Level1Techs Real Upgrades: X299 7900X to AM4 5950X

oh i've got something special today it's a real world upgrade it's not just a build we're actually going to be helping with a real world computer and the existing real world computer the user is suffering a little bit let's uh let's dive in [Music] all right so a lot of the time people don't throw out their machine entirely and then just buy an all-new machine it's sort of a continuous upgrade cycle so i happen to know somebody let's call them dewey and they have a fabulously ancient machine well parts of it are fabulously ancient it's like the ship of theseus you know it's like how long have you had that computer oh i've had that computer for years oh that computer's only six months old it's a corsair carbide case before tempered glass was in vogue so okay that's that's pretty old a pretty old cx750 power supply it's based on the x299 platform but it's got some problems it's stuttering in games you thought it was a heat problem replace the cooler with a noctua tower cooler that helped some to be sure but here's the thing it was working fine before he upgraded his gpu to a used 2070 super from msi and then things got a little bit worse let's do a level one diagnostic and dive in at the workbench now i've got his system booted up behind me and oh boy does it have problems first when i went into the box it said the bios has been cleared and you should reset everything up which you know dewey said that that's been happening more and more regularly so this is a 10 core 7000 series cpu it's from 2018 so it's not really that old and you know 10 cores is still kind of a thing this thing will turbo up to 4.5 gigahertz all right again before we get too far ahead of ourselves the name of the game here is diagnostics it's level one diagnostics that's what we've got to do here so step one clean install of windows look this machine has been upgraded over a period of time like the first incarnation of this machine had 120 gig ssd and i just won't let it go it's like dewey this is garbage you got to let this go all right then we got the 970 evo plus that's a little bit more recent this is still a perfectly reasonable ssd that's completely fine so to do diagnostics i've done a fresh install of windows on another ssd because i don't want to erase everything and set everything up the tools in the toolbox for that hardware info 64. this is a great utility that can read from the sensors on pretty much every motherboard out there it will give you your cpu temperatures your vrm temperatures your gpu temperatures pretty much everything across the board that's really good because you know one of the main complaints here is my games act weird and they're kind of stuttery and that's since the new msi supreme you know 2080 or 2080 super and um that he's had that for like four or five months six months something like that so that's that's the most recent upgrade and everything else sort of starts to go farther back in time and you can tell that the oldest stuff here is that cx750 power supply and the case the other tools in the toolbox just windows task manager for bringing that up cpu-z for running some basic benchmarks um you can install msi afterburner which is really great for capturing uh benchmark utility i've also installed obs so i can do some screen captures and things like that although you don't want to be running a screen capture while you're trying to do a benchmark because the screen capture software will eat some of your resources we confirm the cpu it is a 7900x it's a 10 core cpu is really good way back in the day all 32 gigabytes of memory showing up although at 2133 with basically garbage timings but let me show you something and this is crazy because it's got a noctua cooler on it it's a full tower cooler and keep in mind that you know we're still rocking that 4.5 gigahertz 2 cores 4.3 gigahertz 4 cores that kind of thing oh it gets kind of loud don't it not only does it get loud immediately our temperature shot up to 94 degrees c in the worst case scenario that's some pretty severe temperatures and you know he says it's not super unstable doing most things it's just that playing a game it stutters sometimes it's not like it crashes it's not like it blue screens it's just not acting right do you see a stutter oh stuttered again see what we can do with hardware info 64 running in the background is when it's done we can check and see you know was that a thermal throttle if thermal throttling column is yes or you know are there any clues sometimes there's not a lot of clues but sometimes there are all right 108 fps average at 1080p high 22.2 cpu utilization 74.3 gpu utilization it's not amazing all right here we are with tomb raider 1080p high we're rocking an average of 121 fps let's try 1440 real quick all right with our 1440p benchmarks we're 109 fps which is a little bit foreshadowing for the 1080p performance when we get the cpu upgraded i think finally we want to test ai in civilization six because hey that's kind of a cpu benchmark right i mean that's what we're here for benchmarking now the full result is saved to a csv file but the average turn time 8.06 just for the sake of completeness we will do a graphics benchmark as well average frame time nine milliseconds with our worst frame time of 17 milliseconds or just just a little bit worse than 60 fps worst case scenario and that is at our native 3440x1440 resolution on this particular test setup all right so you can assume that i've done all the usual stuff i've tried to lower the cpu voltage i've tried to check the thermal paste to see if the thermal paste was okay on the tower cooler because it's like well maybe you don't really need to upgrade i mean this is not a completely awful setup and it's not that you know he just wants to upgrade there's there's a component of it that it's like it's time you know the system's for like 2018 or 2019 it's time and it's kind of funny because you know that 2080 super technically is from like 2019 2020 but he was able to get it for like 500 which is a really good deal in this era that we find ourselves in of like gpu shortages and general insanity the previous gpu being a 1070 just a founder's edition 1070. so it's not a breathtaking upgrade you know 3070 would have been a better choice or a 6800 or 6700 xt all right so with the game benchmarks out of the way and seeing that yeah the system overall is kind of underperforming where you would expect it to perform with the 2080 when we're talking about resolutions like 1920x1080 and 1440 and 3440 by 1440 depending on what your particular monitor config is now what he's playing on is 2560 by 1440 so the 2080 super should be able to do that but it is 144 hertz monitor the x299 platform is especially weak sauce for that even with the 4.5 gigahertz clock now the x299 platform gives you more memory channels so even though it's 2133 you've got double the number of channels to work with that helps offset that a little bit we've also got tons of pci elaine so if you wanted to run a lot of other peripherals for capture or display or whatever you could do that and i think initially that was the plan for this machine maybe run a dual gpu configuration you know that kind of thing but ah you know 2018 was halcyon days of oh you could run two gpus that's not really a thing that you do anymore so looking at the rest of the system it's like what what do we got to work with well i think this is this is a corsair car by case that's something that we can work with but look how much front clearance we have with that 2080 super if i wanted to install say for example a radiator in this case it would have to only be a top mounted radiator i'm contemplating an upgrade to a ryzen 5900x or a 5950 that's probably a pretty good upgrade for this system for a fast responsive thing but then we also have to get memory which is unfortunate i'm looking at the power supply it's the cx750 now the green label cx750s from corsair those are not amazing power supplies those are a little a little less than amazing and this is an older cx750 power supply and certain power supplies and older power supplies can actually have compatibility problems with ryzen there's a bio setting that tries to mitigate this but it doesn't do a perfect job called the c6 you know typical idle current or low idle current some power supplies won't actually function correctly when the system draws so little power that's how efficient ryzen is sort of created some frustration among adopters and it still is a problem that pops up on the forum every now and again you get just the right combination of motherboard and power supply even more recent ones and the system can use so little power that it's perfectly fine under load it's 100 stable under load but then when the system is idle or goes to sleep it has trouble recovering it's a little it's a it's it's those intermittent problems or the really impossible ones to chase down and so by switching to the ryzen platform with this older power supply that's something that i've gotta sort of keep in mind because this is not a green label cx750 it's a little bit more recent and i'm less likely to have a problem but if i do have a problem i'm going to toggle that typical uh idle current option in bios and it will probably make the problem go away the other thing to consider with power supplies is that as they age and as they've been abused and running at high load you typically lose some capacity just due to natural aging now corsair is one of the better manufacturers they really try to keep up with things you're not going to lose you know as much as you think you will in the higher capacity it's the things that change or over current protection and some other stuff like how the power supply is architected so there are some benefits of having a newer power supply versus an older power supply it's not truly an apples-to-apples comparison if it's a 750 from a few years ago on a 750 today even a really good brand it's still not an apples-to-apples comparison but the rule of thumb is basically you take ten percent off the capacity for every two years that the power supply was in service so this is a 750 i would take 75 watts off of that because it's more than two years old so that would be i could plan for a capacity of about 675 watts give or take now real world because this is a corsair power supply it's actually you know 700 watts i think is probably a little bit safer that is a rule of thumb and it's a broad strokes thing and there's a lot of holes you can poke in that kind of an approach but if you're more conservative with your power supply generally you'll have a more stable system overall anyway so 700 watts is about what i've got to work with on the power budget upgrading something like the gpu you know to like a 30 80 or 30 70 it's really going to push the older power supply in a way that i don't really want to do um the intel i7 cpus like uh like the 10th generation those are insanely dirt cheap right now like a 10 700 or a 1080 50k plus motherboard those are insanely insanely inexpensive yeah they top out at 8 and 10 cores but for gaming and everything else a couple hundred bucks plus a board plus another thing you know 300 bucks plus a board that kind of thing it's really good of course those cpus also like fast memory now because things have changed so 32 gigs of 2133 not great now this is a 10 course 7900x it's not garbage yet so it could be sold you know 32 gigs of memory motherboard power supply cooler probably can sell it on craigslist something like that to 300 maybe maybe like 200 is probably reasonable 300 yeah depending on where you are may be okay so that's pretty good and then our overall upgrade budget is like a grand so it's like okay that's why i'm thinking do i want a 5900x or 5950 5950 you get 16 cores and it's going to be a long term system it doesn't have the pcie bandwidth of the old x299 system but dewey's not using it anyway if this were you and you wanted to save a few bucks i would wholeheartedly recommend the 5900x you see you got all the same cash you know that same level three cash the two chiplet designs six quarters per chiplet it's really awesome it's really awesome for gaming basically a game can live on one chiplet and then you can have everything else running in the background on the other chiplet it's a pretty great setup now the thing with x299 the elephant in the room is you could go to an 18 core yes you could drop in the 10 980 xe 18 cores it's a monster cpu drops right into the x29 platform and you're good to go the problem is that we were looking around and they're kind of hard to get a hold of i don't the gaming performance isn't there for modern machines for high frame rate gaming but if you're maxing out your gpu it can be passable so a 10980xe adds eight more cores and for the work stuff that dewey's doing not the gaming stuff that probably would help to have more cores because you know he works the work and play kind of thing work from home run simulations do 3d you know that kind of thing depends on what you're doing at a 1090 xe replacing a 7900x it's kind of a no-brainer that is a good idea but the sun and the moon and the stars didn't really align to make it obtainable to get a 10 980 xe for a reasonable price so i think i've got in mind what parts we're going to use now that the benchmarks are out of the way let's go to the workbench all right let's talk upgrades i mean the x 299 platform was a flagship platform 2017 2018 ish for a lot of pcie lanes a lot of connectivity it was a hard choice i get it this is an easy thing to sort of waffle on i mean we've probably gone back and forth 47 times it's like i should just upgrade a threadripper i you know maybe but for what he does i don't think threadripper is really going to be all that beneficial i mean if you can make use of 12 or 16 cores chances are you can make use of 24 to 32 cores but it's a little bit diminishing returns you know and that 595950x is so much faster than a lot of things that are out there of course there's also new cpus on the horizon maybe it would make more sense to wait but he's in kind of a hurry because his machine's acting weird so here we are this is what we picked this is the b550 gaming carbon wi-fi now i also i had the choice of picking the x570 ace from msi which has much better pci express connectivity but it's also got a chipset fan and x570 is maybe a little overkill because it's like okay you're falling into the trap again of more and better pci express connectivity what are you likely to add a capture card something like that well guess what this car is going to do that fine it's got a bunch of x1 slots through the chipset and you can run you know another there's a physical x16 slot if you do get a higher end peripheral you can still use that but this is a more modern motherboard it's a little bit more up-to-date passive cooling also really inexpensive for cooling we have the rgb free as in no rgb mpg core liquid to 240 this is a 240 millimeter cooler and a lot of the choice for this cooler was driven by what we're working with on the case because it's like well if we get a radiator that we can put in the front that's not going to work with the 2080 super because there's not physically enough clearance for that but a 240 will work fine in that case and he likes the case because it fits on his desk perfectly it's not too tall it's not too wide then picking another case so in that case it's perfectly fine and reasonable comes a little bit more of a challenge the 750 watt power supply also factored in a little bit here because even though we're running the 5950x i think it's not going to use more than 140 watts guaranteed that leaves the entire rest of the power budget for the gpu so whatever comes after the 6000 series gpu from amd or whatever comes after the 3080 if it uses 500 watts and it's not insanely huge then that'll be a perfectly reasonable upgrade path we know that amd is probably going to change the socket or at least we think we do in the next six months to a year probably more on the year side than the six month side so again this seems like a reasonable upgrade for i have to have it right now because all this stuff is actually in stock and finally for the cpu 5900x or 5950x my pick would have been the 5900x to save the 250 to put towards something else but hey this is an x299 system dewey likes to splurge a little bit so we splurged for the 5950x to be sure we're gonna get the money's worth in the price difference with that 5950x the way he looked at it was well we could just sell the old stuff and for what we're going to sell the old stuff for that's going to make the difference for the upgrade so it's a break even upgrade to move from the contemplated 5900x to the 5950x but the time he sells the old stuff so we'll be looking at a couple of things in this upgraded build how well does the cooling work is it a better situation in terms of fan noise do we get the full performance of that monster 5950x out of our relatively affordable b550 motherboard there's a lot in play here let's put it together and see what our benchmarks are like the first thing i want to show you in this build is this mag core liquid p240 now this is a really interesting design because it moves the pump to the radiator the pump is not in the cpu block something i've noticed is this this is not only available in a lot of local stores it's also available in best buy my local best buy has the rgb version of this there's not really a lot of difference between the rgb version and the non-rgb version and at the time i'm filming this video these are available for just about a hundred dollars you know give or take ten dollars depending on if there's a sale or a bundle or something like that interestingly these fans have rubber dampening mats pre-installed in the corners after hearing the old machine i'm sure you think that he'll appreciate that wouldn't you what do you think i will say that in an ideal world it does work best if the pump is the lowest point in the system but as a practical matter we're not going to be able to do that for this build and here's our am4 mounting bracket and our bag of am4 mounting hardware and then some we should be good to go did i say b550 gaming carbon wi-fi i meant the msi x570 ace we went back and forth on the b550 gaming carbon wi-fi or the mag x570 ace the ace is the x570 chipset which has a lot more pci express 4 connectivity through the chipset the b550 you know you still got 16 lanes to the cpu plus four for nvme plus four through the chipset but the chipset is really the difference between these two there's so much more connectivity to the x578 that it needs a fan although we're starting to see x570 chipsets you know pretty late in the product cycle come out that don't actually require a fan that said the the fan on the xbox 78 is nice and big it's been pretty quiet in my experience and it's like you know fan of msi can you tell yeah i mean that's that's basically what's going on here so the mag x 570 ace or the b550 gaming carbon wi-fi both of these will have no problem powering that 5950x but for this system for the upgrade we're going to use the x570 ace because dewey also decided that he wants a four terabyte in vme because they were cheap enough which blows the budget but hey you know we're just wandering around micro center cherry picking stuff i guess let's get building now we're going to try to run the old 2133 memory at first don't worry he also wants more memory so we're going to be moving from 32 to 64 gigs minimally i do have a kit a faster kit of memory coming that is also pretty high capacity 64 gigabytes and two sticks so two 32 gigabyte dimms two dimms with as much capacity as the four old ones and also faster memory clocks how far we've come in five years so yeah we're going to try that how much of a difference does it make for gaming with the 2080 super and older gpu for this upgrade i think it's going to make a pretty decent difference at lower resolutions but at higher resolutions it's probably not going to be that much but we'll see we'll run through the tests all right let's get building we'll set this aside for now it's build time or unbilled time i should say i've freed the old motherboard it's really honestly not a bad system i'm sure a lot of you guys would love to have a 10 core 7900x still with a reasonably modern x299 motherboard i mean it's a pretty solid motherboard you got dual lan and it's even got the usb type c front panel connector so this is like one of the later models our x570 ace from msi is going to be a pretty easy install as well basically using the same screw holes now in anticipation of installing the radiator i'm going to go ahead and take out the fan in the top because that's where our radiator is going to go the top fan that's currently in there is 140 millimeters and you can see it does not have appropriate clearance a lovely 140 millimeter corsair fan i'm sure we'll find another use for that somewhere else all right i think that's going to work pretty well so the next thing is to set this aside and mount our fans to the radiator so this is going to be mounted in the top either like this or like that could go either way really now we've got three connectors one for the pump two for the fans the kit does come with a nice y cable so most motherboards have a pump header and a fan header so this will work out perfectly if you use the y cable so that one fan header controls both fans a nice little detail is if you would rather have your pump power cable exit at the opposite side of the radiator there is a slot cut for you to do that so you could just pull the wire out and put it on the other side depending on how you've mounted your radiator to hide the wires what i really love about this mounting system is that it uses the standard amd clips and that's going to make it ridiculously easy for me to swap around cpus if we need to troubleshooting diagnostics whatever now remember the final setup before the system goes home is going to be a couple of sata ssds and an m.2 and brand new four terabyte m.2 connected to this but i set up a separate install of windows on a test ssd just so we could get some baseline numbers any time you're telling a friend troubleshoot you know it could be windows it could be their settings it could be their bios could be any number of things so step one is we're going to reuse that old memory like i said we'll get that installed to get the gpu put back in get the test ssd in and first order of businesses run benchmarks but actually just before that you'll also want to make sure the bios is updated on the motherboard copy it to a usb stick and flash the motherboard to be sure that it's the very latest version it might post but uh you're going to want to update the bios now word of caution here a little bit because with the 240 millimeter radiator there's actually less ram clearance than i thought with our completely blog standard ancient memory the height clearance is no problem just barely but if you had really tall memory the first fan on the radiator would interfere with it a little bit the radiator would have to be mounted a little higher and it'll probably vary from case to case but it's a really really close fit in this particular corsair case at this point our system is basically together other than updating the bios the next things to test are how much of a difference does the memory speed actually make when you've got this you know was it necessary to upgrade to faster memory 64 gigs oloy kit is what we're going to try in here that is 3600 so we do get the benefit of the faster infinity clock speed but uh the timings on that kit are not as fast as say a higher end g-skill tried in z kit but that also costs more so we'll see good news everybody it boots it's detecting our 5950x processor correctly as well as the fact that we've got 32 gigabytes of 2133 but 32 gigabytes installed in the system well i've got the system set up once again another fresh install of windows that's how you got to do this in the same toolbox hardware info 64 cpu-z obs for recording mostly for y'all and reinstalled all the games yeah i know just baseline testing bear with me hardware info 64 shows much more reasonable temperatures we have not enabled pbo or anything like that we haven't done any overclocking this is just the out of the box performance for the cpu-z multi-core score we're at over 12 000 like 12 2 12 3 something like that and that's with our 2133 memory our pokey 21 33 memory is just just barely clocking along now the timings are pretty good on it well no it's not actually it's like 15 but that's not it could be worse could definitely be worse and our peak cpu temperature with that all in one is only 57 degrees c hardware info 64 also shows us that our 5950x is clocking at 50 just over five gigahertz 5.05 gigahertz to be exact it's nice very nice and we've got our first result 156 fps at 1080p even with our you know relatively pedestrian 2133 memory 32 gigabytes where gpu bound 43 of the time now instead of 7 of the time ah that's more like it that's what we like to see average fps 117 and 99 of the time more gpu bound this is in 2560 by 1440. 117 fps though remember our targets 144 1440p we're doing pretty good and that's on high settings we can always drop it down just a little bit more let's try wildlands now remember when we were going through this scene initially there were a lot of hitches and stutters and just general weirdness i don't know if that really shows up on camera there's been a stutter or two in this but subjectively it's way better and spoiler alert we've actually already been playing a lot of games for a few hours and the subjective experience is way better since we've changed the cpu 133 fps 13.4 cpu utilization 93 gpu utilization that's a 1080p high let's try 1440. 107.8 fps average 13.4 percent cpu utilization not bad let's see how civ does with this monster cpu average turn time 7.33 that's a pretty big improvement this is the graphics benchmark let's see how much better that does average frame time 4.8 milliseconds and the 99th percentile is 9.5 milliseconds that's a pretty substantial improvement as well and finally here is our oloy memory upgrade kit which you might remember from other past videos this is two thirty two gig six sixty thirty c18 1.35 volts this is not super tall memory and it's angled on the corner so it's just barely going to fit in this case let's swap this out and then do some more benchmarking now with the memory installed the bios will reset don't worry you can go back into the bios and reconfigure any appropriate settings now the memory we were using before didn't even have an xmp profile but most of the memory that you would get today will have a memory an xmp profile so you'll at least need to turn that on it's like oh devices have changed they have indeed while i'm in here i'm also going to configure the fan profiles with the xmp profile set that's literally the only material change that we made and then i turned on automatic mode for the other fans you can hear it ramps up and down but mostly it stays down and the ramp is much slower the plot thickens 64 gigabytes of memory that's 3600 but not the best timings 153 fps at 1080p 90 gpu bound and here we are 1440p 106 fps gpu bound 100 of the time with our 64 gigabyte kit sieve 6 ai turn time 7.37 for the graphics not much of a change 4.67 milliseconds uh for average and a 99th percentile is 9.1 milliseconds so for wildlands 1080p we're looking at 126.53 fps 11 cpu utilization 91 gpu utilization 98 fps at 1440p gpu bound 94.3 of the time with 12.9 percent cpu utilization not bad now the olo memory out of the box not super impressive timings you know 18 22 22 but fortunately msi has memory try it in the bios and memory try it okay 3200 didn't work but 2800 did because we got decent results with 2133 so 2800 with really tight timings now i can do 164fps at 1080p with 64 gigabytes of memory so there you have it walking you through my thought process now i know it seems like a slam dunk could take one of those 18 core x 299 cpus and shove in that motherboard but i think the usable lifetime of that unless you're doing 3d rendering or something that's really gonna use the 18 cores more than high performance gaming you would enjoy upgrading to something else other than x299 plus right now is a great time to sell x299 because there are a lot of people that have x299 and are looking to upgrade if you want to see more what if content like this ask more what if content like this on the forum but you got to post a lot of pictures so i've got something to talk about in the video it's like this is what i've got this is what my budget is this is what i'm contemplating for an upgrade might be good stuff if you like this content definitely let me know you want to see more of it i'm window this level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 46,019

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: XTpzFtRqbxg

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021