Transcription
There are three main things that I use my PC for: gaming, video editing, and 3D modeling/rendering.
Those first two, my maxed-out mini PCs, have always handled really well. Like, the best gaming CPUs are only eight cores and under 100 W. And the fastest GPUs can actually fit and be cooled in a lot of these really small cases with a little bit of extra work. Video editing as well. I mean, I use DaVinci Resolve, which is super heavy mainly on the GPU. So, my current rig, which has a 9800 X3D and a 5090, it's pretty much maxing out my workflow, except for 3D rendering.
It's something I'm doing a lot more of lately and something I really enjoy. The latest renders I did for the Zero Mouse, for example, were really taxing on my system and I did find myself compromising here and there. I wouldn't mind having a bit more horsepower for that area of my workflow. I also just honestly have been itching to build a super overkill midtower PC because I feel like it's been actually forever since I've done that. So, perfect timing. Some new parts came out and I built this. It's the most power-hungry, most expensive PC that I've ever built and hopefully the fastest as well.
The CPU that I'm throwing in this overkill midtower build is the new Threadripper 9980X from AMD. It has 64 cores, 128 threads, and it's running on their latest Zen 5 architecture. Think of it as four 9950Xs fused together. You get four times the cores, four times the L3 cache, and it also has quad-channel memory support as well. I'm not going to lie, the price of this CPU alone, you could build a couple really high-end complete PC builds. So, yeah, it's not cheap. But also, is it justified for certain workflows where you can see a huge boost in productivity and the chip ends up paying for itself really quickly? Yeah, I think so.
Although this isn't a gaming chip, that is something that I'm interested to test out as well because it is something I do a lot of on my main system. The peak boost clock is listed at 5.4 GHz, which doesn't sound too bad, but it also supports overclocking, so I'm thinking we might be able to squeeze a bit more out of it. The board that we're using is the TRX50 Arrow from Gigabyte. I've always really enjoyed how these Arrow boards look. It's just a super clean white and silver aesthetic, and the slot spacing in particular here is perfect for what I have planned. As much as I love my mini PCs and dense ITX boards, there is just something really cool about a proper fully loaded EATX board housing a massive CPU.
Now, if this box of RAM looks slightly bigger than usual, you'd be correct. We've got 128 GB of DDR5 going in this thing clocked at 6400 MHz. Threadripper 9000 actually comes with a faster memory controller this time around. So, these 6400 DIMs are supported out of the box, no problem. In true workstation fashion as well, I mean, no heat spreaders, no RGB, just the way I like it. And then we also have a bunch of storage that I'll be throwing in here as well. 8 terabytes of Samsung 990 Pro. If I don't end up needing the system, these won't stay in here, but I'm personally feeling optimistic. 8 terabytes is usually a good amount for my daily rigs.
Next up, we've got the case. And I'm not going to lie, this was a kind of a tough choice because there aren't that many midtower cases out there that get me really excited to build in. But I saw the new Evolve S2 from Phanteks come out recently and yeah, it's not bad. Very clean, not too oversized for a midtower. You've got this full glass enclosure with this kind of unique bottom-to-top airflow design. Looks pretty neat and actually quite different from everything else out there.
When I went to install the motherboard though, I realized I had made a huge mistake. The motherboard actually doesn't fit. This case doesn't technically support EATX motherboards. There's this part of the bottom shroud which just prevents the board from meeting the standoffs. To be honest, I think this is a huge oversight from Phanteks. I mean, this case is more than big enough, and I've built in plenty of midtowers that support these larger EATX boards. I have a couple other cases that I could use, but none as unique and clean as this one, and I've already built in them. So, I decided to bust out the Dremel and try buffing down that part of the shroud. Although it looks like metal, it is actually just plastic. And it seemed to be working. Luckily, it was actually enough to get the board fully installed and was definitely worth buffing out. Can't really see it too much. And things here were starting to look pretty clean.
For the CPU cooler, I'm using this dedicated Threadripper cooler from Silverstone. It's a 360 mil liquid cooler with a huge cold plate for the massive heat spreaders that you'll get on these Threadripper CPUs. Regular liquid coolers only cover a portion of these CPUs because they're so massive. So something like this, we're going to be extracting as much heat as we can from this chip. Then lastly, the GPUs where we have two RTX 5090s. I've yet to actually run and test out a dual GPU system, believe it or not. So, I'm really curious to see what the benefits will be. Aside from testing the new Threadripper 9980X, this is also what I'm really looking forward to. Again, if there's not much benefit at all, it's back to my dense little mini PC. But, if there's a big enough difference, I'm thinking it's time to upsize. I mean, two has to be better than one, right?
Each 5090 here gets a full-speed PCI Express 5.0 x16 connection and a 600 W cable. And having them stacked in the system like this, I think it just looks so sick. For me, I think I've realized it's not actually so much about the form factor of these mini PCs that I've enjoyed so much. It's actually the density and the way everything fits together so efficiently. Although this is over five times the size, I have to admit it does kind of satisfy that same itch. Still looks pretty neat, pretty clean, and really overkill. But how much faster is it?
All right, this thing is all set up, and it is very interesting. First thing I did was actually overclock the CPU. I know overclocking 64 cores sounds absolutely insane. And when you see the stock power consumption at 350 W, it's kind of like mind-bending. Like, how does a CPU pull 350 W? But it's actually a big beefy chip. And when you look at the temperatures, there is so much thermal overhead to take advantage of there. I mean, if you want to get the most out of the chip, you can actually do quite a bit with overclocking. What does that mean, though, in terms of performance? Well, in Cinebench, the rendering scores for multi-threaded CPU are 5 1/2 times faster than my mini PC. I know there's a lot more hardware here, and there's like eight times the CPU cores, but still, it's kind of mind-bending when you see scores like that. It is also good to see the single-threaded scores still keeping up despite being a much larger, much more complex CPU.
Now, I'm not using Cinema 4D or Redshift for rendering. I'm using mainly Blender. And the performance there, too, is pretty shocking. I mean, maybe it's not shocking given how much hardware this thing is packing, but man, I've just never seen my own renders run this fast on any PC. Like the speed that I can organize the lighting and the scene and the animations. It's just so much smoother with that extra GPU and I guess eight times the CPU cores. Rendering one of these single frames at 4K ends up being over twice as fast as my mini PC. That's actually a really noticeable difference when it comes to how fast you can work. Like gains of 30 to 40% are nice when you upgrade your GPU. Maybe you go from 8 cores to 16 cores and get a nice little bump there. This is like a complete night and day difference, easily. Over 2x the speed means you can render at higher resolutions, use way less denoising, use higher resolution models. Yeah, the hardware is expensive. It's a no-brainer there, but I guess this is the first time that I've taken something like this for a test drive and really seen what it can do.
It is also the first time that I've seen power consumption this high at the wall. Just the PC alone in Blender with everything at full tilt can pull over 2,000 watts. I do have a beefy enough power supply in this thing which is handling it no problem. But yeah, 2,000 W, man. That's getting close to maxing out your typical electrical circuits, at least here in Australia. I quickly tested rendering in Fusion 360 as well, which is my main 3D modeling software. Since this is CPU only though, it's very slow on most systems and I usually avoid it. But here, I mean, it's almost rendering in real time. Like, it's just absolutely shredding through these scenes. So, yeah, I guess this is something I might use a bit more of now.
Now, as for video editing, I wasn't expecting many gains here at all, especially when it came to export speeds. And I was right. You know, there's a little bit of time saved, which might be handy for those larger exports, but yeah, not a real game-changer. Usually, if I have any hiccups on my video editing timeline when it comes to like, you know, clips not playing back smoothly and stuff like that, it's with heavily denoised footage. So, sometimes the footage in those really dark areas can get a little bit grainy. You chuck on what's called a denoiser and it smooths everything out. On this system, I can use as much denoising as I want. I mean, I can just crank everything to like 100 and it still plays back smoothly, 30 frames per second. And that's something that I've never seen before on any system.
Now, when it comes to gaming, unfortunately, running two 5090s is not going to net you any more frame rate than just running one in your system. You know, unfortunately, SLI hasn't been a thing for a while now. It would be really cool if it was and I could get like a 50% bump at least in a lot of games, but yeah, that hasn't been a thing for a while. So, you know, expect basically just typical 5090 performance for the system. The main thing that I was really interested to test out was the Threadripper. You know, how much slower is that going to be versus my 9800X3D? I didn't do like a whole bunch of testing here, just a little sample to see kind of what we're looking at. And yeah, I think if I'm really loading up those 4K graphics and being mostly GPU bound, I'm not really going to see too much of a difference. I did also find that disabling all of the cores except 8 did help improve performance quite a bit.
The deal-breaker though was going to be Overwatch 2 at 1080p and 1440p. That is something that I played a lot of and especially on a high refresh rate monitor. If Threadripper couldn't run this thing nicely, then it was pretty much going to be over. Again, I did have to disable like 56 cores to get this running nicely. And there are some more frequent dips than what I see on my 9800X3D, but still mainly above that 500 FPS mark. Pretty decent 1% lows. And more importantly, the PC latency was ridiculously low around that 3 to 5 millisecond mark, which is pretty much what I was getting on my mini PC. So, I'm glad it's the same here, too.
There is something that I do need to fix, though, on this build before I swap over to it as my main system, and that is the cooling for this top GPU. Now, the cooling for this bottom card is actually really, really good. It's getting all of this fresh air coming from underneath, and I've actually been using this bottom one as my primary GPU. I know it kind of looks unintuitive, but yeah, that is like the primary display output right there. So, gaming card temperatures are absolutely fine. But then multi-GPU workloads, this card gets all the hot air from this card. It's taking it in. And the temperatures are just absolutely awful. Like way, way worse than I was expecting. 87, 88° C even after just rendering for like a few minutes.
Now, as much as I love the Founders Edition air-cooled GPUs, I think liquid cooling has to be the thing that I do next for this system. I mean, first and foremost, it is a workstation, and workstations have to be like bulletproof. Like, I'm going to be rendering on this thing overnight, 8+ hours, and I don't even want to think twice about this thing hitting temperature limits. So, yeah, I mean, liquid cooling, a Threadripper, and two 5090s is something that I've never done before. Stay tuned because this is going to be absolutely insane.