I’ve mentioned my own rig in passing a few times previously as a comparison point when looking at builds on the channel, and seeing as I need to do a bit of work in there it seems as good a time as any to give it a butchers.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see what I’m daily driving, what I’m using it for, and see if we can’t get more fans installed. Clearly it’s lacking in this regard right now.
This throbbing purple unit is named Goliath, because my computers get named after Starcraft units, because I’m really cool. In some ways it’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus, or a Trigger’s Broom if you prefer, in that there’s some parts that survive from builds I retired a decade ago.
Most of it, however, is now a little over a year old. The heart of it is the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, still about as fast a processor for gaming as you can buy, and pretty damn good for general productivity tasks. Honestly, it’s way more than I really need. The recent build with a budget Ryzen 5 7500F actually delivers pretty close real world performance at all but the toppest of the top end duties at a fraction of the £500 I spent on the 9800X3D.
However, my strategy for systems is to build with the best parts I can afford and use them to death, typically at least six years. My last PC was based around 2018’s i7-9700K, and before that an i7-3770K, so I’m hoping this platform will see me into 2030. Who knows if home computing will even remain a thing by then, or if we’ll be reduced to renting other people’s computers.
Sorry, a bit of an old man shouts at cloud moment there.
In a lot of ways on this build I’d bounced myself into components with much less consideration than I ought to have put into it, but I think that it’s worked out well. I’d been ready to buy an ASRock motherboard as their AM5 boards were very well regarded, at least until they started apparently incinerating 9800X3Ds. So instead there’s ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F motherboard installed, which hasn’t given me anything to complain about. It cost £200 last year, it’s now £165. I don’t think there’s anything in the X class chipsets that I need, certainly not enough to justify the price.
I’d been intending to reuse the Corsair Carbide 175 case I’d transplanted my last build into in 2024, but the cooler didn’t fit, so I joined the aquarium hivemind with this FOIFKIN M9 Case, which cost me £90. It’s fine, but it doesn’t feel like a £90 case. At the £65 it’s going for now it’s more acceptable. There’s nothing much wrong with it, it’s just bang average build quality and for me at least £90 is edging into premium territory, and this ain’t it.
This is powered by an NZXT C1200 Gold PSU, which is still going for the £150 in cost me last year. I’ve no complaints with its performance since then.
The graphics card is one of the holdovers from an upgrade to my last build. I bought this Sapphire RX 7800 XT PULSE 16GB in Jan 2024 for £485. Previously I’d been using a GTX 1080Ti I bought for £475 back in November 2018, and I’d decided I wasn’t going to upgrade until I could get something with more or less twice the raster performance for more or less the same price. It took quite some time to get there, but it did in the end. Much as I’d like a faster card, I’m not sure I need it. We’ll test that later.
It’s driving this superwide Alienware AW3423DWF monitor at a resolution of 3440 x 1440, so not quite 4K levels of pixel density but getting there. It’s fantastic. Great OLED colours and black levels means great contrast, it’s decent at showing HDR content, and the 165Hz refresh rate makes it excellent for gaming. I’ve not noticed any burn-in problems despite also using this for productivity tasks where the menu elements are in the same place for extended periods. This was a bit spendy by my standards, costing £670 at start of 2024, but as the only reason I can think of to replace this will be if it breaks, I hope to be using this for the next decade.
I have no complaints with these two 32GB sticks of 6400MHz Corsair Dominator Platinums. They cost me £260 last year which seemed a little bit spendy, but let’s just see what they are going for these days Jesus fucking christ £1300 what the actual fuck fuck these AI datacentres right in the arse
Ahem. Let’s hope I never need to replace them.
It’s a similar story with the frankly too much storage that’s in here. It boots from a 2TB Silicon Power Gen 3 M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB that was bought for £240 in August 2019. I’d considered getting a newer, faster Gen 5 drive but figured that could wait for a bit, and now the prices are ridiculous. Ces’t la vie.
My games live on a Crucial P3 4TB Gen3 NVMe SSD that cost me £160 in June 2023, which seemed like a lot then. Again, different perspective on it now.
I was looking to transition away from spinning rust, but there didn’t seem to be a reason not to carry over the Seagate BarraCuda 6TB from the last build for bulk storage of ROMs and the like. It cost me £130 in February 2019.
I instead added to this after dropping a Seagate 8TB External drive, which somehow broke the enclosure. Shucking the drive out of it revealed it still works fine, so in it went. It cost £200 in November 2015.
A whistlestop tour of the rest of the desk setup now. I use this Glorious Model O mouse most of the time, and occasionally this cheap HXSJ T22 ergonomic mouse if my wrists play up.
The keyboard is an unremarkable tenkeyless Arzopa K81 mechanical beastie. These Creative Gigaworks T20 speakers must be twenty years old by this point but are still going strong. I’m using Logitech G435 wireless headphones most of the time, with wired Sony MDR-7506 headphones for editing.
This Huion Kamvas 13 graphics tablet display is more aspirational than something I use on the daily, but maybe one day I’ll use it for editing photos but to be honest I’m happier with a mouse. My capture device for, er, capturing gameplay footage is this Elgato HD60S, working well as long as of course you don’t need 4K captures.
This Lenovo 500 webcam was really just the cheapest way I could get something with Windows Hello support at £15, which is maybe the last useful Windows feature released. The quality is, well, pretty bad, to be honest, as you can see, even at the £15 price point. It doesn’t have a microphone, so I’m using my trusty old Rode Podcaster for that and indeed the audio for these videos, along with this cheapo generic ring light.
The reason we’re opening it up is to replace this CPU cooler, the Thermalright Frozen Warframe 240. It cost me £70 last year, it’s currently £56 on Amazon. It and the hodgepodge of assorted ARGB fans is doing a decent job in dealing with the heat produced under normal loads. However in a furmark / prime 95 torture test, while the GPU is chilling at 62 deg C under full load, HWInfo shows a max of 94 deg C on the CPU hotspots, and 88 deg C overall. It seems to be drawing the full 165W throughout the ten minute test so it’s not quite thermal throttling, and the Temps drop 30 degrees in seconds after stopping the test.
While changing this out to the 360mm version is, I think, unlikely to improve this, at £67 I suppose I’ll take the gamble. I’m actually doing this to fix something far less serious. I just don’t like the way there’s three fans on the bottom and two on the top. What’s that? Remove a fan and save money? Don’t be silly now.
I will have to remove a fan, actually, the one at the back isn’t going to fit with the hose in this orientation. My excuse for not doing any cable management today is that there’s a project coming up in a few weeks where I think I’ll have to remove the motherboard, so i’m going to do it then. I promise, scout’s honour.
Having done this swap, there’s a difference of, well, basically nothing. It’s showing a reduced max of about 91 degrees after baking it for ten minutes. A few degrees wasn’t really worth it, but the cooler will be used in other projects and I’m happier with how it looks, which was the main aim here anyway. At some point I’ll pick up some Thermalright reverse blade fans to make the bottom intakes looks a bit nicer and hopefully haver a consistent colour temperature throughout the case.
So, what do I use this for? Well, everything, I suppose, but I’m not going to bore you with a test of me browsing the Internet. I’m sure you can take as read that the 9800X3D is a capable chip that handles media consumption, office tasks, and photo editing with ease.
The most demanding tasks I have for it are gaming, of course, and increasingly these here YouTube videos. DaVinci Resolve runs well on this, certainly for the 1080p workflows I have, so no complaints with this. It renders out quickly as well, taking one of my simple 10 minuteish projects, it spits it out in 1 minute 33 seconds. My old 2013 Mac Pro 2013 with dual twelve core v2 Xeons took 12 minutes 27 seconds, so there’s certainly progress. However, I should note the aforementioned 7500F took 2 minutes and 12 seconds, very comparable performance at about a quarter of the cost.
If you’re interested, the video you’ve seen of devices on this channel is shot with the Panasonic GX9 camera with either the Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 lens, or an Olympus 60mm macro for close ups, with maybe a few pickups using my Pixel Fold 9 Pro camera. These yapping sessions are shot with a Panasonic G100 and Olympus 25mm f1.2 lens, aided by this Glide Gear TMP-10 teleprompter setup that runs from an old FireHD 8 tablet. The mike and light you saw earlier. While this gear can give great results, despite my natural tendency to screw it up, I’m just repurposing things from my longstanding photography hobby where possible. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this lot as the kit to get if you were starting from scratch, but it’s what I’ve got for now.
Let’s go through the usual test suite and see how the 7800XT is holding up, as it’s the limiting factor here. I should add I’m testing with the usual stuff I need or want to run a computer, google drive, assorted quickview and window manipulation utilities, graphic tablet drivers, that sort of stuff. This isn’t a super optimised gaming rig, it’s a general purpose workstation so let’s run it like it normally does. I’m testing some of these at 1080p for comparison with other builds on the channel, but of course I’m most interested in the 3440 x 1440 resolution of the monitor I’m using.
The usual bunch of synthetics first. Cinebench 2024 gets 1294 multicore and 135 single core.
3DMark next, with Fire Strike getting 42560 points, Time Spy 19068 points, Port Royal 11013 points, Steel Nomad 4085 points, and Speed Way 4081 points.
Unigine’s Superposition gets 23094 at 1080p High settings.
Counterstrike 2 at 1080p Very High Settings gets 453 average fps, and a slightly silly 854 average fps at 1080p competitive settings. Moving to the 3440×1440 widescreen resolution at Very High Settings, it gets 227 average fps. I’ll just call this widescreen from now on.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s benchmark at High Settings gets 266 fps at 1080p and 144 fps at widescreen, so we’ll need to push this a bit harder.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s benchmark gets 148 fps at 1080p Ultra settings, dropping to a still perfectly fine 94 fps at widescreen Ultra settings.
Forza Horizon 5 at widescreen Extreme settings gets 120 fps, although it still gives me a recommended setting of Low which feels like a bit of an insult to be honest.
Read Dead Redemption 2 at widescreen with everything supposedly cranked to Ultra gets 58 average fps, but some of those textures don’t look very Ultra to me. I think it’s struggling running from an external SSD, or maybe my recent Linux misadventures have corrupted something. At any rate, it will run this just fine, once I’ve fixed it.
Horizon Zero Dawn at widescreen Ultimate quality gets 105 average fps and looks amazing doing so.
Total War: Warhammer 3’s Mirrors of Madness benchmark at widescreen Ultra settings gets us 65 average fps.
Taking a look at the Civilisation VI turn time benchmark next, where it gets an average turn time of 26.65 seconds.
Here we are taking a wander around Baldur’s Gate 3, at widescreen Ultra Settings where we get 101 fps.
Right, heavy hitters next. Well, the heavy hitters that I own at least. We’re starting with the Black Myth Wukong benchmark, where it recommends no FSR, Very High settings, no raytracing but with framegen for my card at widescreen, where it gets 62 fps, I don’t know quite how this plays using framegen, but it looks stunning.
Turning framegen off, as you might expect, pretty much halves the framerate to 34 fps.
Adding Ray Tracing at Very High settings is a very effective way to murder the framerate, tanking it to 7 fps.
In fact it’s pretty hard to get anywhere close to playable with raytracing on the 7800XT. Dropping to Low RT, with framegen, but the other settings kept at very high still only gets us to 25 fps.
Dropping to medium settings and adding in 80% FSR improves somewhat to 41 fps, but I can’t imagine this being a great way to play.
To make me feel better, the results at the usual test setting of 1080p High, No Framegen or upscaling, without raytracing is a very reasonable 86 fps.
Marvel Rivals is the other Unreal Engine 5 game I test, and we are getting 122 average fps at our usual 1080p Medium Settings, Native Resolution, No FG test setting.
Pushing this up to my monitor’s widescreen resolution, and cranking the settings to Ultra, at Native Res, but still no FrameGen and we get 48 average fps. Ultra settings use Lumen for ray traced reflections and global illumination, so that’s why there’s the drop off.
Dropping the settings to High, still at widescreen, native res, no FrameGen gets us 68 fps, so that gets us just over the line that I think most would call acceptable.
If you need a few more frames, then at adding in Balanced FSR3 at the same widescreen High, no FrameGen gets 91 average fps, and I don’t think there’s too much of a visual hit.
Incidentally at widescreen, Ultra, but no Lumen, just screen space reflections and general illumination, at Native Res, and again no FrameGen gets 57 average fps.
I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I think despite releasing in 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 is still about as high end as PC graphics can go, at least when ramping up to full path tracing. Testing without Ray Tracing first, we get 167 average fps at 1080p Ultra Settings, dropping to a still great 90 fps at widescreen.
Cyberpunk 2077 with RT Ultra Settings gets 83 average fps at 1080p, dropping to 51 fps at widescreen.
Just for fun, the Ray Tracing Overdrive setting with path tracing only get 40 fps at 1080p, so not worth considering at higher resolutions for this card.
Even knowing the difference between these rendering techniques, I doubt I’d be able to reliably pick one from the other in a line-up so I guess I’ll stick with the old ways, the high framerate ways.
So, we’ll round of the testing with a quick Kubuki runaround and cop-bothering, where we get 91 fps at widescreen Ultra Settings.
Right, so having run that gauntlet, what has it told us. Well, I’m still very happy overall with my PC, although it’s important to recognise that this isn’t the combination of parts I’d recommend if you were building a machine from scratch. My leapfrog strategy of alternating upgrades between the base platform and graphics card every couple of years mean that it’s always likely to be unbalanced in some regard.
If we want to make the 9800X3D earn its keep, it really ought to have faster graphics card plugged into it. This is easier said than done in the current market. Indeed if I apply the same upgrade strategy, looking for something twice as fast in raster performance for about £500, I do not think I’ll be upgrading this decade. Only the 5090 fits one of these criteria, but very much not the other.
I’d considered upgrading to a 9070XT, at least at its announced MSRP, for the better RT performance. The price it became commonly available for is more than I think it’s worth. I hoped for something along the lines of a 9080XT from AMD, or for the 5080 to drop below a grand, but neither are going to happen with AI datacenters eating all the compute supply.
With rumours that the next generation of cards won’t launch until 2028, and with Intel seemingly abandoning the discrete GPU market it’s a grim short term outlook indeed. So, I’m doing the only sensible thing and not buying a damn thing.
The 7800XT’s showing its age a bit, and if games do insist on requiring ray tracing to run then the struggle will continue to be real. However, at the current moment at least, it’s able to coax playable results out of everything I’m throwing at it, and my backlog is such that I’m not short of older less demanding games to play. I don’t buy new games anyway, given that they will drop to, what, a third of the price within a year, so the point where the 7800XT no longer gives satisfactory results for me is hopefully a few years away, and maybe the bottom will have fallen out of the AI market by then. I choose to live in hope.
At any rate, that’s all I have for you, Feel free to insult my decisions and life choices in the comments, and if you really hate them then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.