Did we screw up?? Fixing and TESTING a $10,000 Gaming/Editing PC...

first video of 2024! hello everyone, welcome  back, we are going to be following up on Joe's threadRipper build this is about a $10,000  total system that we assembled back in December, (the cost is) due largely in part to  the fact that it has a 32 TB SSD configuration, with 8 4TB m.2 nvme ssds provided by Lexar - so  let's get the initial report filed right away, does it work? yes totally works. I have updated  the BIOS, all the m.2 nvme ssds are recognized, however there were a few new bits o

f information  that have come to light that we should address. excellent today's video is brought to you by  the Paul's Hardware store on Paulshardware.net the only official source for Paul's Hardware  merchandise. tantalizing t-shirts brilliant beer sets high quality hoodies and more all featuring  The Classic thumb screw for tasteful and refined viewers or the 8bit thumb screw for tasteful and  refine viewers who hate curbs new designs are added sporadically and at random so head over to  Paul

s hardware. net and get get some of that sweet sweet merch right now or not right now after you  watch the video either way definitely check out the two-part build video if you haven't already  the Assembly of this system was actually a lot of fun we did have to deal with some quirks and  eccentricities because it's a high-end desktop PC with a lot more Hardware in it than we typically  do with a gaming PC we decided to use this case pretty early on because it's a new case from lean  Lee the 01

Vision PC Master race Edition and that presented some air flow challenges we wanted to  use an air cooler for the CPU because this is a production machine and we don't want to have to  deal with any downtime in case a pump failure happens or something like that but we also wanted  the system to be very visually appealing as well as very powerful which is why we have added  extra RGB stuff which isn't really necessary from a functional standpoint but it does look  quite pretty and that's where on

e of the first controversial decisions came into play we have  intake at the bottom we also have an exhaust at the back and we went with two intakes for the  GPU cooler and an exhaust at the top and we're going to need to provide a little bit of separate  spiration behind the motherboard tray for that which we will be doing today and who knows maybe  that was a horrible idea but we'll find out with some testing also because the motherboard we  chose has sort of a unique slot layout for the PCI E

xpress expansion slots and also because  I was told by gigabyte that only the top slot would work with PCI Express bifurcation which is  needed in order to address all four of the m.2 nvme ssds in this adding card with full bandwidth  uh we thought we needed to install it in the top slot but if you guys watch wendle over on LEL  one text he did a review of this motherboard where he showed pretty clearly that PCI Express  bifurcation actually is enabled with all three slots you just need the upda

ted bios but it was  specifically the slot layout and the fact that we thought we couldn't install the GPU to the top  slot which is why we went with this graphics card which does include an all-in-one liquid cooler  which yes somewhat defeats my purpose of going with the not all-in-one liquid cooler for the CPU  but we didn't have much choice because we needed an RTX 490 that was three slots or Slimmer and  this is the only one I have that fits the bill other than my Founders Edition and I'm so

rry  Joe you can't have my Founders Edition 490 so lastly because my recap is getting a bit long-  winded we have a 4K capture card that we wanted to install in the lowest slot that was actually  still conflicting with this graphics card even though it is just slightly wider than two slots  so we used some risers to drop it down a little bit lower which means it's now partially blocking  one of the fans but don't worry for any of you guys who really really didn't like that we went  with that rou

te and thank you to all of you guys who were like that's awesome just make it janky  whatever works s but the first thing we're going to do today now that I know that the system works  is we're just going to shuffle some stuff around here to give you guys what is probably a much  more sensible layout we can move the GPU up to the top slot move the add-in card with the m.  tws to the second slot and that should give us plenty of access to put the 4K capture card in the  lowest slot so pretty stra

ightforward here we're going to swap seiz the graphics card and the  adding card and then we will be able to remove the risers from the uh 4K capture card bring  that up and install it directly into the third slot the real trick is can I can I move this  card without unplugging anything I think I can we can now get a proper look at our PCI  Express extension for this 4K capture card for the record this totally was functional it totally  worked it's just obviously not the ideal solution so we are

going to bypass it and all this was  was two 90° adapters that allowed us to install our 4K capture card down there so we're going to  reinstall it there but let's do the addin card first that seems a better hierarchy to me and  lastly the 4K 60 Pro right down here as God intended it also means that this bracket at the  bottom we will no longer need to pass through like HDMI cables so we can reinstall this there  now it goes big medium small and for anyone who was looking at again the part one

part two videos  thinking Paul what are you thinking what were you planning what did you have in mind this th this  is what I had in mind so I'm glad PCI bifurcation works on more than just the top slot so that we  could reconfigure these cards one other item to address before we run a few tests and that is this  area right here we have this fan which is acting as an exhaust pushing air out and the lower two  fans are pulling air in obviously we don't want to conflict in here air mixing between

just  be a bunch of like weird thermal issues going with the air mixing that way so we're going to do  very temporarily and we might be replacing this ideally in the future we our friend Brian BPS  Customs offered to use his 3D printing skills to make a bracket or something a little bit more  permanent but just for the sake of testing and to determine if this is even a good idea or if we  should switch some things around and definitely there's a very good case to be made for these  two fans on t

he GPU radiator to be exhausts so that the heat from the graphics card is being  immediately pushed out of the case instead of bringing more warm air into the case but at least  to test this initial configuration I'm going to be using this high-grade piece of foam and I'm going  to cut a little piece out of it here and I'm going to tape it in with some gaap tape and it's going  to be functional enough to direct that airf flow so that we don't get cross contamination between  these two sets of fa

ns I guess this is another Moment of Truth since we've reconfigured things  a little bit but hopefully everything continues to work fingers crossed day two the system is  reconfigured it looks much better this way and while some of us did appreciate the janky way  that we had initially set it up I think this is going to be better we're going to get into  some Benchmark testing next but before I do that let's talk about the bad stuff let's talk  about things that haven't gone according to plan ot

her than the fact that we had to do all that  messing around with the PCI Express bifurcation thing initial setup of the system actually went  pretty smoothly and all eight of those m.2 nvme drives that we installed were recognized even  the ones with the add-in card adapter PCI Express bifurcation does function on this motherboard and  it functioned with the top slot initially and now that we have updated the BIOS to version F2 which  is the most current one that's available it still works and

the bifurcation is set to automatic by  default with which our configuration was able to immediately recognize all the ssds and assign them  their proper lane configuration for PCI Express Gen 4 lanes for SSD however after I chose one  of those ssds to install Windows 2 and then did a bios updates the system was hanging upon Boot  and fortunately thanks to the LED readout code on the motherboard I was able to determine that it  was during the memory stage of post that it was hanging ryzen 7000 s

eries CPUs do have a bit of  a notorious reputation fit taking a long time to go through memory training that's supposed to be  improved or fixed or at least slightly better with the threader 7000 series CPUs and I did attempt  to wait I think as much as 20 or 30 minutes for it to get past that process it's possible that by  waiting even longer it would have gotten through that process and posted normally after that but  I bypassed it by removing all the memory sticks except one in the A1 slot t

hat allowed the system  to post again get into Windows refresh Windows updates then I replace the three memory sticks  and thankfully it booted just fine after that and now boot up times are actually quite Snappy  with this system the second issue is one that's not necessarily immediately correctable and you  can let us know in the comment section if this would be a huge issue for you or not I noticed  during setup that when I was going here to the power button we don't have a sleep option we ha

ve  restart and we have shut down often when you're doing initial setup and installing drivers you  need to have the motherboard chipset driver as well as a graphics card driver installed before  the Sleep option becomes available but the system is now fully set up with all the hardware  recognized and drivers installed and we still don't have that option I haven't had a chance to  follow up directly with gigabyte about this but I was able to dig into some recent posts about  this issue with peo

ple who have this specific setup and also check the gigabyte website for  this motherboard the TRX 50 aod this motherboard already has not one new revision but two we have  version 1.0 there is a version 1.1 and a version 1.2 now and with version 1.2 there's actually some  Hardware changes on the motherboard at least with the lowest PCI Express slot they've updated that  to be the ultra durable style slot now practically speaking if the system is otherwise fully  functional it's not really that

big of a deal to get a slightly newer revision of the motherboard  however according to the responses on the posts I was referencing gigabyte has told the customers  who have reached out to them that if they have a version 1.0 motherboard they're actually going to  need to R it and get a version 1.1 or 1.2 if they want sleep to work now that's a little odd to me  that's a little baffling it's also a little weird to me that although this platform has only been  out for about 2 or 3 months gigabyt

e already has not one but two revisions of this motherboard  that they have launched I could also complain about the fact that the chipset version the  gigabyte has on the downloads support page for this motherboard is still a version from March  2023 that didn't install correctly I actually used the Asus website to get the most recent uh version  of the chipset driver for this system but all that being said we're paying a little bit of an early  adopt tax by going with the original version of t

his motherboard and again sleep do you need to be  able to sleep does the computer need to be able to sleep Joe's sort of on the fence about this again  let us know in the comments section whether or not we need to fix that because apparently fixing  that would require swapping out the motherboard just basically rebuilding the system all right  enough about that let's talk about benchmarks because we do have a quick set of comparative  benchmarks to test this system versus not only the 79 70x be

nchmarks that I ran uh when the  platform initially launched but also to test this upgrade versus Joe's current system which is  a thread Ripper 2920x which is a 12 core second gen thread Ripper just just see how much faster it  is how much benefit is Jill going to get by using this system versus his old one so let's start off  with cinebench R23 running the multi-threaded test and here Joe's 7970 X in this system got 64,9  48 points on average across three tests and that actually falls right in

in line with my testing  of the 7970 X which was launch testing so Joe has a benefit of a slightly newer Aisa code and  also slightly lower ambient temperatures here in the garage because we're testing now and it's a  little bit cooler in the midst of winter so yes we can see that the 64 core 7980x which scored  95,000 in this test would be a bit faster but look at that jump from the 2920x which scored  12838 up to 64348 not a bad Improvement let's switch over to the single thread results here 

the 79 70x scored 1,919 ever so slightly lower than my numbers you'll find that my numbers were  pretty much comparable to Joe's across the board here the 79 70x with it slightly higher Peak clock  speed should provide slightly better single thread performance than the 7980x and then again a  huge jump over the 2920x almost doubling the single thread score uh up from 1,49 of course the  mainstream CPUs here the 795x 3D and 14900 K are going to outpace uh these CPUs in terms of single  thread pe

rformance and yes they are slightly better in terms of pure gaming performance as  well but this system is built for other things besides just gaming next let's look at CPU Mark  11 just another allaround CPU performance test the 2920x managed 25752 and pretty much times that  by four to get the current score for the 79 70x which almost almost hits 100,000 likewise with  CPR Mark we have a single thread Benchmark 2 the 2920x was at 2481 1 and again we have a massive  step up with the new 79 70x

going all the way up to 4,135 next we have blender 3.6.0 we're using  the blender open data test which runs three tests monster junk shop and classroom and here Joe's  old system the 2920x struggled heavily getting samples per minute scores between 48 and 97 in the  test for a total of 207 I have a feeling that the 2920x could probably perform better than that  but you have to also bear in mind that Joe is testing his existing system that has been in use  for a while so it's a bit more cluttered

up than a system that has a fresh install designs just for  benchmarking and that's why there's such a score disparity here with the new 79 70x hitting 1,55  again only surpassed by the 64 core version the 7980x which had a really impressive 1,671 point2  samples per minute next is handbrake we're just testing video transcoding going from 4K to a 1080  fast encode and here we have a frame rate that's how many frames per second the CPU can code as  well as the overall time that the test took to

complete Joe's old system took about 4 minutes  to complete this test 2336 seconds 35.8 frames per second and again we have a huge leap with  the new CPU about tripling the performance to 113.9 frames per second completing the test  in just over a minute 73.5 seconds so since we're purely testing transcoding here this will  apply not just to stuff like handbrake but also to other tasks like taking raw video that we're  going to be editing with and transcoding proxies but to round out these tests

we also ran 3D Mark  time spot extreme just to show a brief sampling of gaming performance I did not run this test in  my initial thread Ripper testing so we're just looking at Joe's old computer versus his new  new computer here and also bear in mind that Joe's old computer is running an RTX 380 currently  which is not going to have as much performance as the RTX 490 that's installed here still Joe's old  overall score was 7,771 new one is 12,864 Graphics scores jumping by about 4,000 uh 12,08

0 was the  result for the new system I will point out that the RTX 490 when paired with a gaming specific  CPU like the 79 x3d can actually go quite a bit higher than that in this test it can get up to  around 19,000 points more realistically though when Joe is going to be gaming like at 4K you're  not going to see a whole lot of difference between the mainstream gaming Focus CPUs and a monster  CPU like the 32 core 79 70x because it's the CPU score it really matters here and the CPU score  was

20363 again uh more than quadruple Joe's 2920 X's score 4,971 let's round things out with one  more chart to show you guys temperatures we had lots of people who were a little bit skeptical  of our choice to go with an air cooler for this system now don't get me wrong you guys water  cooling is good water cooling can often be awesome and yes water cooling is typically more  efficient at taking the heat generated by a CPU or a Gra graphics card and shuttling it off to  be distributed throughout y

our home via fans and radiators but that does not mean that air  coolers universally suck and that does not mean that an air cooler like a tower cooler like this  one designed by noctua which has a pretty good reputation for Designing air coolers suddenly  cannot keep up simply because of the existence of water coolers case in point look at this chart  right here these are the peak temperatures that I saw with my threader tests which use a 360 mm  all-in-one liquid cooler just to about one of th

e best ones that you can get right now versus  what we got with the noctua NH u14s tr5 sp6 are you noticing anything about these numbers are  you noticing that the air cooler actually gave us slightly better temperatures than the liquid  cooler is your mind blown again I need to point out that the ambient temperature in the garage is  a few degrees cooler than it was a few months ago when I originally tested thread Ripper so looking  at these values here you could probably call it a wash between

the two we are getting equivalent  performance performance to what we saw with a 360 mm all1 liquid cooler with this cooler from  noctua and we just went over all the Benchmark results too we're getting pretty much equivalent  performance with an air cooler so all the air cooler haters suck it or blow it or put it in a  push pull configuration what we're running here so if it wasn't obvious we've been working with a  little bit of a deadline this week in testing this system because we are about

to head to CES so I  wanted to say thank you than you guys for watching this first video of 2024 and to remind you that  next week we'll be packed with content coming to you from Las Vegas Nevada we'll be covering CES  visiting a lot of vendors that we work with there and we're going to be bringing this system along  to help render out the videos which would be very nice part of the reason we needed to get it set  up but also part of the reason why we haven't gone into a little bit further test

ing in this video  but we're very interested in your feedback if you guys would like to see more on this system it's  kind of a tossup we're not really sure at this point it could be just just fine as is or maybe  we want to swap out to a the newer revision of the motherboard maybe we want to do the additional  testing that I wanted to do which was swapping the directionality of some of those fans and doing  some CPU and GPU stress tests to see which would be ideal there we of course have no lim

it to  the number of RGB configurations that we could set up and then of course with all those uh 4 TB  nvme ssds we've just sort of done a basic setup with those we could test like setting up raid  configurations and maximum throughput and all sorts of things so if you guys have any feedback  for us on whe whether or not you would like to see a followup on this it probably wouldn't be  till later in January or February but leave those comments in the comment section below also if you  want to c

heck out the parts that are installed in this system those are listed down below and you  can also check out the build video if you want to see the Assembly of this beast but thank you so  much for watching this video on behalf of myself and Joe we have lots of exciting stuff coming  in 2024 so stick around subscribe if you're not already and check out my store at paul.net  where you can buy highquality merchandise as being demonstrated here the stuff that we're  wearing thanks for watching guys

we'll see you in the next one. thanks Paul... don't say thank  you it's all for you Joe. yeah so - thank you!