The "I'm not buying Zen 3" gaming build

[porina]

 

This is a work in progress. I wanted to build a "next gen" gaming system, with a Zen 3 CPU and targeting a 3080, but decided to cheap out once Zen 3 was actually announced. I don't doubt it will be the best gaming CPU, but I didn't want to pay for the current announced offerings. As such, I decided to reuse parts from my other systems.

 

Provisional parts list

• Ryzen 3700X
• Noctua D15
• Asrock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac
• Kingston HyperX RGB 4000 ram at 2400 (I'm checking for stability at low speed before I turn it up, I don't recall which systems this ram has had problems with)
• EVGA G2L 850W PSU
• Crucial P1 1TB NVMe SSD
• Crucial MX500 1TB SATA SSD
• Corsair Graphite 230T case
• Some GTX 1060 3GB (placeholder, to be replaced by 3080 when I can get one)

Yes, this might seem an odd mix, but it is more a case of "what I have" than "what I'd choose today". The two SSDs were bought new, since the donor systems I raided the parts from had WD Green SSD and hard disks... the ITX mobo is going to be the biggest limit for this system I feel. At some point I want to add 2.5G ethernet to this system, and I think I'll have to go USB for that.

 

Things still to do

• Get a 3080 or similar GPU!
• Replace the D15 with the Chromax Black LTT edition, with orange trim to match the case. It's in another system right now.
• Configure the software on the system
• Look for 2.5GBE options that don't need PCIe. Most likely will have to go USB.
• Stress test it - gaming is serious business! My 21 YouTube followers deserve it.

 

Random thoughts about the components used

 

The 3700X is arguably one of the top two gaming CPUs I have, the other being the 8086k in my existing gaming system. I wanted to go 8 cores for next gen, so the 3700X is what I can do without buying a new CPU. I do have a spare Z390 mobo actually, and getting an 8 core Coffee Lake was a consideration.

 

The cooler only has one fan on it since I ran out of headers on the mobo, and I don't know if I have fan splitters. I'm not sure it'll be that important since I'm leaving the CPU at stock 88W PPT limit.

 

The mobo is one of two Ryzen boards I still have. The other is X370 chipset, and when I tried to build around that, I had an unexpected crash with what was a pretty clean system. That got me concerned that the generational gap between chipset and CPU was too great. The B450 board was in a system I was trying to sell anyway, so I thought I'd give that a try. So far, so good.

 

The ram is a kit I was already using with the 3700X. Although it is rated at 4000, it also has an XMP profile at 3600 that I found gave better real world results on both Intel and AMD systems. So I was going to use that... but I'm not 100% sure about its compatibility. When I first got the kit I was using it to test in various systems, not all without problems. As such, I'm running at 2400 (highest SPD) while I do the initial configuration, and only switch on XMP once I'm ready to stress test.

 

The EVGA PSU I bought on sale. They're not a brand on my normal radar, but as said, it was on sale at the time, and I think it was pretty high up the PSU tier list, so I grabbed it. Kinda wasted on a quad core Broadwell system without PSU before I moved it here. At 850W I hope that is more than sufficient for the demands a 3080 might make of it.

 

The two Crucial SSDs were chosen in part for price and performance. The P1 is essentially a better version of the Intel 600p QLC. Some seem to run away fast when they hear those three letters, but my thinking is, for a gaming workload it'll be primarily read only. They're perfectly fine in that area. I wanted an NVMe one for increased bandwidth, looking forwards if more games might make use of RTX IO or similar. This might not be PCIe 4.0, but I'm not paying for a 4.0 SSD. The premium isn't worth it to me. In time, it'll be standard and we'll also get faster read speeds at a lower price. So for now, a 3.0 drive will still give a good increase over SATA that I've tended to use regardless. The 2nd SATA drive I didn't intend to buy but it was really cheap (even lower than a BX500) on Prime Day so I snapped it up. I think it'll help anyway as I'll likely want to make game recordings, and the NVMe is overkill for that. Also it can be a place to store older games that wont benefit from faster transfers.

 

The case housed the previously mentioned Broadwell system, so moving the mobo into it meant I don't need to move the PSU. I like the case anyway, with better airflow than newer ones.

 

No comment on the 1060, that's just to allow me to get the software set up ready. I'm still targeting a 3080 10GB as the ideal GPU in the short term. I'm thinking I would take a 3070 if that is more available, but then I'd skip the 3080 10GB and only replace when the 3080 20GB happens. Since I have multiple gaming systems, I can move GPUs around as best suits the needs at the time.

 

If AMD do eventually announce lower Zen 3 CPU offerings, and if my B450 mobo will get the bios update to allow one to be used, then that could still be a path for the future. Just one lacking PCIe 4.0.

[A1200]

Nice job!

[Helpful Tech Witch]

For the love of god get a bigger motherboard. The mini-itx and the micro-atx case is painful.

[porina]

57 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

For the love of god get a bigger motherboard. The mini-itx and the micro-atx case is painful.

It's a full ATX case I think... and nope, a new mobo is more cost.

 

 

Anyway, I finally got some stuff installed. Seems ok apart from the CPU fan being noisy under load. First I tried setting the fan profile to "silent" in bios, which reduced it a bit but not enough. I did find a Noctua low noise adapter cable and put it on the cooler, and now it is silent. Surprising how much a few rpm makes. 1100 good, 1200 bad. I should do something about cable management at some point. Also I should dig out another PCIe power cable ready for the 3080, since I only have one cable in there at the moment.

[GuacInWhereSunDontShine]

Good on you! Planning to use my 3700X for years on end. Great CPU, should last a while

[porina]

I've hit a possible hurdle and debating how to proceed.

 

At the thread I'll link at the bottom of the thread, I describe a Prime95-like check for computational accuracy. In other words, stability. The 3700X system build as described above was giving detectable calculation errors. As the CPU was running stock, and the ram is at a pretty safe speed, I didn't think there would be much to go wrong. Temps were "fine". I'm using a big PSU. That's not to rule out any of these components could be operating incorrectly, but it seemed unlikely.

 

I tried to "fix" it using tricks others with Zen 2 CPUs have reported success with. Specifically, reducing the power limit. In short, it made it much worse for my system. Now not only was I getting the new error check, I was also getting "round off errors", which should be familiar to Prime95 users. This is a bigger order of error. I even had a BSOD, and another time an unattended restart. And no, it wasn't Windows Update.

 

I was about ready to kick the system and break my foot in the process, but I left it a while and now am debating how much effort do I want to put into this. I've removed the power limits so it is back to stock. The only BIOS setting I've changed from stock is turning off Spread Spectrum, which in theory could reduce stability when enabled. I'm not going to run more of that workload though it, but will start lower down. I installed the latest version of Aida64, and it did 1h45m of CPU+cache stress no errors. I'm now running FPU+cache which has done 12 minutes at the time of typing. I've got about another hour or so before I start to move in the direction of bed, at which point I might turn on CPU, FPU, cache, ram, and leave that running overnight.

 

Is it a case that Prime95-like loads are still a stress too far? One theory from another forum was that my mobo could be overheating, but it seems counter-intuitive that the problem gets much worse if I limit the CPU power. It did make me think, where does the responsibility lie when it comes to deciding what voltage is fed to the CPU? Could my mobo be under-volting when running CPU at lower power limit? I don't know if there is a voltage offset, but I'm wondering if dialing in a slight positive offset might help.

 

I've run some graphical loads, but given the GPU I have in there is so weak, it will be the limit and not the CPU, so I'm not sure that in itself is a good test for stability.

 

Given I want to use this system for gaming, I do want to know it is stable, but at the same time, it doesn't need to be Prime95 stable. However that point still remains a concern.

 

 

 

[porina]

As a quick follow up to the above, I ran aida64 with cpu. fpu, cache, mem selected overnight (over 10 hours) and that was fine. Do I just take it that prime95 is an outlier in stability?  I did do a general search, and found multiple posts about similar. It seems that power delivery might not be reacting fast enough to the surge in power demand from such use cases, although I was unable to locate if there was any official resolution to this. I also wonder how much of the "blame" goes to the CPU or motherboard. I had used the 3700X in an x370 board which I no longer have, and that was prime95 stable. So, in my case at least, I'm more inclined to think the power delivery of the current mobo isn't top tier.

 

It has still shaken my confidence in the system though, that I'm not motivated to continue the software setup process. I think my next best option is to run more CPU heavy workloads for confidence that it wont crack under gaming.