A serious upgrade
Before upgrading, this machine was fine for gaming, and could turn its hand to more serious work at a push. The aging storage was holding it back, though, and it did feel sluggish in even day-to-day tasks at times. After the upgrade (or complete rebuild, if we’re honest), this machine is an absolute powerhouse – look at the Cinebench result below if you need proof (the zero-point results were taken from the machine before its upgrade). That storage overhaul means that it feels smooth and responsive across the board; no need to go and make coffee whenever a huge app or game is fired up.
The overall build went well, and there isn’t much we’d change. Obviously, we’re lucky having so much gear to hand – flashing the motherboard BIOS, for instance, just required slotting in a first-gen Threadripper, updating zthe BIOS, then swapping back to the second-gen chip. Something that took less than half an hour, as opposed to weeks getting a replacement motherboard.
There’s still room to add extra fans, and we may fight the cabling to try to add a little color, but there’s no need for this rig to be lit up like the Vegas strip to enjoy its thread-heavy power. The lighting from the mobo is subtle, and there’s just enough light from the RAM and graphics card to see that it’s all working OK when you hit the power button.
Returning to the performance, there was one anomaly when testing, and that was in Total War: Warhammer II
– we saw a modest increase at 4K, as shown, but at lower resolutions, the frame rate was stuck in the mid-30s. We knew switching to Game Mode in Ryzen Master would improve this a little, but weren’t expecting to hit almost three times the frame rate at 1080p compared to Creator Mode – it really does make that much difference in this one game. At 4K, the frame rate jumped up to 43fps, which is a notable improvement. The other games weren’t affected anywhere near as much, just a frame or two at 4K. So, we’ll stick with all the cores and threads of Creator Mode unless we spot sluggish behavior.
The upgrade from a GeForce GTX 1080 to an RTX 2080 hasn’t blown us away. 3DMark Fire Strike may be a synthetic test, but it’s a good indicator of power, and the 7 percent improvement of the RTX 2080 over the GTX 1080 speaks volumes. Gaming performance is improved, especially when the Threadripper is in Game Mode, but even here, it isn’t enough for to us recommend such an upgrade. At least we can experience real-time ray tracing now, albeit not at 4K.