 processor
• Gigabyte X870 Gaming Wifi 6 motherboard
• G.Skill Flare X5 16GB DDR5-6000
• Noctua NH-U12A
• Noctua NF-A14 140mm fans - 2 of them
• Noctua NF-A12 120mm fans - 4 of them
• Be quiet! Power Zone 2 750W PSU

Used Parts list

• Sabrent 2TB SSD
• RX 7800XT GPU

I researched fan placement and used chatgpt to visualize how the fans should go

The reality is that I was unable to get a 3rd 120mm fan in place due to the PSU wires. More about that in post #2

The case is what triggered me to build a new PC, and I absolutely love this case - the Cooler Master Qube 540 moonstone color - it harkens back to the beginning days of the computer industry with the off-white color.

Overall with sales, discounts, and using my credit card points, the cost was about 700 dollars for everything, and part of my reasoning is that I can stay on the AM5 platform longer then I could on my aging AM4 setup. I'm a little disappointed with reducing the ram to 16GB, but that will be a temporary situation, I'll buy a second stick before the end of the year, I just want to set aside some money for that.

 

[maflynn]

The Build:
This is my first non mini-itx case in years and you would think working with a larger case and motherboard would be easier but not so. The back of the case was extra slim - somewhat of a surprise to me, cable management was one of the very first stepsI needed to do in this build not delay it till the end.

PSU the be quiet power supply is a platium 80+ which is why I bought that over a seasonic or corsair gold 80+ (at the same price) but I'm somewhat unhappy with it - largely the cable which are non-brainded/sleeved and working with them was harder then I was expecting. I'm not sure if a different PSU would provide different results but I was unable to use a 3rd case fan at the bottom because that's where some of the cables sat. Also the back of the case lacked sufficient room for me to use cable extensions for a cleaner look.

The Noctua NH-U12A is smaller then the massive NH-D15 which I've used in the past and was overkill for my usage. Also that larger cooler blocks access to the ram slots and the CPU power headers in the top left corner of the motherboard - Now with a smaller cooler I have access to both.

I struggled with USB headers as I always seem too, I again bent the pins in the USB 3 header, luckily it was pin 10 which is not used and with a bit of work I was able to straighten the pin enough to insert the connector

The USB-C header was also a pain, the cable just didn't want to go in and stay in, I later learned it "clicks" in. Maybe because I was running the PC for a while, and things warmed up, but when I re-tried adding it back in, the bad boy finally clicked in and now my front panel as USB-C and the regular USB connectivity.

Overall the build was headache free except for the above issues, and I didn't rush the build, taking over the course of a couple of days, spending a few hours each day to slowly add each component.

 

[maflynn]

The Review:
I've had this build now for a week and its been going great.
Temps are in the upper 30s to the low 40s at idle, upper 50s under load running prime95, in fact I've yet to see anything beyond 59c, so the case I chose, the fans and cooler all worked together to keep the system quiet and cool.
By the way, the fan curve I have, is that the fans are on a rather low speed up until I see temps in the 60c range, which they will then ramp up, which I've yet to hear.

The Geekbench performance is a little surprising, single core is quite a bit more then my 3700X, but the multi-core is not so much, at least until you realize the 7600X3D has 2 less cores then the 3700X, so I think overall its mult-core performance is impressive - that's my story and I'm sticking to it 🙂

I've not taken any time to benchmark the games, the type of games I play (RPG type) will largely benefit from the 3D cache but I've not had the energy or desire to benchmark them.

Since I'm reusing the SSD, and I stuck with the same AMD hardware there was nothing I needed to do within CachyOS, it bootedup just like before, no fuss no muss.

Overall I'm really impressed with the case and the look and performance and I've yet incur any buyer's remorse over spending money that I didn't think I was going to spend

 

[boswald]

Well, at least it's pretty on the inside. Joke aside, I'm glad you decided to stick with Cachy. Wonderful system.

 

[pshufd]

A lot of Windows PCs are aimed around 8K - 12K for multicore these days. It is easy to find CPUs with far higher scores, but, as far as what a typical consumer needs, around 10K is the sweet spot. Mac users may be spoiled by much higher numbers but I think that the vast majority can't really use that higher performance.

My Windows desktop is 8,846 but it could handle all of my trading if I needed it to and it handles some media processing too. This is part of the reason why Microcenter sells so much older hardware. I just heard that nVidia is bringing back the RTX 3060 because they can get process space on the older node: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-rumored-to-bring-geforce-rtx-3060-production-back-this-quarter

 

[maflynn]

Ii updated Post #3 to include my Studio's Geekbench 7 results and the results are telling - my M4 Studio is a beast of a computer.

 

[diamond.g]

Ii updated Post #3 to include my Studio's Geekbench 7 results and the results are telling - my M4 Studio is a beast of a computer.

Yeah Apple Silicon CPU power has been quite good. GPU power has been somewhat disappointing relative to how strong the CPU is.

Nice build, look forward to hearing more about it.

 

[maflynn]

One thing I'm realizing, I'm working off of default bios settings, I did a ask chatgpt and I see I can tweak a lot of settings, so I'll be working on that over the coming days and report back

 

[maflynn]

Nice build, look forward to hearing more about it.

Thanks, I'm quite happy with the results, both the inside and the case, which btw, is larger then I've had in a long time but over all I'm impressed with the cooling. My ITX case simply did not have enough open area to be a good candidate for air cooling.