Big, Blue, and Beautiful
Looking at the numbers, we’re pleased with how this turned out. Roughly 20 percent performance improvement over our zero-point 1440p system is in line with the theoretical improvement of the 2070 Super over the GTX 1080 that system uses, and broader graphical performance in Fire Strike Extreme is great, too. The eight cores of the Ryzen 7 3800X work hard, hitting a good score in Cinebench R15 with no overclocking.
There’s room for overclocking in both the CPU and GPU. The 3800X can hit as high as 4.5GHz with a manual overclock, potentially higher on individual cores with Ryzen Master’s auto-overclocking mode – although you’re constrained by the silicon lottery to a degree; the highest manual clock we reached was 4.3GHz. Cooling is well handled by this case, with great airflow that kept idle temps very low. The GPU and memory idle at 28 C, while the CPU varies from 30 C to 45 C.
At maximum stress, the CPU peaked at 68 C, proving that air cooling is very much a viable option. Running graphical benchmarks didn’t see the GPU temperatures rise above 60 C, either. This system should be able to play just about any game on 1440p ultra settings, with ray tracing as a definite option as well, provided you’re willing to drop your settings a tad to keep the frame rates steady. GPU overclocking makes 4K ultra a distinct possibility in some games, too.
Were we to build this rig again, we’d make a few tweaks. You might be wondering why we removed all the case fans when there’s room for at least one or two to stay – that’s because the MEG X570 Unify only has seven fan headers, and our build has seven fans. Seven independently powered fans, anyway; if you include the GPU and mobo fans, this is a 10-fan machine. It’s surprisingly quiet, though, as the Fractal Design case fans are designed for minimum noise.
A fan controller might have been a good addition, allowing for a couple of extra fans in the front and roof, while adding hardware RGB control. We didn’t use the small physical RGB controller included with the MA610P cooler, because it wouldn’t have been properly compatible with the fans. A PWM fan hub would improve control; using the pump header for a fan means the fan curves have to be manually tweaked in the BIOS.
Talking of which, remember to engage A-XMP in the BIOS. Running the memory at full speed is important when using an AMD processor; while some programs only see very minor improvements, Cinebench R15 saw a 9 percent rise in performance when A-XMP was turned on. There’s also Game Boost, which cuts your core use in half, but drew a few extra frames out of each game on our list (the figures in the table are using A-XMP only). Using Game Boost increases fan noise, though, so experiment with it.