Upgrades, upgrades, upgrades
Z490 with an 11th-gen chip. Is it worth it?
Let’s face it, Intel’s latest launch has been a little lackluster. At least at the top end. The Core i9-11900K is, technically, a fantastic piece of engineering (a compliment we keep having to throw Intel’s way these days), because it circumvents a lot of the limitations of 14nm and the previous architecture design. However, when it comes to outright performance and pricing, Rocket Lake sort of falls flat on its face rather swiftly – at that aforementioned top end, anyway. That’s not good. We really need Intel to break through that 10nm barrier, and deliver, en masse, newer chips for the health of the industry as a whole. Regardless of whether you’re a fan of Team Red or Team Blue, having two competitive chip makers means that we, the consumers, will see significant improvements, generation to generation. And that’s something that, apart from meaning faster, better-performing rigs for us, also extends to benefiting society. Heck, we don’t want to see this all boil down to ARM versus AMD, RISC versus x86, in 10 years’ time. That would be sad indeed.
So, was everything a dud in Intel’s latest launch? Well, no. Bizarrely, and in perhaps the biggest turn-around in history, Intel’s budget-oriented chips are actually far more interesting than those at the top of the stack, and even more so than AMD’s. The Core i5-11400 and Core i5-11600K in particular are quite interesting, especially for those who only have one ambition for their rigs: gaming. In fact, in many cases, they entirely outpace their red rivals at the lower end of the spectrum. Long gone are the days of “If you’re on a budget, go AMD.” Yet there’s a catch….
The impossible task
There’s just no way of getting out there and buying modern components today. It’s almost impossible outside of a select few areas. Storage, power supplies, cases, cooling, peripherals, some motherboards, and Intel CPUs are in steady supply, no doubt the latter due to the 14nm process being fairly under-utilised at this point by the majority of the industry. But trying to find a graphics card in this hellish mining boom ecosystem is nigh-on impossible.
We’re very fortunate, with the fact that there are indeed some press samples in circulation that we can take advantage of here at APC. Not least the card we’ve chosen for this issue: AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6700 XT. But even we’ve had to borrow this card specifically from our colleagues at PC Gamer for a week, purely to build, shoot, and test this system, because AMD had no spare samples available for us.
So, we’re pitching this build around the concept of an upgrade, effectively. You’ve had the majority of these parts for a while now. You managed to pick up a Core i5-10600K way back when it launched in 2020 (yikes), along with a Gigabyte Z490 motherboard, complete with PCIe 4.0 compatibility, and thanks to being extremely lucky with some pre-orders, got hold of a 6700 XT and an i5-11600K, although the chip wasn’t exactly too difficult to source.
The big question: Does the Z490 board do the job with the latest-gen chip? And if you were to build this rig from scratch, what would $3,8501 get you in terms of gaming performance in this silicon drought-ridden world we live in? Let’s find out.
01 LEGENDARY LIAN LI
Why we’ve never done a “Build It” using the legendary Lian Li PC-O11-Dynamic chassis before is beyond us. It seems to have slipped through the net at APC. We’ve used it across other brands, and we’ve known for years that it’s exceptionally well built. In fact, it’s perhaps the best case available right now for anyone looking to build in an ATX tower. And yet, somehow – amid all its accolades and awards – we’ve never thought once of documenting a build in it, outside of recommending it for “Blueprints,” of course. Crazy.
The O11-Dynamic is an absolute beast. It is a full-tower, cube-shaped, dual-chamber case, with capacity for up to three 360mm radiators in the front alone, E-ATX motherboard support, dual power supply options, and vertical GPU support, along with enough accessories to make your eyes bleed, all packed together with a lovely flourish of smart brushed aluminum and tempered glass. And the cherry on top? You can also pick it up in silver.
02 INTUITIVE PANEL REMOVAL
Getting to grips with it, the first thing we did was strip our case down to its bare bones. The PC-O11 has quite an original design when it comes to removing the panels. First, you remove the top of the case; there are two thumbscrews at the back to loosen. Once that’s off, the two glass panels, secured by a stealthy notch and latch mechanism, lift up and out. It’s all super-clean and surprisingly secure for a chassis of this size.
There are no thumbscrews, magnetic hinges, or anything along those lines, giving it a super-tidy look overall. We’ve also gone ahead and removed a few interior panels here, namely the 3.5-inch hard drive cage above the PSU, as well as a cable tidy bar, just to give us as much room as possible to work in.
“We’re very fortunate, with the fact that there are indeed some press samples in circulation that we can take advantage of here at APC. Not least the card we’ve chosen for this issue: AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6700 XT.”
Retro boards
There you have it: one crisp clean Lian Li upgrade build, complete with PCIe 4.0 drive, Intel Core i5-11600K, and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT. We’re super-happy with how it turned out, even if it is running in a negative pressure configuration. It looks excellent, and that RGB fan setup is looking fine. Ideally, it does need a few extra fans; three intakes in the bottom blowing cool air up into that GPU would add an extra splash of light and help with temperatures. The PC-O11Dynamic is what we call a chimney or funnel design – unlike most cases that draw cool air in through the front and exhaust it up and out, a chimney design is assisted by natural convection, as it pulls cool air in through the bottom and then pushes it up and out through the roof. That’s why the O11 has a magnetic dust filter below those bottom three intakes.
The build itself went supersmoothly. The one thing we would say is that installing the radiator in the roof was a little tricky, as it doesn’t have a removable radiator bracket, but having one there would add to the bulk, and may have led to an uglier finish aesthetically. And let’s face it, you install a radiator once, it takes five minutes of messing around, then it’s in place for the next six months to several years anyway.
As for performance, the Core i5-11600K is a fine piece of gear. In multicore performance compared to last-gen’s 10600K, we’re seeing figures 20 percent higher across rendering tasks, which is impressive, and it also does better in gaming, no doubt thanks to higher single-core IPC. It’s not quite as big a difference compared to AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X as we’d like, but all things considered, it’s not bad, and it is cheaper and in stock. We were worried about PCIe 4.0 performance, given the fact that it’s an older series motherboard, but performance with the 980 Pro landed right where we expected it, with reads in the high 6,000s and writes in the low 5,000s.
We decided to compare this rig against a similarly priced machine from last year, our Razer Tomahawk ITX build, which housed the RTX 2080
Super from Zotac. Impressively, the RX 6700 XT could easily keep pace with it in 1440p gaming. In fact, in almost every benchmark, it outperformed the old juggernaut by a comfortable 10 percent or so, with the only exceptions being Total War: Warhammer II and ray tracing, as the 6000 series doesn’t quite have the same dedicated hardware that Nvidia is using to deal with ray-traced shadows and resources.
Question is, should you build this system today? Well, if you have most of the parts already, and feel the need for an upgrade, it’s not a bad move. At 1440p, it’s a solid build, but you do need to find a GPU, and you are going to be paying $1,100 for the privilege. If you can, snap up a new GPU at retail price or get on a pre-order list. But we recommend you look at eking out extra performance where you can without breaking the bank, namely with your case setup, cooling, and peripherals. In a year or two, hopefully the silicon shortage will end, and you won’t be out of pocket sitting on a rapidly depreciating graphics card.