Cleanest Build Ever - But at What Cost? (ft RX 7900 GRE)

this is amd's radon RX 7900 gr and it actually launched last year in July 2023 only in China the card that is now available for a updated $550 MSRP in regions like the UK United States and elsewhere across the world is the same graphics card from last year so we already had a pretty good idea of its performance but we did get some updated reviews yesterday that compared it to updated graphics cards such as nvidia's new RTX 40 Super Series specifically the RTX 4070 super which has a 6 $0000 MSRP which is the closest competitor to the 7900 GRE at 550 I'm going to post a few full reviews in the video description if you want to check out some more details but to summarize the general feeling about the new 7900 GRE it's a little bit disappointing because it's 10% more than the RX 7800 XT and it's only about 5 to 7 or 8% faster depending on the games that are tested they also both have the same 16 gig vram buffer so there are no additional benefits there on on the Nvidia side you have the RTX 470 which should have the equivalent price to the 7900 GRE and the RTX 470 super which is a $600 MSRP but because it outperforms the 470 it's been more directly compared to the 7900 GRE 7900 GR in rasterization performance will be roughly equivalent to the 4070 super or perhaps 1 to 2% behind and while that might lead you to the conclusion that the 7900 GRE is just a 470 super for $50 less if you bring Ray tracing into the equation which lots more people are doing these days thanks to the fact that Ray tracing does look pretty nice in a lot of applications the 4070 super leaps ahead so to sum up this mini intro review the RX 7900 gr is not suddenly leaping onto the scene with the massive Improvement in price to Performance and suddenly blowing away all the other cards that it is compared to it's going to get you slightly less performance per dollar than the RX 7800 XT and it is definitely going going to be hard put to keep up with the RTX 470 super if Ray tracing is at all on your radar you know we got some more time today let's do a build excellent today's video is brought to you by the Paul's Hardware store on Paul's hardware. net the only official source for Paul's Hardware merchandise tantalizing t-shirts brilliant beer sets highquality hoodies and more all featuring The Classic thumb screw for tasteful and refined viewers or the 8bit thumb screw for tasteful and refined viewers who hate curvs new designs are added sporadically and at random so head over to Pauls hardware. net and get some of that sweet sweet merch right now or not right now after you watch the video either way I like to recommend sensible balanced Builds on my YouTube channel so if someone came up to me and said Paul I am pretty much set on the RX 7900 gr for my graphics card can you recommend the rest of the system I would recommend something along these lines a fulls siiz ATX case for around $50 to $70 maybe a few bucks more if you find one that really suits your tick case a power supply I would aim for a 750 W unit from a reputable manufacturer that's ideally 80 plus bronze or maybe even gold rated a motherboard we're building an am5 based system today there are plenty of b650 chipset am5 motherboards that you can find for around 150 to $180 ddr5 memory has come way down in price and you can get a 32 GB kit for around $100 these days even with decent speed ddr5 6000 or faster nvme SSD prices have come up used to be able to find decent ones for around $70 for a 2 TB stick now it's about 100 bucks for 2 TB stick but so it goes and for CPU the ryzen 77800 X 3D is highly recommended as pretty much one of if not the fastest CPU for a gaming system however that costs a few more bucks so you can easily get yourself by with a 7600 or 7600 X these will run you around $220 to $240 each and bear in mind that if you get the 7600 X you will need to add an aftermarket cooler as well for round around $35 or so so these parts or their rough equivalents would be my recommendation for a solid mid-range gaming PC right now in the $1,200 to $1,300 range as I recommended just a few weeks ago in that video and I will include links in the video's description to a parts list that will cost you around $1,250 to $1,300 and yes if you're not completely sold on the RX 7900 GRE based on the somewhat lukewarm initial reviews you could easily swap in a RTX 470 super an RX 7900 XT which is a big step and performance from the GRE or heck go all out and drop in an RTX 490 or something like that but if you do that do the 7800x 3D and not the 7600 X but what we're actually going to build today is something completely different and if you noticed I have a project zero motherboard from MSI right here so give me just a moment all right there it is we're doing a pretty over-the-top build Now featuring a lot of Corsair stuff with their new IQ link components which should should be interesting and also this is going to be my first build featuring a motherboard with the connectors on the back of the board instead of the front and I'll talk about my feelings about this new trend as we proceed with the build speaking of which let's proceed with the build and go over the parts we're assembling what a pretty pretty stack of products we have here um we're going to start with the products I already talked about we have a CPU the ryzen 9 7950 x3d one of the fastest CPUs for gaming right now and it does also feature 16 cores and 32 threads and I know I have the right wrong box it's a ryzen 9 not a ryzen 7 and the GPU of course is going to be the radon RX 7900 gr and this is the powercolor hellhound Edition and rounding out the non- Corsair products we have the MSI b650 M project zero motherboard this is a microatx motherboard which means it's going to fit properly with this case the 2500d which is a Micro ATX case and this one's already out and available and it's about $220 one of the reasons I was very critical of putting the connectors on the back side of the motherboard earlier on was compa ability and that's one of the things I would like to say I feel like is moving in the right direction with corsair's launch of the 2500 series as well as a 6500 series there's an X version that has lots of RGB and temper glass panels there's a d version that's more focused on airf Flow and that's what we're building in today but these cases are compatible with a couple different series of motherboards with the connectors on the back msis project zero as well as Asus BTF boards Asus does not have an am5 ETF Micro ATX board so this is pretty much the only motherboard that is going to fit in this case with the connectors on the back at least that's available right now but of course there's also the full 6500d or 6500 X case which is compatible with those Asus BTF boards beyond that we have a bunch more Corsair high-end components the IQ link h150i RGB which is compatible with their new Corsair link products we have a really nice memory kit here because it's a 64 gig kit so 32 gigs per module DDR 5 6000 and it's Vengeance RGB ddr5 which is a little bit more expensive than their non-rgb kits but this is still not quite as highend inexpensive as the Dominator platinum or do Dominator titanium's oh and this is the Expo version that has Expo memory settings for am5 and AMD platforms we also have a real nice storage configuration here the mp600 from Corsair which has sequential read speeds up to 5,000 megabytes per second it is a pcie Gen 4 drive and we have a 2 terb and a 4 tbte of this so we're going to have 6 terab of storage total in this build and then surrounding the 7900 GRE the rest of the components power supplies the rm850x 80 plus gold rated a longstanding and very reliable line of power supplies from Corsair and we've got these new fans also compatible with IQ link the RX 120 RGB these are available as a three-pack that includes the IQ link Hub that you need in order to connect them up and then these are called expansion fans because you actually need that IQ Link in order to use them so if you're looking at these fans make sure you get one of these three packs or you have an existing IQ link Hub if you're going to get these expansion individual fans cuz you will need that in order to plug them in all right those are the parts we're building with today links are in the description once again let's get started we got the motherboard set up CPU installed got those ssds installed in the 2 m.2 slots down below and the memory as well so now let's take a closer look at the 2500d case from Corsair once again 2500d airflow Focus so you've got mesh panel in the front as well as across the top and then there's a 2500x it's going to ship with RGB fans pre-installed and that one will have a temper glass in the front so slightly less air flow although I'm sure of Corsair would tell you that they both have perfectly adequate cooling you have a temperglass eye panel here pops off with a couple captive thumb screws and then the case itself is the dual chamber design originally popularized by the lean le01 but that does mean you have some extra support on in this area here for radiator SL fans you can fit up to 280 mm uh radiator or 240s or 2220s in the front you can fit two 120s in the side right there and then you can do up to a 360 mm radiator across the top these mesh panels all pop off pretty easily they're held in by some of these little tabs those little metal tabs one in front as well pops off like so so that gives you lots of access to the internals of the case for building or especially for mounting radiators fans since this case is oriented towards something that's going to be a bit higher end since it is a very long case that supports very long and large graphics cards continuing that airflow theme you have a mesh dust filter across the bottom it slides out from the front and then flipping around to the opposite side a couple more caped thumb screws you can see again why this is the airflow version Look at that big completely meshed side panel it's pretty Tight Mesh the metal design here with the tiny little triangle Ang Les of the Corsair pattern that they've been going with for actually like a few years now is there and then there's also um finer plastic mesh for dust filtration there as well so that is going to catch some dust while also letting a decent amount of air pass through of course also you can pop the whole thing off so you can clean it off later on down the line after you've been using your system for a while over on this side you have a couple 3.5 in Drive Bays accessible from the back of the case there full size ATX power supply Mount they do include an insert for sfx power supplies as well this is going to be most of your Cable Management Area down here but as you can hopefully see the cutouts here around the motherboard tray are what makes this case somewhat unique or at least a case that is forward-looking towards these new uh motherboards that have connectors on the back side instead of the front with the motherboard installed we can see how nicely all of these cutouts align with the various connectors on the back side of the motherboard and when it comes to my criticisms of this new development with PC Building um they've been mostly about the Practical aspect of it I don't want there to be a really limited number of cases that work with a very limited number of motherboards in order to take advantage of this so Corsair has at least somewhat answered one of my first questions or requests when I first heard about this which is we need some level of standardization between the motherboard manufacturers and case manufacturers so we can have something like this a set area where all the cutouts are so the motherboard manufacturers know that that's where they can put the backside connections and if that is the case haha uh then we have only benefits remaining and I'm going to demonstrate those benefits right now I'm going to plug in all of our case connectors which includes front panel audio our actual front panel connectors which are in a block so we can plug them all in at once our USB 3.0 front panel connector and our USB 3.2 Gen 2 which uh connects via this plug right here that was very fast that was very easy that practically speaking was easier and especially if you're looking at this from the perspective of a firsttime builder than it is to pass the cables through do a little U-turn and then plug them into their respective spots on the motherboard I also like that certain plugs like your SATA connectors here which you might want to have access to for expansion in the future are potentially going to be a little bit easier to access back here than they might be on the front now that's going to be I think again a caseby casee situation you might have a lot of cables back here that block it but I do think there are benefits with the rearm mounted uh cable connectors Beyond just the aesthetic value that you may or may not feel is beneficial to you of having the cables be back here versus being exposed on the main viewing side of the PC build and as we can see looking here from the front everything's looking real clean cuz you can't see any of those cables granted we haven't installed everything we still need to install our CPU Cooler graphics cards fans and all that stuff so let's install all that stuff [Applause] [Applause] [Music] he [Music] [Applause] at last the build is complete and I have all the RGB fans working too more on that in just a moment but I replaced the side panel peeled off the plastic and we have one of corsair's default profiles from their IQ software up and running this is called abstract but it's the end part of the video now when I typically give some summary and conclusion on the performance or the process of building the system so I'm going to do a little bit of all of those things since we have a lot of products to talk about let's start with the graphics card since that's what I started this video off with a mini review of and although there were some complications earlier this week that limited the amount of time I had to test the card I did Run 3D Mark time spy extreme really quick and this is just verifying the performance compared to some of the Benchmark results I referenced at the beginning of this video the graphics score is what we want to focus in on here we scored 10,279 that is roughly 1,000 points more than the 7800 XT would score it'll score around 9,200 to 9,400 in this test so that's pretty much falling in line with that 10% or slightly less than 10% performance uplift of course these 3dark tests are pretty optimized so you're not always going to get this type of scaling which is why some of the other Benchmark reviews that are out shown performance uplift that's maybe more in the 6 to 7 to 8% range although some of the overclocked aftermarket versions of the car do seem to be performing and getting up to the 10 11 12% range the consensus seems to be that the 7900 gr is a little bit power limited compared to the 7900 XT and also the slightly slower vram also seems to be holding it back a little bit but that said this card is maintaining pretty good temperatures we see a peak memory Junction temperature of ADC there and the peak GPU temperature in this test only got up to 53 ° C so the hellhound performed quite well in terms of cooling performance you can also see the fans spinning to a stop there it does have zero fan mode so they won't spin if the GPU is not in use I also like the feature set on this card it does have a dual bio switch you can see right there so you can switch between a silent or an OC profile the test I ran was with the OC profile by the way the only limitation of this card I would say is it actually doesn't have RGB lighting and it took me a minute to figure that out because there is a dedicated switch right here a three position switch so you can switch it like that just to turn the lights off if you're trying to blend or make it match with an RGB aesthetic like uh we're showing off a lot with the Corsair parts that we have in here off might be your best option your other two choices are the purple uh which is I believe amethyst purple or if you switch it all the way to the left it's that ice blue finish so I'm glad you at least have a couple color options to choose between I like the fact that there's a physical switch on the board so you can just physically switch it to whatever you want it to be but for anyone who had a very specific lighting or color scheme in mind and was considering this card it might be a little bit limiting for you there thankfully the aftermarket cooler performs really well otherwise so good cooling performance stays nice and quiet so that's a quick rundown of the 7900 G specifically powercolor hellhound version let's talk about the rest of the build though we have the new Corsair case the 2500d we have the new back to front or I guess I should say project zero motherboard here with the backside connectors and we have some new components including corsair's RX series fans the rx20 rgbs with which are distinct from the QX fans so the top fans here are the QX fans at existing model RX fans can be seen here they have fewer LEDs so they just have some Central LEDs uh in the central Hub but those do shine out to this side panel here and this is actually a removable piece that bulges out just a little bit they just ship with these that have the Corsair branding on them but I believe you can like 3D print or purchase replacements for those to swap them out to customize your build a little bit further but they are part of corsair's IQ link family which means they have that proprietary connector which yes is proprietary but allows you to Daisy chains things together which is pretty convenient for the build process since it handles both the power for the fan and the RGB lighting controls so I have this rear fan just connected up to the back of these top three fans which are going over and then connected to the hub that's integrated as part of the all-in-one liquid cooler and then that is fed back to one of the two connectors on the IQ Hub so that's basically uh five devices the four fans plus the RGB from the AIO then my intake fans here also daisy chain together it goes from this one to this one one cable over to the two in the back and then those are plugged into the other connector so wiring up all that RGB is definitely easier and I do appreciate some of the accommodations Corsair has made like in the 2500d case such as a little Gap here at the bottom of where the fan mounts go just to allow you to pass the cables down through and although I would say that this is a pretty sizable case for being a Micro ATX case it does still have a pretty substantial footprint and it is certainly still quite wide since it is that double wide design with the back chamber for the the power supply and cable management it does mean that you have plenty of room to work with so even if I wanted to reach back here to something like oh there's 2.5 in Drive Mount spec there that you can put in a place where you can see your 2.5 in drives that's still fairly accessible from this side as well as of course if you remove the rear panel and it did make it fairly easy to get all these fans installed and they even have like that those new little screws that come with these fans that have really wide threading but it means you only need like a quarter or a half turn to screw in the screw all the way which seems like a pretty minor like Savings in terms of time or effort but when you're screwing in four screws per fan and you have 1 2 3 four at least five fans that weren't pre-installed that I did I'll say I appreciated it those those were helpful the only real uh snafu that I encountered with the fans in particular was that I had two of these IQ hubs one that came with the AIO and one that came with the new RX series fans I should have used the one that came with the RX series fans cuz that one had updated firmware on it I instead used the one that came with the AIO which was an older one one and Corsair hadn't quite patched in their website to have the updated firmware yet which meant that when I first powered the system on I had all fans spinning but I didn't have any RGB from the RX fans which was part of the reason this video took a little bit longer than I expected cuz I had to sort of get through the trouble shooting for that that shouldn't be an issue for anyone now because if you are installing one of these IQ hubs the Corsair software should update the firmware for it it was just such a new product with the RX series fans that they hadn't updated that on their servers yet to round things out I'm running the it 64 system stability test which is a full system stress test it's stressing the CPU it's stressing the graphics it's stressing the memory it's even stressing the igpu that's part of the 7950 x3d as a result the fans have spun up so it's definitely louder but I would say not too loud especially considering that we're running a full system stress test these new RX 1220 fans have a magnetic Dome bearing and Corsair is specifically engineering these to have really good performance when it comes to static pressure and Air air flow so you can use them with radiators or as I have them set up for system air flow I'm still very torn when it comes to the ecosystem thing because whereas you do have a lot of easy use in terms of installation with the IQ link setup and you have at least a little bit more flexibility when it comes to the fan options that are available these are still quite expensive the QX fans a single fan by itself is $50 these are a little bit less expensive they have fewer LEDs but it does mean that if you were interested in the IQ link setup you're like man 50 bucks a fan is a lot you at least have a slightly more affordable option I will say though when it comes to the process of building using the IQ link connectors and also combining that with the rearm mounted connectors on the MSI project zero motherboard which this case supports I did appreciate the ease of daisy chaining multiple fans together I did appreciate the ease of plugging in all the plugs on the back side of the motherboard after it was installed here if I had to make a call one way or the other I would say those things are nice I don't think they're absolutely necessary and I don't think this is going to be like a fundamental shift in how PCS are built and everyone's going to switch to the backside mounted connectors and having some sort of proprietary solution to daisy chain everything together if you can afford that especially if you've built an RGB system before and you've had to deal with all those different connectors and plugs and got really frustrated with it then I would say yes it is a better solution but of course is it worth the money uh it's it's really hard to say depends how much money you have I guess but our stress test is has not been running for well over 10 minutes you might note that the RGB effects are actually even affected by that because the system is under such load it's shifting slightly slower than it was before I a 64 stress test is serious business all right we switched to Rainbow at least but here we are after more than 14 minutes of the stress test our CPU has peaked at 89° C that's actually a good result the 7950 X and 7950 X 3D can get up to above 90 995 is where it would Peak so I'm glad that the uh h150i IQ link is keeping up and our graphics card is even cooler we we peaked at 60° C and the memory has only gotten up to 72 even the hot spot is only at 82° C so excellent cooling performance from the case from the GPU from the AO and from these fans I just stopped the stress test so let's wait for the fans to spin back down the noise levels drop precipitously and it gets really quiet and remember that is a full system stress test so in terms of real world use gaming and even some uh heavier lifting applications that might actually do some CPU intensive workloads you're never going to hit that level of system load on a typical desktop PC but with all of those things being said I know this video has gone very long and I probably bid off a little bit more than I could chew but hey lots of information to throw at you guys and I hope youve enjoyed the build I hope you've enjoyed seeing some of the test results and let me know in the comments what you think of the 7900 GRE what you think of putting the motherboard connectors on the back side what you think of corsair's new 2500 D case as well as using it along with corsair's entire IQ link ecosystem I'll post links to the parts I've built with today I'll even post links to the parts I didn't build with today so those are down in the video's description if you want to check them out you can also hit the Thumbs Up Button if you enjoyed this video and you could also subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one coming at you real soon closing reminder to check out my store at Paul's hardware. net for all manner of high quality merchandise t-shirts hoodies beer sets and more thank you guys so much again for watching this video and we'll see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 102,213

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, Radeon RX 7900 GRE review, Radeon RX 7900 GRE, 7900GRE, Corsair 2500D, back to front, asus btf, msi project zero, backside motherboard connectors, rear motherboard connectors, pc build, building a gaming pc, corsair, icue link, corsair icue link hub, rx120, gaming pc build, rgb fans, rgb daisy chain

Id: Nh1DcNyov0U

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024