Rising to the challenge
Frustrating is the word with this one. AIO woes cut our enjoyment short midway through the build. Having to install our AIO in the front, because it was half an inch longer than the top mounting tray, was pure frustration, especially as the mobo and fans were already installed. On top of that, the fact that the front is now an exhaust goes against most common airflow conventions. It is possible to rotate the fans, but you need a particular set of hex keys that we didn’t have to hand. To compensate for this lack of positive pressure, we installed all three remaining fans (two in the roof and one in the rear) to draw into the chassis instead. Combined with the blower fan, it should lead to a mostly balanced system, and we’ve yet to see any temperature anomalies.
To combat our hardware predicaments, we opted for an external NAS. The 2TB of applicable solid-state storage should be enough for any short-term content creation and file transfers, and the 20TB of HDD storage in the WD My Cloud Ex 2 Ultra should provide suitable backup for all longterm projects.
Having the PSU on rails, however, was a dream. Midway through the build, we decided to swap the stock cables for a set of black braided ones, and it was simply a case of pulling the PSU out, swapping the cables round, threading them through, and sliding it back into the chassis.
But what about performance? We decided to slap a 4GHz overclock on all eight cores, to give the processor a little extra grunt in rendering tasks and single-core IPC. What was disappointing was the memory overclocking. We struggled to get the memory to clock at 2,400MT/s, being forced to leave it at stock. Regardless of what timings we tinkered with, voltages we applied or memory profiles, the Gigabyte X370 didn’t want to connect the dots.
As you’d expect, though, rendering performance was staggering, with nearly 1,700 points in Cinebench R15 multi-thread, and a solid 152 in single-thread. Backed up by 64GB of DDR4 and a 2TB PCIe SSD, it’s not hard to imagine this thing flying when rendering everyday tasks.
And gaming? Well, that was a mixed bag of potatoes. AMD is still clearly having issues with a few titles, our Total War: Attila being the most telling, scoring just 36.2fps at 1080p. It’s an aggressive title, no doubt, but when you consider that an Intel Pentium G4600 and GTX 1060 trumped this setup by a frame, it shows that optimisations need to be made. Whether that’s on the OS or on AMD’s side for chipset, it makes little difference to us.
Ultimately, Ryzen is a monster when it comes to professional workloads, board manufacturers still have to get up to par with memory compatibility, and gaming performance at lower resolutions could do with a tweak. But, bang for buck, it’s damn near perfect, and will hopefully elicit a powerful response from Intel, too.