Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, we examine this super compact ITX build with a Ryzen 7 5700X and ARC B570 graphics. I call it Tight Axiom, for reasons unfathomable, but let’s see if it cuts the mustard, or indeed any other condiment. Who cuts mustard anyway? You spread it. Moving on.
The first thing I have to comment on is the sheer size of it. Well, the lack thereof. This is a Metalfish T60 case that’s smaller than most shoeboxes at 315 x 215 x 135mm, but can still fit graphics cards up to about 300mm long and 50mm thick, that’s two and a bit slots thick, so course the chonkier bois are off limits but there are a good number of modern, powerful cards that can fit it. It can be fitted out with a handle, although this will mean either punching through a glued-in mesh on the top, or ripping it out entirely, which is an odd design choice.
Even so, I like this case so much I have another build in the pipeline with more horsepower, but I think this is a very credible system for a mid-range to budget build. At it’s heart it’s a Ryzen 7 5700X, which is still putting out very respectable numbers as you’ll see in the benchmarks later. I’ve paired this with an Intel ARC B570 graphics card, mostly out of curiosity. I believe it’s the cheapest way to get into a graphics card with RAM in the double digits, certainly on the new market, and this is the catchily named Sparkle Intel ARC B570 GUARDIAN Luna OC 10GB model that turned out not to be quite as white as I thought it would be, but still fits the build well enough. I’m quite impressed with the performance on offer for well below £200. More on that in a moment but let’s take a quick look over the rest of the components.
There’s a 500W fully modular SFX power supply from T.F.SKYWINDINTL plugged into this JGINYUE B350i motherboard, both with the typically oddball Chinese names that are so popular on AliExpress but both are checking out fine in operation. This TEUCER 55mm Low-Profile CPU cooler is doing an admirable job of keeping temperatures under control, although there is room for a somewhat larger and taller cooler if required, and there’s 2x8GB sticks of KingBank DDR4 RAM running at 4000MHz. I’m sure some will quibble with these “Chinesium” components but we’re trying to do the best we can on a budget.
The NVME slot is filled by a 1TB MSI SPATIUM M470 PRO SSD. There’s another nvme slot on the backside of the board, but puzzlingly it’s only been given half the bandwidth of the main slot. I suppose if there’s ever a good deal on a older PCI gen 3 NVME it will get close enough but expect less than half the 3670 MB/s read, 3369 MB/s write speeds the front slot puts out. This can be accessed from the back, although you’ll need to remove the graphics card and shoogle the riser cable out of the way.
There’s a Wi-Fi 6E / Bluetooth 5.3 m2 NGFF card plugged in, which turned out to be the biggest pain in the neck of the entire build, and there’s on-board 2.5 gigabit ethernet alongside the usual selection of ports. Would have been nice to see a USB-C port, but such is life. There’s room for two 120mm case fans, I’d picked up these slimline UPSIREN models but it’s not required, most regularly sized fans will fit fine. Just be mindful of the cable runs- I’d wanted to keep it neat and tidy by routing the fan connections from the GPU side, but there wasn’t quite enough slack given where the headers are. This board does have two ARGB headers as well as the two PWM fan connections, but I have chosen not to go there on this build. Cable management is hard enough already, thank you.
If we follow this gen 4 riser cable round the back we find the B570 graphics card, this model is 242mm long and 44mm wide so fits in with plenty of room to spare, which is useful for giving some extra space to manage cables. It’s rated at 150W, so there’s a bit of room to upgrade to something more powerful in future. But will you need to? Let’s find out with some benchmarks, shall we?
I’m just looking at the Cinebench 24 for CPU tests, which gives a Single thread result of 93 and a Multi-threaded score of 775, using the standard AMD Ryzen precision boost overdrive software, which is exactly in line with where it should be. 3D Mark’s Fire Strike gave a score of 27567, and Time Spy gets 12374. Unigen’s Superposition give us 14208 at 1080p High settings. What does all that mean? Well, in my admittedly limited test numbers it’s posting very similar numbers to a 2080 Ti in all bar the slightly low Superposition score, and it’s outperforming the 5060 8GB. But synthetic benchmarks aren’t actual games, so let’s see what it can do what we need it to.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is our representative older game, and at 1080p High settings it gets 148 frames per second on average, a very good result but 20% slower than the 5060.
Counter-Strike 2 is a bit less positive, at 1080p Very High settings getting 166 fps. Which is plenty, to be fair, but also about a third less than the 240 to 260 odd fps the 2080Ti and 5060 could give you.
Cyberpunk 2077 returns more impressive numbers, getting 101 fps at 1080p Ultra, and even 60 fps at 1080p Ray Traced Ultra settings in the built in benchmark albeit that setting does lean on upscaling to maintain the framerate. Still looks pretty good to me though. Actual gameplay will be a little less performant, but this is giving numbers within 10% of cards that are currently roughly £70 quid more than the £185 I picked this up for brand new.
For me, the critical test is how it can handle Unreal Engine 5, which is tripping up even the most powerful cards on the market. For testing I’ve settled on running the freely available Black Myth Wukong demo, and the popular Marvel Rivals, both without upscaling and frame generation. I’m open to suggestions on alternatives, as this engine seems to be built around the assumption one or both of these technologies will be used, in some flavour.
At any rate, it’s a measuring stick for raw performance. Looking at Black Myth Wukong the B570 can only give 40 fps at 1080p High, with no framegen or upscaling. For comparison, the 2080 Ti gets 59 fps, and the 5060 racks up 68, so on this test the B570’s falling behind.
Marvel Rivals is I think a more positive result, as it’s giving 64 fps at 1080p Medium, Native Resolution, no upscaling, no framegen. In the same tests, the 5060 gets 86 fps, and the 2080Ti 87 fps. None of these are barnstorming results, but even at 20 fps slower the B570’s plenty playable.
Let’s take a holiday to Verdansk to get murdered in Call of Duty: Warzone, where a very solid 80 fps average at 1080p extreme settings does nothing to stop me getting immediately brutalised. Will higher framerates at lower settings help? Well, maybe for someone that can aim, but that ain’t me, but of course, going to more competitive settings with lower graphics quality and the same long view distance will goose framerates considerably. Again in comparison it’s about a third less than the 110-120 the 2080Ti and 5060 are giving, but this PC can run the game well, even if I can not.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is my representative sample of a not particularly well optimised PlayStation port, and using the built-in benchmarks at 1080p favour quality preset gives us a 74 fps average, so no problems here.
Red Dead Redemption 2 with the quality slider to the low end of balanced gives us 123 fps average, so no challenge there. Increasing the settings up to the favour quality side does look a good bit nicer, particularly with the higher resolution textures, and still presents no problems for the B570, getting a 92 fps average.
Forza Horizon 5’s default setting was to go for 1080p high settings with the 60Hz Vsync active, and it’s giving a basically locked 60 fps with 15-20% of spare GPU overhead, an amazing looking game while drawing less than 100W of combined system power. Cranking the settings up to Ultra and unlocking the frame rate pushes it harder, but it’s still delivering an average of 105 fps. Amazing performance here.
Rounding off with Assassin’s Creed Mirage, at 1080p High setting this looks great and delivers an average of 93 fps, so again this is not going to present any problems at all.
So, I suppose the overall story is similar to what’s always been said about ARC graphics, in that some games perform extremely well, on par with cards a good bit more expensive than it, and in others it’s falling behind, notably here in Counter Strike 2 which I’d expected more from. The difference now, after years of driver development, is that even in those games where it’s behind, it’s still giving out entirely playable results.
This variability is the only thing holding me back from giving it a full throated recommendation as a budget GPU. While I suppose it’s good practice to check the results for the games you want to play regardless of what card you are considering, it’s an absolute must for the Intel ARC cards in a way that it kinda isn’t for Nvidia and even AMD these days. The other thing to consider is how the recently announced Nvidia / Intel tie up will shake out for Intel’s graphics division, but without a crystal ball who knows quite what’s going to happen there.
With all that in mind, in a world where the B570 is at £185 and the 5060 8Gb is still holding around to £250, I think it’s worthy of some serious consideration.
I am selling this PC locally, but if you have any requests for further game performance testing before it goes let me know in the comments and I’ll help if I can.
Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.