Build this RX 6900 XT Gaming PC for the cost of an RTX 3090

what's up guys welcome to paul's hardware today i'm going to be building this epic gaming pc featuring some of the fastest hardware currently available like the ryzen 959 50x 16 core processor and the radeon rx 6900xt in the red devil variant by power color now full disclosure right from the get go amd offered to sponsor this video and provide the hardware for this build they said i could also give it away to you guys afterwards so that's great and they have a special message for those of you who are actually in the market for a high-end graphics card right now so before i put this build together i wanted to talk quickly about pricing because that has been a sticking point for a lot of people when trying to build a gaming pc so if you've just been watching the market for the past year and you're finally at the point where you've saved up some money you're ready to drop some cash leading right into the holiday season and you've got your site set on a high-end build then you might be considering something similar to what i've assembled here and i'm just using pc part picker to take a look at the list and the prices we have a 5950x which is finally widely available the 16 core 32 thread mainstream cpu from amd and it's dropped even below its msrp of 750 bucks available for 730 right now at newegg and then we have the rest of our components i'm going to go over them individually in just a moment but you can take a first quick look at them here please note for some of the fractal parts they're not quite available yet so i've had to input the price here but it should be at least in the ballpark of what we're expecting same goes for the g skill memory kit but our price total is already 2 360 dollars and you might have noticed i did not add one key thing the video card if you're building a system like this in the three to four thousand dollar range then you basically have two options when it comes to the fastest graphics cards that are currently available and that would be the rtx 3090 from nvidia so let's take a quick look at what those are currently selling for the least expensive listing is this msi variant which is three thousand dollars and even if i click on the three thousand dollar listing at amazon it's not even directly available from amazon so you're buying it from a third-party seller which is sometimes a little sketchy so it should be noted that pc part picker is not an exhaustive listing but it is pretty good that uh pulling from a bunch of different retailers and showing current available prices i literally went down this entire list of rtx 3090s that are currently supposedly in stock and all of them are somewhat in stock at amazon but they're all in the three to four thousand dollar price range and you can't even buy them directly from amazon you have to buy them from these third-party sellers like deal targets or st cool line or you neon group that you've probably never heard of before so let's take a look at the other fastest graphics card currently available which is the 6900xt and the cool thing about the 6900xt is that the highest end variants which are typically labeled as ultimate or some variety thereof use the navi 21xtxh gpu die and that can hit really really high clock speeds both out of the box if you're getting one of these really nicely designed variants like the power color red devil or for extreme overclocking where these cards have been setting records going back for the past several months and perhaps the nicest thing if you've been on the hunt for a graphics card for a really long time is these are actually in stock there's a handful available between 1700 and 1800 and although this least expensive sapphire nitro plus variant is out of stock currently at newegg the next step up the asrock oc formula is available for 1700 and do note that you get far cry 6 and resident evil 8 with the purchase right now and that's not a bad add-on and here we have our power color red devil radeon rx 6900xt available in stock eighteen hundred dollars add to cart ships from and sold by amazon and you might look at this and say paul that's eighteen hundred dollars that's still a lot of money i completely agree with you and that's why i'm giving this system away too for those of you who can't currently afford something like this but for those of you who can it is a much more compelling price than the three to four grand that you currently have to pay for an rtx 3090. even if you were to compare it to the next step down from nvidia the rtx 3080 ti those are currently starting for 1 892 and then they go up to 2 grand and more and even here you're once again going to have to deal with third-party sellers on amazon whether you're talking about this evga variant or the msi that said we're going to add the red devil ultimate to our build here and now we have the full list here so we are building a system that retails for 4 160 today that's pretty high end but i'm really excited to get it all put together okay let's get back to our traditional parts run down because this is this is such a nice pile of parts we have here big thank you to fractal they jumped in a little bit after the build was planned and they added the torrent computer case which has been just so well received across the board they had a slight issue with the fan controller on this so they stopped sales of it but they are fixing that issue and these cases should be back on the market really soon just check any of the initial reviews on this case it's really well designed and it has excellent excellent airflow speaking of airflow fractal sent an entire set of their rgb fans their prisma rgb fans and 140 millimeter variants 120 millimeter variants and these crazy big 180 millimeter designs which can fit two at the front of the torrent case so even though we got the gray variant of this case which i think has a really nice finish we are going to be maximizing the rgb via all of those fans we also have the lumen s36 cooler which is a 360 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler from fractal which has a nice clean design here on the cpu pump block i will say and then we also have the ion 2 plus platinum 860 watt power supply which should be more than enough wattage for our needs this is the implus 2 variant which has a slightly different design for some of the aesthetics all around but a really nice solid and fully modular power supply our core amd components are going to be of course the ryzen 9 5950x basically the fastest desktop processor that you can currently get without dipping into the high-end desktop platform where amd has their threadripper series of course but not talking about that today pcie 4.0 support 16 cores and 32 threads this is absolutely a beast and i feel like it has an excellent combo factor the ryzen and radeon grouping to go along with our power color radeon rx 6900 xt graphics card power color has consistently made some of the best designed third-party models of amd radeon graphics cards and they have continued it with their red devil design for the 6000 series and again note that ultimate radeon rx 6900xc that means it's the xtxh variant which is going to run at higher clock speeds so i'm really excited to see what this card can do when i do the follow-up video which is going to also include the giveaway and some testing on this system our motherboard is right here this is the x570s aorus master from gigabytes and the nice thing about this is the new s variant of the x570 chipset doesn't require active cooling gigabyte already had a passively cooled variant of the x570 motherboards on their aorus lineup but that was like their highest end board so it's really nice to have the s variant because just removes one more cooling fan from your system that might make a little bit of noise from time to time and beyond that this board is absolutely packed with features it's got all the bells and whistles that you could possibly want for a high-end build like we're putting together today rounding things out we got some memory and some storage uh let's start with the storage the sabrint rocket four plus this is the newer variant again they had a rocket 4 before now they have the plus and this is a 2 terabyte nvme ssd it's pcie gen 4. the read and write speeds on this thing are absolutely absurd 7 100 megabytes per second 7.1 gigabytes per second reads and 6600 megabytes per second writes that's that's crazy that's actual pcie gen4 bandwidth needed in order to support that level of performance from this drive and two terabytes is a good capacity and then we've got the trident z royal elite kit of memory right here this is g skill's newer design which has rgb of course and i'm gonna call it tessellation as well on the outside and it's very shiny and flashy i prefer the silver finish on these a little bit more so than the gold but this is ddr4 3600 cast latency 16 kit and that pretty much rounds out the vital components oh we do have a couple more tucked in here these were a little bit of a late addition but we wanted to finish things off with some cable extensions so everything looks really clean and nice for whoever wins this system so these are some gray cable extensions and we got two kits because we needed enough to support all the pci express extension cables and the cpu supplemental power well that was a fair amount of exposition but now you guys are fully appraised of all the details and nuances of this build and i have my trusty screwdriver so let's get started [Music] all right let's get a closer look at this fractal torrent case it did get a little bit banged up in shipping but that appears to just be the box and we had like the perfect timing for the final piece to arrive for uh this build which is this replacement kit so this is the fan hub that fractal's been shipping out to people who bought the case when it first launched it was available for a very short period of time when the reviews went up and then fractal had some really small amount i think like four people who said that they had an issue with the fan hub rattle said you know what we want to nip this in the bud so they're shipping these to people who already got the case or offering refunds if people would prefer that option so we will be swapping that in once we have access to the fan hub that's already in there and in the time when not every manufacturer is behaving uh in a way that we would say is the best in terms of issues like that popping up it's nice to see fractal doing the right thing from the get-go and making sure that they're shipping a product that is good and doesn't have any issues with it and as i already mentioned at the beginning of this video there are plenty of reviews on this case demonstrating its cooling performance as well as just other other nice features i suppose i have this completely upside down so let's flip it over and here we have the reveal and it's backwards oops love that right off the bat i really like how easy it is to access the internals on this case just two thumb screws at the back to remove that top panel and then the side panels they just pop out via these clips on the top and you can remove them both tempered glass on either side and right now i got to figure out what our configuration is going to be for our all-in-one liquid cooler because we have a 360 rad but you might notice this case has a top mounted power supply there's the little dock for it right there fractal's bringing that back and it actually is a pretty good implementation of it but it does mean we can't have a long radiator across the top the case comes with three 140s mounted in the bottom and two 180s mounted as intakes up there in the front my plan was to swap all those with rgb variants however uh we got to figure out where our 360 rad will go so of course we could do the 360 across the bottom like that but everyone would be like oh my gosh paul what a horrible idea because then your cpu block is going to be up there and the pump's going to die but wait the pump in this aio is down in the radiator right there so the pump would actually still be at the lowest point if it was installed across the bottom but i still don't really want to put it here because i'd either have to have these tubes going up and around the graphics card which i just i don't feel like is a good idea or i'd need to put them down in this end in which case the tubing might have to stretch quite a bit to get over to the cpu if it would fit at all so i think the radiator is going to need to go in the front which means i'm going to need to remove the 180s and i'm not going to be able to use 180s up there however i can put the 180s in the bottom three 140s or two 180s in the bottom is the biggest question i have right now and i think i'm going to need to stick with the tubing at the top here in order to reach over to the cpu with hopefully a little bit of aesthetically pleasing slack on those tubes that said here's a quick look at accessories screws and all the usual accessories there here's my fan replacement kit which i'll swap it in just a moment and then i do have these fan brackets and these are actually for the front right there because right now it's set up with brackets in the 180 position but these you swap in if you want to mount 120s or 140s up there so i think we should start by getting the case set up properly swapping in the fan hub and getting the fan situation sorted out here's a quick side by side of the old and new fan hub the new one is on the bottom and it is labeled v 1.1 and it looks like they added some some grounding so that's good to have these metal contact points here will help ground the hub to the case [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] all right at this point i have all the fans installed swapped for rgb models and we went with the 360 red up here in the front as previously planned now this doesn't have a removable bracket as is often convenient for installing radiators they just have these two side brackets but i feel like it's a good solution because it allows them to be flexible it comes pre-installed with the 180s here in the front and without the brackets that allows plenty of ventilation but then with the brackets you can move them in closer or a little bit further away if you're going with 120s or 140s there so it is convenient that our 360 rad is already installed and looks like i've got plenty of length on the tubing to get over there to where the cpu block is going to be and again with the pump integrated into the radiator here there's still plenty of room up above so you shouldn't have any issues with it pulling in air bubbles or anything like that and try to do some early cable management riding cables back and through where they'll be most discreet doing a few tie-downs so far and as you can see i went with the dual 180s down in the bottom just because these fans are so cool they're so beefy and thick and i wanted to make sure i used them so those are going to be providing a ton of airflow as intake from the bottom got an exhaust installed on the back and the 140 there as well so this is definitely going to be a positive pressure oriented case with lots of intakes going on but i just appreciate a lot of the attention to detail that fractals made here for instance uh when you're riding the cable for the pump over they did a little notch in the side of the radiator so you could feed the cable through and just make it a little bit more clean but i think that's all the case setups that we can manage for right now let's get the motherboard set up and then we can install everything into the case [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] and just like that we have almost everything installed and it's it's looking like the build's like ready to go i should be able to just pop in the graphics card like that and we can give it a test boot but uh there is one small issue that still needs to be addressed doesn't that look lovely so cable management is its own subtle art and i'm gonna do my best to just plug in the things that are important so we got the power supply plugs coming down here the extensions already plugged into the motherboard we'll help out with some of those i have a lot of rgb leds fortunately all this fractal gear just uses the standard three pin addressable rgb header connectors and all of the fans are daisy chained on there i haven't checked this motherboard but a typical motherboard rgb led header the addressable ones can handle something like 400 to 600 leds so i should be able to daisy chain these all together off of one or possibly two of the motherboard rgb headers then i have some smaller power cables that uh fortunately i took the time to label like this three pin fan header which is actually for the pump i want to plug that directly into the motherboard and then the rest of the fan headers i'm going to route to our newly installed and upgraded fan hub that said this is going to be a lot of work tying this all in so uh give me a few minutes here and i'll see what i can do [Music] so even though you don't have like a power supply basement in this case there's a pretty good amount of space behind the motherboard tray between the motherboard tray and the tempered glass side panel it's wide enough that you can fit a couple 3.5 inch drives back here and then there's four 2.5 inch drive mounts as well fortunately we're not using any of those so i've been able to use like one of the 3.5 inch bays to wrap up a lot of the rgb led cables because there's a decent amount of that overall i would give my cable management today i don't know b maybe a b minus depending on how critical you're being it could definitely be a little bit prettier but i do believe everything is plugged in properly and all we have left is to feed down three of our pci express graphics connectors plug in our cable extensions here and now i can feed these through to get them in the right position to install our graphics card we're almost done [Music] so [Music] so i might have just discovered a major oversight on my part as i've gone through this build did you guys spot it as i was moving along don't worry we'll come back to it in just a second for now i've got the cable managements all managed for the most part i've got the graphics card installed and i've got my uh extensions trained reasonably well they're being a little bit finicky and i kind of wish these cable extensions had one more set of combs on there so i could train them back a little bit further but i think after a day or two they might be a little bit more malleable and i can make them look a little bit prettier but it's not too bad for now for now what i really want to do is switch on the power switch and i see some power going to some things so that's good and press the uh the old power button there to power the thing on because uh you guys might have also noticed that i skipped over the outside of the box build which is something that i often do but in this case i was like it's new hardware what could go wrong it seems like it's in pretty decent shape so i'm happy to say it seems like it's powering on for the time being i'm so torn right now because we're so close to being finished and yet also so far so if you guys didn't notice my big fail was not noticing that the radiator should have been on the inside of these brackets with the fans mounted to the front of the radiator there's not enough space for this front panel to actually snap into place there's not enough clearance back there even after i removed the dust filter that's installed there by default so what i need to do before this video ends is swap that radiator to the other side of that bracket so the fans can have clearance with the front panel and then also get windows installed so i can install some rgb software so we can get the lighting aligned a little bit better and then i think we can finish this video so uh why don't we jump ahead to when i've done that right now and just as promised i'm back system's put together and fixed up just right but how did i do it so the first step was to fix my somewhat embarrassing mistake of mounting the fans and the radiator improperly on those two front brackets fortunately i was able to unmount that whole thing with just four screws and i didn't have to undo too much of my cable management i only had to snip a couple zip ties that i put down there when i first installed the fans and then i was able to remove each bracket individually and shift it forward to be in between the radiator and the fans instead of mounted to this side of the radiator and by doing one side of that and then the other i was able to keep that whole unit kind of together i had to do a little bit of finagling to shift the brackets up so it would be mounted in the right position but the good news is i didn't have to undo any of the major cable management i did in the back of the case so that was nice beyond that i had a few other little things to take care of and i want to show you those so let me pop off the side panel real quick and get my other camera so i took another swing at these cable extensions and while the 24 pin is actually looking quite nice these three eight pin ones for the graphics cards were not and while the quality on these cable extensions is pretty nice they are actually made with a curve in mind and it's unfortunately curved the wrong way for my setup if my plugs here on top were flipped it would naturally curve the right direction but what i actually ended up doing was grabbing some cable combs that i had from a different power supply and adding them in right here and these actually kind of grip the cables so that allowed me to train them in such a way that at least kept the front part of it here looking reasonably aesthetically pleasing it would be really nice if they included more of these built-in cable combs but it only comes with two but by adding the third one on there and doing a little zip tie action down there and just training them up as much as i can i think i've got it to a reasonable configuration i also decided to add the gpu support bracket and i went with the one that came with the fractal torrent case because it's pretty low profile and it blends in and it's pretty flexible it's tucked back there at the corner of the graphics card the fans aren't spinning right now because the graphics card's not hot enough and what i ended up with was a kind of an ugly little section right there at the corner of this graphics card with the untrained parts of the cables and that bracket but fortunately from most angles that you're gonna be viewing this system at you're not gonna see that part at all so i think it's okay lastly i wanted to get the rgb set up so i actually ended up using two pieces of software for that we have the rgb fusion 2.0 software and that's what comes with the gigabyte motherboard it's like okay software it's not that great it can't really do much with the addressable feature but at least if you have everything connected to the three pin addressable headers on the motherboard which i was able to do because the power color red devil 6900xt does have an rgb addressable header on it and i plug the cable in right there it's not in the best spot but i was able to kind of tuck it back there and it has a daisy chain on it so i ran it down to this bottom plug and integrated it there and then i was able to get the devil zone red devil software and it has a few different color options too but you just need to select synchronize with motherboard and that allowed me to get all the rgb lights synced and i found that the most appealing color configuration was either just a static color or the basic color shift where it's kind of taking all the lights and going from one color to the next because like i said this rgb fusion software is functional enough but it doesn't really do anything with the addressable rgb lights it just you know it just allows them to function with that sorted though i deemed the build to be complete so i was able to do the final build things peeling the protective plastic off the tempered glass is an important ritual for any pc build of course but then i was able to get a look at the finished build so i think this build turned out beautifully and i think it has a really nice balance between aesthetics and functionality because it's going to have a ton of air flow especially with these two massive 180 millimeter intake fans at the bottom and just a really nice hardware configuration i was able to plug in the xmp values for our ddr4 3600 memory kit from g-skill and pairing that with the 5950x and the rx 6900 xt red devil from power color just means this is going to be a beastly gaming system speaking of which i will be doing a follow-up video in about a week's time where i'll be demonstrating some of the capabilities of this system and i will also be kicking off the giveaway at that point too so it's not ready quite yet so don't be looking for a giveaway entry down in the description that will kick off next week along with the testing video for this build so i need to say a huge huge thank you to amd for sponsoring this video sponsoring this build and giving me the opportunity to give away a system like this to my lucky viewers at home big thank you to fractal as well for providing the torrent case the fans the cpu cooler and the power supply guys that's gonna wrap it up for this video if you enjoyed it please hit the thumbs up button links to all the parts i used are down in the video's description as well as a link to my store at paul's hardware dot net where you can help support my channel by buying yourself some merch t-shirts mugs pint glasses that sort of thing it's all really nice thanks again for watching this video you guys and we'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 371,902

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, RX 6900 XT, 6900XT, powercolor, red devil ultimate, 6900 XT Ultimate, asrock, sapphire, rtx 3090 vs RX 6900 XT, rtx3090 vs 6900xt, $4000 gaming pc, $4000 PC build, best gaming pc, fastest gaming PC, 5950X

Id: gIk-2ERcy5A

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021