£800 could have bought you this very impressively performing compact AM5 system a few months ago. Now it’s closer to £1000. What’s that all about? Let’s find out
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk I am making good on my threat from my first video to put a more powerful build in the tiny Metalfish T60 case, well, here I make that dream a reality with an AM5 and RDNA 4 upgrade, now in black, hence the very clever and funny name change from Tight Axiom to Tight Blaxiom. Let’s adult Lego all these together, shall we?
It’s always a good idea to test build the essentials outside of the case, but particularly when space will be so constrained. It’s another JGINYUE ITX motherboard outing, this being the exotically named B650i Night Devil. It’s a very similar layout to the AM4 boards we’ve looked at previously, with 2 PWM fan headers, two ARGB headers, two DDR5 slots, 1 PCI Express x16 4.0 slot, and it fixes the oddest issue with the other boards by having both the M2 NVME SSD interfaces supporting PCI-Express 4.0 speeds, rather than gimping the one on the back of the board.
Into this goes the AMD Ryzen 5 7500F, a 65W TDP, 6 core, 12 thread part with a base clock of 3.7 GHz that can boost to 5 GHz. We’re keeping the Metalfish theme going with the DH380 low profile cooler, which is befittingly tiny for this build. So small in fact that we’d better properly test that it’s up to the job once it’s together.
We’re fitting this out with the 2TB CUSU NVME SSD, a PCIe3.0 part. I’d contemplated putting this on the back slot for ease of future expansion, but on balance I’d rather use this heatsink. Testing later reveals it’s getting 3651 MB/s Read and 2754 MB/s Write speeds, plenty fast enough.
Again with the Metalfish, this time their SFX 80Plus Bronze 600W PSU. It’s fully modular, so that should help keep the cabling tidy. Ish.
I’ve added two 16GB sticks of Crucial Pro 6000MHz DDR5 RAM, which I bought a few months back for £80. It’s now going for £240. This is madness, and yet more evidence of AI ruining everything as datacenters hoover up all the supply capacity to further enable torrents of soulless slop content, abusive deepfakes and hallucinated misinformation. This is making PC building completely unaffordable and is going to massively inflate prices for everything going forward. Not that I’m salty about it or anything.
And here’s the newest graphics card I’ve laid my hands on, the 16GB version of AMD’s 9060XT, this being the Gigabyte GAMING OC variant which should fit the case, going by it’s listed dimensions, but I admit I’m a bit concerned looking at it here.
That’s enough to test if it boots, so let’s give it a bash. It fires up, and after the usual heart-stopping wait as the motherboard goes through a few rounds of memory training that takes just long enough to make you think that it’s not worked, we see the welcome sight of the BIOS screen. I’ll need to update this later, so no point tweaking it just now.
One last thing before it can be encased, this WIFI 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 card needs to be installed into the NGFF slot at the back of the motherboard, so we’ll need to get this backplate and heatsink off. It would have been slightly easier to do this before fitting the CPU heatsink, so lesson learned there, but thankfully it slides out easily enough. Hooking up the aerials in this shield thingy with these tiny little connectors is an absolute pain, matched only by trying to insert the card into the slot using only your fingertips, but our cause is just, so we must prevail. If anyone’s got a better technique for this I’d love to hear it.
Let’s get it installed. The side panels come off with these thumbscrews, and after a bit of staring at it trying to remember the best build order for the components I decide to sleep on it and come back the next day, to recharge both myself and the camera’s batteries.
Now, I could edit this together in a way that shows this going very smoothly, but even having built in this case before there’s a certain amount of trial and error involved. More error than trial, in this instance. I blame a lack of sleep.
As part of planning where to run cables in this build I somehow had the position of the motherboard backwards, so there will be a bit of on the fly recalculation as we’re going. Firstly I get these cables in the positions I think they need to go, then fit two Kolink fans, surplus from the Rocket Complex build of a few weeks ago. I want their cables tucked away on the GPU side of the case.
The power supply gets fit to this bracket, and I thoroughly confuse myself by putting it on back to front. Fixing this, it then screws back on easily enough although at some point I’ll need to loosen it to free the power switch cable I’ve trapped behind it. Doh.
The riser cable gets put into position, although don’t screw it into the case like I’ve done here or you won’t be able to connect it to the motherboard later. Doh,
Here’s where the power switch header cables make their appearance, as it’s easier to fit them now than when it’s installed. Marginally. I’d wanted to get the case USB and audio connectors done too, but there’s not quite enough play to do that. Ultimately this looks better with the cable pushed more to the GPU side of the case.
It’s time to get the motherboard installed, and secured with four screws, and in goes the riser cable, at least once I’ve realised when there’s not enough play to get it plugged in. Nothing some unscrewing and rescrewing cannot fix.
24 pin power and the 8 pin CPU power cables can now be plugged in, and tucked away as well as can be done.
Finally for now, the GPU has it’s power cable plugged in, and it’s installed into the riser and screwed down. Tons of space, don’t know what I was worried about. A quick power on check to see it’s still working… phew. There’s no immediately obvious problem with cable positioning interfering with fans, but it will need another pass just to keep it tidy. That, and the software setup can wait until tomorrow.
Updating the BIOS requires formatting a USB stick so it can boot into this UEFI bootloader flash utility, so we’ll get that done and install the usual Windows 11 IoT edition, then make sure it’s properly set up for the best memory and CPU speeds, and enable secure boot for the increasing number of games that moan about that. Let’s get some drivers installed and run it through the usual test gauntlet.
Actually, because life is never simple, I’ll have to take it back out again. Cinebench 2024 was getting solid results at 819 multi and 112 single core, but was pushing very close to thermal throttling. Also, the wifi card isn’t fully working – the Bluetooth part is fine, but it’s WIFI capabilities are just not showing up. It turns out the BE200 WIFI chipset doesn’t work with AMD systems, which would have been nice to know on the AliExpress listing. I’m also getting a strange AMD driver error on boot, which devolved into general instability and then not booting, so let’s try this again.
Removing the platform, we can swap the Wifi card out, with much struggling, to this 6E card, which works well with this chipset and is recognised out of the box. I happen to have this larger CPU cooler kicking around that I wanted to try out, but it’s a smidgen too tall for the case so back out it goes. From doing a bit of checking around, when in overclocked mode it seems that pushing the thermal envelope is just what these Ryzen 7000 chips do in the pursuit of maximum performance, so I’ll continue testing with the smaller cooler and see how it settles out.
This time I’m installing the normal version of Windows 11 Pro, let’s see how that goes. I say standard, it’s still bypassing the need for a Microsoft account. The processor overclock settings are saved to the bios memory, so no need to run that again, particularly as it turns out to be the cause of the random crashing.
The Ryzen Master tool’s normally good about determining the limits but it seems it’s going a little too hard here, so a bit of manual experimentation is warranted. I’ve dialled the all core curve offset back to -15, which gives 793 multicore and 107 single core in Cinebench 2024, so a three to four percent drop, but it’s stable, which is kinda more important. If I didn’t have a video to get out I might have spent another day or two tweaking it, but I don’t think there’s more than a percent or two of performance left on the table.
I’ve checked the stability with a stress test, with Furmark and Prime95 battering it for maximum power draw and heat output. It’s pulling around 320W from the wall, and after 20 minutes the GPU is sitting at 59 degrees.
Something this powerful isn’t going to have any problems with web browsing, streaming video, office tasks or editing photos, but I though it would be interesting to see how long it would take for Davinci Resolve to render the same 10 minute project I’d tested on my desktop and laptop. Turns out it’s 2 minutes and 12 seconds, so barely any longer than the 1 min 33 seconds my 9800X3D / 7800XT system. Quite impressive given the gulf in price.
Let’s take a look at some synthetic benchmarks first. Some hot 3DMark action first, with Fire Strike getting 30888 points, Time Spy 14333 points, Port Royal 9672 points, Steel Nomad 3727 points, and Speed Way 2881 points. We’ll round that off with Unigine’s Superposition gets 17061 at 1080p High settings. All of which tells us that the cards more or less performing as it should, but how will it fare in actual games?
I wouldn’t expect Shadow of the Tomb Raider to present much of an issue at our usual 1080p High Settings, and indeed it gets 190 average fps. Clearly we’ll need to be challenging this a bit more, so upping the resolution to 1440p High Settings gives 141 fps, and only pushing up to 4K High Settings challenges the 9060XT, with it still producing 71 fps.
Counter-Strike 2 is similarly well dealt with, and 1080p Very High settings it churns out 213 average fps, dropping to a still respectable 136 average at 1440p Very High, again with only 4K Very High settings pushing it with 64 average fps.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage gives a pretty impressive 119 average fps at 1080p Ultra Quality settings, maintains 91 average fps at 1440p Ultra, and can even give a solid 68 average fps at 4K Medium Settings with adaptive quality upscaling turned off. It you’re okay with that adaptive upscaling, you can even run this at 4K Ultra settings at 60 fps, although of course as it’s applying upscaling it’s not exactly 4K all the time.
Unreal Engine 5 games next, which is always the litmus test of a system. In the Black Myth Wukong benchmark tool we are getting a nice 69 fps at 1080p High, No Framegen or upscaling, without raytracing, although it drops dramatically to 26 fps at the same setting but with raytracing turned on. So if you want to push the visual features even on modern cards trickery like FSR upscaling or frame generation will be required.
Marvel Rivals is the other Unreal Engine 5 game I test, and the machine is performing well with 118 average fps at our usual 1080p Medium Settings, Native Resolution test setting. This drops to 81 fps for the same settings but at 1440p Medium, and going up to 4K at the same Medium Settings, Native Res will drop us to 42 fps. Still, very respectable performance.
Cyberpunk 2077 is, somewhat unbelievably, five years old by this point, but it’s still able to bring hardware to its knees at higher settings. If we look first at performance without raytracing, it gets a very tasty 129 average fps at 1080p Ultra Settings, dropping to a still great 88 fps at 1440p, and it’s just 4K Ultra Settings that trips is up at an average of 42 fps.
Stepping into the brave raytraced future, at 1080p with the Raytraced Ultra setting at 1080p it’s giving us 81 fps, a still quite respectable 62 fps at 1440p RT Ultra, and down to 40 fps at 4K RT Ultra. Just for fun, I tortured the poor thing by throwing the RT Overdrive Settings at it and at 1080p it bravely struggled up to 41 fps, but this is a really setting reserved for 5090’s, upscaling and frame gen.
A few more test subjects, and representative not-great PlayStation port Horizon Zero Dawn gave us 122 average fps at 1440p favour quality settings, and upping the resolution to 4K at the same favour quality settings gets 61 ave fps.
Forza Horizon 5 runs well on practically everything, so no surprise that at 1080p Extreme settings we get 147 ave fps, going up to 1440p Extreme settings it gives 123 ave fps, and even 4K Extreme settings nets us a very good 82 average fps.
Rounding off with Grand Theft Horse, Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k High settings give us an almost nice 67 ave fps, and the same settings at 1440p will give 120 ave fps, although oddly enough dropping further to 1080p only gets us 128 ave fps, so might as well keep it cranked.
Having looked at the CPU utilisation figures on these tests, I’m left wondering if we can reduce the power draw and the temperature it’s running at by imposing a power limit without hurting the real world gaming performance very much. That’s going to have to wait until next week at least – let me know if that experiment would be of interest.
As it stands, I think it’s hard not to be impressed by this setup. It might not have been the smoothest of builds, but the results speak for themselves. This Ryzen 5 7500F and RX 9060 XT might be at the lower end of the currently manufactured parts, but it’s going to play anything you throw at it. At 1080p it’s going to give high framerates even with everything maxed out, and it’s mostly the same story at 1440p, perhaps bringing a few settings down a bit if you are driving a high refresh rate screen.
Perhaps AMD aren’t marketing this as a 4K card, but it there’s plenty of reasonably demanding games it would be able to get up past a steady 60 fps with some judicious tweaking, admittedly without raytracing if that’s an option, although this generation of hardware from AMD has made solid inroads into NVidia’s lead in raytracing performance.
So this build overall is a subtle, good looking, very compact powerhouse that will handle anything most people could throw at it. The only thing that springs to mind as being beyond it, probably, would be monkeying around with local AI generation, although frankly that’s beyond my capabilities and understanding to judge.
I don’t know what the future holds, and possibly the six cores of the CPU might limit some tasks down the road but in the here and now it’s admirably coping with the most demanding games and computing tasks I can come up with.
Given the recent surge in pricing for DDR5 RAM and NVME storage, I can’t exactly call this a budget build any more. It cost me £815 for the parts, and the RAM price increase alone will have driven this up to £1000 by now. Even so, it will still be at the cheaper end of the market for new components, even if that market has gone insane, and I can highly recommend this selection of components. I’ll have to leave you to judge if it still delivers the value in terms of price to performance, I’m just glad I bought the components a few months ago rather than this week.
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