The Lucid Dream
Mythical, beautiful, luminous. Take a look at our castle in the sky.
In Jarred’s Tech Talk this issue (see page 19), he went into great detail about the shortages we’re seeing in the industry right now. Thanks to a multitude of different factors, the world of computing is fragmented in terms of stock, and it’s only snowballing further. There’s a massive disconnect between the RRP and the actual price you can buy these components for now, and it’s all due to demand far outstripping supply, with some unscrupulous agents in the middle to boot.
We live in unprecedented times, and in a world so connected to its technology, especially for enthusiasts, professionals, and hobbyists like ourselves, we’re suffering because of it. That’s why we continue to publish the current street price you could theoretically buy the parts for today.
Now let’s just start by saying this: do not buy this today at its current price. Encouraging scalpers only leads to more of it happening in the future, further driving up costs for us all and putting what are meant to be affordable parts way out of reach of the everyday enthusiast. What we’re looking at here is an example of what can be built and achieved when stock finally comes back into existence again – something that should hopefully occur by this summer.
This build’s also a bit of a special one for us, for a number of reasons. You’ll also notice that there’s a ton of Corsair stuff in the build too. Corsair sent us the 5000D Airflow long before the NDA was due to lift. In fact, the whole idea was that we’d have this killers AMD build ready, colour-coordinated, and illuminated in the mag, right on time for the case’s NDA to drop. If you work in print media, let us assure you, meeting an NDA is like gold-dust, and something we almost always pursue. Obviously, that didn’t quite go to plan, but that’s not stopping us from putting this epic build together for this issue.
This time around, again due to that pesky pandemic, we’re going to show you some of our favorite highlights from this system, what considerations we made, and how we put the whole thing together. It’s a bit more unorthodox than our usual builds. COVID is also having an effect in our workplace, when we have a need to be there and aren’t working from home, and we don’t occupy the same room as our tech-savvy photographer while we actually do the build.
So let’s go through this 4K gaming build, take a look at this awesome system, and explain how we forged every element of it.
“There’s a massive disconnect between the RRP and the actual price you can buy these components for now, and it’s all due to demand far outstripping supply.”
“There’s no easy way of routing the pump cables from the motherboard block out the top of the case. Usually we tuck these out of the way, or under a heatsink, but there’s just nowhere to hide it.”
01 DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY
Corsair’s 5000D Airflow is a behemoth. It’s not quite full-tower level, but it’s much larger than the 4000D mid-tower case. This is in part thanks to its ridiculous amount of compatibility for cooling components. Inside you’ll find a cable-tidy bar, cable grommets, full-length PSU cover, vertical PCIe mounts, push-pull support in the roof, plenty of ventilation, and cable-management features in the rear. There’s even support for side-mounted radiators.
We removed the front panel, the roof, the two dust filters, and the cable-tidy bar. We knew we were going to be installing fans on the side of the chassis (because, well, it looks cool). The cable bar is attached via four Phillips-head screws in the back of the chassis. We pulled out the 3.5-inch hard drive cage as well, to give us extra room to mount the power supply and tidy up the cables.
Motherboard installation went swimmingly. We installed four sticks of our DDR4 here, routed the cable kit in, and installed our AIO, a painless procedure with AMD as it doesn’t require a special backplate.
02 AIO & MEMORY WOES
There’s nothing better out there right now for brightness than a Capellix LED. On the pump block itself, you can change the colour of this to white, instead of black. Effectively, the top is a clear block with the Corsair logo engraved onto it, and the part below is a translucent acrylic. Theoretically you can remove the lot, and 3D-print your own cover if you want. One thing that did annoy us, however, is the fact that there’s no easy way of routing the pump cables from the motherboard block out the top of the case. Usually we tuck these out of the way, or under a heatsink, but there’s just nowhere to hide it.
At this point in time, we’ve had to drop down to two memory sticks to get it to boot. This gives us 32GB total DDR4 at 3,200MHz, instead of the 64GB we wanted. Effectively the motherboard wouldn’t cycle, and we just ended up with a light informing us of a DRAM error and a blank screen. Remove two sticks, no problem. Place them back in, problem. This is likely due to an early BIOS on the Dark Hero having issue with our high-density memory from Corsair and Ryzen 5000 chips, and we’re still trying to get to the bottom of it.
03 M.2 SLOT #1
Installing an M.2 drive is, at this point, easier than installing a 2.5-inch SSD in our eyes. There’s fewer cables, less fuss, and it looks a lot cleaner – and that’s before you consider the performance gains you get from it. At this point you can get standard SSDs as M.2 drives as well, but honestly, we’re not even sure that it’s worth doing these days. After all, an Intel 665P or Crucial P2 1TB M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD will set you back roughly between $120-150, both of which feature speeds that are four to five times faster than the best SATA 2.5-inch or M.2 SATA SSD you can find.
In our case, installing the Corsair Force MP600 was as easy as pie. Simply undo the two Phillips-head screws, lift off the M.2 heatsink, install the M.2 drive, making sure to note where the notch is on the socket and the drive itself, take the film off the heatsink thermal pad, place it carefully back down, and resecure those two screws. There’s nothing to worry about here – no LED screens or anything along those lines, just one proficient heatsink to get the job done.
04 RGB CONNECTIVITY?
Our second M.2, the Force MP400, has gone in here, in an almost identical manner. Simply undo the two screws, lift up the heatsink, remove the LAIRD film from the thermal pad, insert M.2, rinse, repeat, and you’re done – no cables, no fuss, no massive drives taking up space and introducing rogue heat elements. You can also spot that we’ve filled both of the USB 2.0 headers on this motherboard. One of these runs to the Corsair Commander module that comes with the H150i Elite Capellix cooler, and the other runs to one of the RGB modules that comes with the QL fans.
What’s particularly nice about this setup is that it doesn’t rely on any RGB headers on the motherboard. Everything plugs in or is connected via the two commander units. For those who’ve played around with RGB before, you’ll know that the software itself is inherently a nightmare to use. Multiple components from different manufacturers each require their own RGB software, and each one intrinsically seems to cause conflicts with those other programs. Even in this case, just using Asus and Corsair as our two manufacturers can lead to issues. In most cases we recommend not installing Asus’s ROG Aura software, and just installing Corsair’s iCUE and using that to control the lot to avoid any conflicts. Also, because we’re not using any RGB headers, our two USB hubs have full control over the nine RGB fans and the pump, minimising any potential problems.lines, just one proficient heatsink to get the job done.
05 DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY
With our GPU installed, this system’s starting to look like a real monster by this point. The 6800 XT is a chunky card, but we have one major issue with it, and weirdly it’s the reason this build is themed the way it is: the red accents that run all the way around the card.
We live in a digital RGB, multi-coloured world now, where we can set lights to do any and all sorts of colours and patterns. Even Razer has dropped its famous green in favor of letting the end user choose what colour they want. So why on Earth does this reference design still insist on having that red accenting?
Anyway! Like most GPUs it’s a cinch to install. Remove the two PCIe covers from the rear (thankfully it’s still a two-slot card), line it up with the port, slot it into place, secure it with the two thumbscrews you removed earlier, and then install your cables. The 5000D doesn’t have a direct cable cutout below the GPU, but you can run them from the back near the front I/O headers fairly easily. We quite like this flowy look we’ve got going on here.
06 ILLUMINATED POWER SUPPLIES
We’ve used the CFX RGB power supply from Corsair. It connects via a cable directly to a Corsair Commander unit for its lighting. However, we couldn’t get it to register with iCUE on our first attempt or during the photoshoot, though after a quick firmware update at home during testing it was up and running. It’s not a bad power supply, but it does raise questions as to whether it’s worth having lighting there. To get the most out of it, you need to have the fan facing upward in a chassis like this. You could have it facing downward to get a soft underglow, but it’d be very muted.
The problem with having the fan facing upward is twofold. Firstly, if you do have a leak with the AIO, or if you’re running a custom loop, if any coolant leaks into the power supply, it’s kaput. On top of that, if the fan’s facing down, it’s typically got a mesh cover. It pulls cool air from outside the bottom of the case, through a mesh-filtered grille, and pushes hot air out the back. But with the fan facing up, it’s drawing in unfiltered warm air from inside the chassis, and spitting that out the back instead. That’s technically good for your other components, as you’ve got one extra exhaust, but less so for your power supply.
07 SIDE-MOUNTED RADIATOR?
When we saw that you could side-mount a radiator here, we went for it, because that’s what it’s all about when it comes to testing cases like this. Corsair advises that you install your AIO either in the roof (to allow for push-pull configs), or the front, but we wanted to try sideways. It fits quite well, and gives us a bit of a different angle compared to most other builds in towers like this.
One thing that was slightly annoying, however, was installing the front fans. This isn’t necessarily something that’s mission-critical or performance impacting, but the front fans, when mounted in the lowest most position, don’t line up with the fans on the radiator. We raised the radiator up as much as we could to try and line these up, and got close. It’s not the end of the world, but if you’ve got an obsession with precision, it might not be ideal.
The QL fans, although expensive, are impressive to look at – both the lighting and the rear of these things look good. In fact, despite the ones with the iCUE H150i Elite cooler looking good too, we’d have preferred a third set of QLs.
09 REAR CABLE MANAGEMENT
And here we have the rear of the 5000D Airflow. You can see the cutout for the radiator on the left, the fan cables we have littered everywhere, and the multiple fan controllers. The case comes with a standard fan controller that plugs directly into a PWM header on the motherboard, and can support up to six fans directly. However, it only controls fan speed, not RGB. We’re using that to control all of the QL120 case fans – the three in the roof, and the three in the front of the chassis.
The AIO is entirely controlled by the Corsair Commander module that comes with the cooler. We mounted that to the back of the motherboard tray using double-sided adhesive pads that Corsair provided. Theoretically that supports up to six fans, with six RGB headers, and is controlled directly via the iCUE software. However, to keep things simple, we kept all of the AIO fans on the Commander, the QL120 case fans on the integrated fan controller that came with the chassis, and the QL120 case fan’s RGB on a separate controller that came with the QL fans (but doesn’t control fan speed). Confused? Us too. But it works, and only requires nine fans, three controllers, and 18 separate cables (19 with the PSU).
08 PANEL GAPS
We mentioned installing push-pull configurations earlier with this case in the roof, and here’s a really good example of just how easy that is to do. We’ve removed the top panel in this shot to give you a good idea. You can see that there’s a magnetic mesh filter over the top of that, but you can remove this and install an additional set of three 120mm fans, then a radiator underneath, with three more fans equipped, without contacting the motherboard at all. That way you can provide even more airflow and static pressure if you so desire.
We typically haven’t seen a huge amount of benefit to running push-pull in radiators. Generally, the industry consensus is that it’s not a huge deal. As long as you’ve got a solid amount of air going over radiators, the limiting factor as far as thermals are concerned is going to be surface area and the radiator’s thermal capacity, which isn’t something you can usually get around by adding more fans. That said, the gap is very good for standard airflow reasons – the less restriction you have in the way of those fans, the better they’re going to be at exhausting hot air out of the top of the case.
And there you have it, one ship-shape 4K gaming PC powered entirely by AMD. We’ve been wanting to do one of these builds for a while now, just to see what the added benefits are in the real world when it comes to AMD’s Smart Access Memory tech.
For those that don’t know, when using AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs (and now 3000-series processors), with a Radeon 6000-series card and appropriate motherboard BIOS (X570 chipset), you can enable Smart Access Memory. This basically gives the processor complete access to the GPU’s VRAM.
Traditionally your processor can only ever access up to 256MB of that VRAM at any one time, regardless of how much VRAM the card actually has. The CPU then uses that VRAM as a frame buffer to store information regarding the upcoming frames that the GPU has to render. In this case it could be textures, colour values, and so on. Obviously, having a limit of only being able to access 256MB at a time acts as a considerable bottleneck, so the way AMD has got around this is by using the extra bandwidth available from PCIe 4.0 and a few driver tweaks to give the processor unlimited access to the GPU’s VRAM.
It’s worth pointing out that AMD hasn’t patented this, and it’s not something that’s going to stay only with Team Red. In fact, the company is actively working with Nvidia to get its cards operating in a similar manner with Ryzen processors, and even cooperating with Intel to ensure that Radeon cards work with Intel chips in the same way. Nvidia has also announced that it’s working on its own variant of this technology. AMD has stated that this can lead to up to 16-percent performance increases across select titles.
In our testing we found that to be generous. On the whole we saw average improvements of around five to six percent across our testing suite at 4K, compared to it being turned off. That’s nothing to be sniffed at, and free performance is free performance. It’s likely, as games further advance over the next few years, that developers will be able to take better advantage of the frame buffer because of these improvements, so it could make a serious difference in future titles.
There she blows
When it came to the actual build process, well it was relatively plain sailing. The only problem we had was something we encountered with the original 4000D, and that’s the position of the thumb screws that you need to remove to release the hard drive caddy. They face upwards into the chassis, yet are underneath the power supply cover, and because of that, and the fact they’re overtightened during the manufacturing process, they’re a nightmare to get out. We ended up using a very long screwdriver and precariously slotting it through one of the cable cutouts near the front I/O headers to get access to it, to loosen them off until we could turn them by hand.
Outside of that it all went swimmingly: the motherboard went in as easy as pie, and mounting the fans didn’t present any difficulties. Being unable to perfectly align those side radiator fans with the front case fans was annoying, but not something that would keep us up at night, and cable management could’ve been a doddle if we’d have taken our time (there’s plenty of cable-routing channels, cable covers, and Velcro straps included). It’s just a seamless experience building in this thing, and when you get to the end you’re left with an exceptionally clean-looking rig. One thing to point out is that if you do go for the vertical GPU route, you’ll need to think a bit about how to route the PCIe power cables, as there’s no direct PSU cover cutout/passthrough for them.
And the performance? Well, this thing is a beast when it comes to our testing suite. We’re comparing this against our Razer Tomahawk ITX build, complete with Core i5-10600K, 64GB of DDR4, and an RTX 2080 Super, to see what it’d be like as a complete upgrade from generation to generation. Unsurprisingly, in the processing department that poor Core i5 is murdered, with the 5950X baring its teeth with a 201-percent performance increase in the multi-core test (and a 30-percent performance increase in singlecore tests). PCIe 4.0 SSDs are also markedly faster, topping out near the 5GB/s mark, and on the whole traditional graphical rasterisation shows anywhere between a 31and 57-percent increase in average frame rates at 4K.
We don’t currently have any ray-tracing titles in our system test suite (we’re still waiting for office access for the full setups we discussed last year), but we ran 3DMark’s Port Royal ray-tracing benchmark across the two rigs to give us a good idea of what’s going on. And even there we’re seeing a 34-percent improvement over the RTX 2080 Super. That’s still shy of what you’d get from an RTX 3080, but it does slightly edge out the similarly priced RTX 3070. It’s worth bearing in mind that this is a purely synthetic benchmark and isn’t indicative of what you’ll see in games featuring the new tech.
So, for roughly $1,500 more (at RRP) compared to our 2080 Super build, this system leaps over its predecessor. The only title currently not above 60fps is the latest Assassin’s Creed, and even that averaged 54fps, which is far from unplayable.
It seems that we’re finally starting to cusp over that 4K edge. Perhaps not this generation, but next time 4K may finally become the norm, and we can say goodbye to 1440p.