Mystical Monster
This issue, Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture meets overkill RGB.
Come on now, you knew it was coming. You can’t launch a major new GPU architecture and a swathe of graphics cards and expect us here at APC to not go out and put together a ridiculously over-the-top, super-powerful, super-expensive machine. It’s in our nature. So that is exactly what we’re doing here today.
However, if I’m honest, it being this colourful is a happy accident
– depending on your point of view anyway. It’s certainly not something we set out to achieve, but it’s part and parcel of working with the brands we do – more on that later.
So what’s the ambition? Well simply put, to see how well MSI’s GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio can perform in an actual PCIe 4.0 rig, with a fairly solid base spec. But this is our first build with an aftermarket card, and that raises a lot of questions. There’s been some furore surrounding capacitors on these cards, especially the aftermarket variants, as they seem to be running at the absolute limit (built to Nvidia’s specs), and any attempt to overclock leads to blue screens and crashes. Secondly, these things are seriously big, and as the cards are known to draw more power than ever before, I want to take a look at a) just how noisy they are, and b) whether the temps are actually that bad.
That’s actually one of the big advantages of being a tech journalist in print: We don’t have to rush our work to be the first out. We can take our time, find any bugs, and report on them too, giving you all the best information. Let’s dive in!
“The ambition? Well simply put, to see how well MSI’s GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio can perform in an actual PCIe 4.0 rig, with a fairly solid base spec.”
Part selection
So then, on to the parts list. What have I got for this rig? Well first up is the processor, and at its core I’m running an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X. This is one of the more top-end processors from AMD for this current generation. It’s got eight cores, 16 threads, and a beefy 4.5GHz turbo clock speed at max. Single-core performance is solid, and it’s got plenty of headroom in games too. Combine that with PCIe 4.0 support and a bevy of additional features to get the most out of it at stock, and it’s a good pick for this test system.
Moving on to memory, and I’ll be pairing this with 32GB of G. Skill’s Trident Z NEO memory at 3600MHz, which is sort of the sweet spot for 3rd‑gen Ryzen. I’ll be slotting all of that together inside one of Corsair’s latest 4000D Airflow chassis, and then I’ll complete the look with a
Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix AIO liquid cooler too.
And as for the wild cards? Those are reserved for the storage and power supply. I’ve gone with the Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB, just for testing purposes, and one of be quiet!’s latest Dark Power Pro 12 1200W 80+ Platinum PSUs. The latter was actually a stand in; I was intending to use one of Corsair’s latest CX750F RGB power supplies as well, just to really go for RGB overkill, but sadly it arrived a day after our photoshoot, due to that pesky coronavirus delaying shipments from Taiwan. That said, the Dark Power Pro series has long been a workhorse of ours, and this one will go on to become our permanent test‑bed PSU as well, at least once we’re allowed back in an office again.
“There’s a reason we don’t award perfect scores at APC often, and that is because very few products are flawless. There’s always something, and here we have another example of that.”
Concluding thoughts
All in all the build process for this rig was fairly smooth. It’s funny: Year after year I’ve been building systems, and I’m not sure if it’s a combination of more experience and a particular procedure I follow, or whether it’s chassis design getting better, but it is so easy now to build your own rig. I can’t stress that enough. If you’ve spent any time reading APC, and you’re still worried about building your own rig, or don’t want to stress yourself with the time it takes, believe me, you’ve got nothing to worry about, you’re more than capable. I’m positive pretty much anyone can build a system, and in not a lot of time too – unless you’re dabbling at the more extreme ends, such as with liquid cooling.
Even looking at this build it’s hard to think of anything that could easily go wrong. There’s some housekeeping stuff perhaps. You could wear woolly socks and build it on a fresh carpet, or accidentally knock off a capacitor (which requires a lot of effort), or use conductive thermal paste and spill it all over the socket (although there’s very little of that conductive stuff left out there at this point). But aside from that, if you’ve spent time reading a guide or examining the process of building a PC, it’s hard to go wrong. Everything’s notched a certain way, or designed to minimise the chance of breaking things. In fact, I reckon the only thing still left that poses any sort of danger is Intel’s LGA socket, or AMD’s processor pins, and even then you’re dealing with that situation for all of about two minutes, if that.
All that aside, how does it perform? The RTX 3000 series is a game-changer for gaming at 4K. Here we’re comparing it against the Hydra Mini from a few issues back. The difference between the two extends to about $300, which mostly falls on the processor, motherboard, and power supply. Additionally the Hydra Mini features an Intel Core i5 processor, while this one houses the AMD
Ryzen 7 3800X, which is somewhat slower for gaming. With similar original price points, the two cards make for a good comparison.
What are we seeing? Well, average framerates in Shadow of War were 81fps, Total War was 94fps, and Assassin’s Creed was 59fps. That difference is huge, near 80 percent increases in most cases: Not the 100 percent increase with the 3D Mark result, but still an incredible performance boost.
On the whole it’s not too noisy, and the crashing bugs that occurred at launch seem to have been fixed with the latest driver update. Is this all the card you’ll ever need then? It certainly looks that way. I’m just sad I have to give the card back to MSI.
We’re approaching the point where GPU performance outweighs monitor tech, and unless higher spec monitors come down in price, the need for flagship products like the RTX 3090 is difficult to justify.