The AMD RX 7600 XT Gaming PC Build! - Is 16GB of VRAM Worth It?!

ladies and gentlemen did you think it was only Nvidia that was going to do slightly weird things well if you thought that you'd be wrong because today we're looking at the 7600 XT from AMD a graphics card that to be honest is basically the same as the 7600 except it now has double the vram which is good but then it also has a higher price tag I mean there are some more subtle differences like this consumes slightly more power and it's clocked faster so it should yield higher FPS but does that slightly higher FPS actually justify The increased price tag of course though the only way to properly put this through its Paces is to build ourselves a kickass gaming PC on a budget and throughout this video we're going to show you all of the parts that you need we'll show you how simple it is to actually put everything together what's hot and maybe what's not and then of course at the end show you those all important gameplay Benchmark numbers so you can see for yourself exactly how well this thing performs and as I say it's not like this is a terrible product or anything like that but with around about a 70 maybe $80 price premium versus the normal 7600 which in itself wasn't that remarkable anyway I think this is definitely a case of watch this space and indeed watch this space and find out whether this thing is actually any good and what it's capable of right after a short word from this video's sponsor nxt's HX flow is here throwing a whole new angle on PC gaming this airflow orientated chassis fuses the beauty of rapper glass with the performance of ventilation thanks to three angled side mounted fans fitted as standard an expansion room at the top rear and bottom it is super easy to build into thanks to its dual chamber design toolfree access and cable management straps get yours today with the link down below let's start though with all of the reasons why you might actually want to buy one of these because again I want to reiterate this is by no means a bad product it's just more of an unremarkable one because what you have to understand is that there is actually a lot of confusion at the moment when it comes to vram and what it actually means for gaming and essentially in a nutshell it's a bit like memory you just have to make sure you have enough of it and then your PC will run properly if you don't have enough video memory then you'll find that games will be stuttery and just won't really be very playable at all whereas if you have the right amount then assuming you can actually run the game at that frame rate in theory it should be nice and smooth so having more vram alone doesn't actually translate into better gaming performance if you're not limited by vram so obviously more vram is going to be better but the main problem and the reason why you'll find a lot of people aren't exactly raving about this card is because this is actually aimed at 1080p gaming and the sort of scenarios where you are going to use more vram are ones where you're running games at higher resolutions or you're using things like rate tracing and because this doesn't actually have enough horsepower really to satisfy Gamers that want to play at like 1440p and 4K at like Max detail settings then you're not really going to be using that extra vram anyway and the thing that's got a lot of people annoyed myself included is that the actual core of the GPU is basically identical to the 7600 yes you are going to be putting slightly more power through it and yes it does run at a higher clock speed but without any extra cuse or anything like that it's always going to be limited and people will say why don't you just overclock a normal 7600 which to be fair would be a fair point I have to admit though that I really do like the look of this Asus tough GPU I mean it's not going to consume crazy amounts of power so you could probably go for a cheaper two fan variant if you can find one you do have two eight pins on this massive radon text on the top but crucially we do actually have display port 2.1 as well but to be honest this is another one of those features really where it's nice to have but this doesn't actually have enough horsepower to properly drive one of those displays that's going to be like over 4K 240 anyway so it's more of a spec sheet Edition that's nice rather than something that you're practically going to use but whether this is worth the price premium again this is something we'll be discussing as we start our gaming tests but let's move on now to the rest of our build cuz obviously you can swap out the GPU for something else as well I mean realistically like RTX 4060 the normal 7600 or if you can get a hold of maybe like a previous generation AMD graphics card like a I don't know 6600 if you want to save money or maybe like a 6700 XT or something which is kind of the same sort of price point of this that's definitely going to be worth considering as well and in terms of the sort of Bill that we're going for you can go for a ryzen 7600 and then an am5 compatible motherboards but I want to save as much money as possible here today so we've gone for Intel we've gone for b760 this is a board that costs around about $150 or so and it should be able to take like an i7 or an I9 if you do want to upgrade in the future but for the time being you're going to want to look at the I5 12400 F this is the normal 12400 so it has integrated graphics you're going to save about $10 or so by going for the F version and you're not going to use it anyway and as I say I do want to strongly reiterate that this is not going to be as good as a am5 7600 build but if you're saving around about like $80 $90 or so on the CPU then that's extra money you can put towards the graphics card and I don't think we're going to be bottlenecked at this point in time anyway let's take this opportunity to have a closer look at our board though obviously the main thing you'll notice is that this is Micro ATX this goes with the case we're using the Asus Prime 2011 which is one of my favorite chass is really good value for money but more than that in a bit this does also come with Wi-Fi as well which is going to be really important for over 50% of Gamers as we know decent io on this as well loads of calling for our vrms support for ddr5 memory not ddr4 actually a lot of the b760 motherboards are ddr4 so make sure you know the difference and buy the right memory and then this one also has support for three PCI ssds two of which come with these little heat sink covers but be aware both of these are only single sided heat sink cover so if you're buying like a large capacity SSD you're probably going to go why can't I speak today you're probably going to want to buy one that has a larger built-in heyn let us proceed to pop this on top of the box grab our CPU and you should also notice at this stage that you do get this little coer inside the box and I very almost expect it for this build cuz obviously is going to save you a decent amount of money and you can upgrade it when you get your next paycheck that's the best way to save a bit of money on this build just use the stock caller for now but the Intel stock caller is pretty nice I don't like it and we've got a $35 upgrade which is the ak400 from Deep Co would highly recommend this if you can spare the change but let's get back to our CPU installation please do not drop the chip on the pins I know this happens and it will break you board and you'll be incredibly sad you just lower this down with very minimal force and then just tuck that lever back under now I did want to do something a little bit different with this build we haven't done it before but I've had this kit of memory for a while now I bought it myself self set of ddr5 16 gig you can get this for about $60 or so over in the states so it's very good value and when you compare it to 32 gig or something like Corsair Vengeance granted that runs at a slightly higher speed is almost half the price so clearly this is a good way of saving money and I'm just thinking what are you going to notice more a much quieter call us or a much quieter system or 16 gig of memory that most people probably won't use for gaming anyway I mean there's not a right or wrong answer and obviously you can upgrade this really easily but as I've had this for a while I did want to see how well this works to be honest but it does feel so cheap there's no heat sinks on this there's not even anything on this side open up slots two and four though and hey I mean if you go for laptop memory it all looks like this anyway and no one has any complaints there I mean I admit that doesn't look fantastic we're going to persevere but if you do want the best looking build possible this ain't it but it's going to be in this anyway I thought about this build as with the rest of the build we're not going for anything crazy when it comes to storage I mean this is a 500 gig drive to save as much money as possible but I would strongly advise really go for a terabyte cuz the price difference isn't crazy this is a gen 3 drive so it's not going to be crazy fast but it is a very good value for money but as I say in pretty much every video the prices of ssds change all of the time there's always something on special to just buy the fastest drive you can in your price range but you just want to take off that heat sink grab your SSD line it up with a slot push it down into position grab your heat sink again and then just replace that you can use a screw to secure this down on certain motherboards but these days they tend to just secure in place with the heat sink at this stage then it's then time to pick your cooling I mean hopefully you've bought it by now I mean suppose if you haven't you can just use the one that comes in the box if you forget like my friend Rob did a cool build by the way first time building his gaming PC if you want to follow that along you can find that video in the top round corner but he turned up with a load of different parts missing and had to borrow some in fact he still got my Ry CPU that I lent him how on Earth do you forget to buy a CPU but as you can see this is a way bigger cooler than the Intel stock one it's going to have much better Cooling and I think it looks way better even if you're not necessarily going to see it in this chassis if you've gone for anything windowed I think this looks more of the business but you just want to take this fan off grab our Intel back plate pick up your motherboard and feed this through the back and then drop it back down grab these little black spacers that say Intel 1700 on it and then just lay them over the holes then you grab your little we plate and line that over the top of those then use the screws to fit that down now you will get some thermal paste inside the box but where I've used this coer loads of times before I think I've used it all so I'm going to add some of my own just a little squibble in the middle of the CPU is enough is squibble a word then you can proceed to pick up your cooler and then just line that up with those two screw holes that are facing up and then you can screw that down making sure to alternate between the screws so you're putting even tension on the socket you want it to be tight but not overtighten it then you can grab your fan once again have the cable facing upwards and then just drop that into position hook that on then grab this little cable and plug it in where it says CPU fan one I realized by the way for Avid viewers I never actually talk about these these are just some spare clips and hanger type things so if you do want to add an extra fan at a later date it's very easy to do so and you can clip this on the other side whether that's just to make it look better or of course for better performance and that is pretty much your mother board complete I would like to think you'd agree that was actually very straightforward I know I do this a lot of the time but especially if you are going for a smaller air cooler it's just so easy to get your motherboard ready to go and then once you put that in your chassis there's not really that much else you have to do other than plug everything in with your graphics card and power supply but I have briefly mentioned this already but I do want to reiterate that this is one of my favorite chassis out there and you can buy this with a tempered glass panel if you prefer but at the moment this is called the Asus a P 2011 it's part of their Prime series comes in a couple of different colors and I just love the fact that this is small but so easy to build in supports really large graphics cards and I think creates something that looks quite unique but then also something that looks really good it's very mimal list it's very classic let's just take both of the side panels off lay our case down flat pick up your motherboard ensuring you have an IO plate attached if you don't that's fine it will just be separate in the Box goes in this little hole here then you're looking for these stand offs they all say m on them which stands for Micro ATX and you just want to make sure that all of the holes on the motherboard line up with these standoffs there is a little Central one here that should kind of catch your motherboard like that stop it moving around then it's just a case of using the screws to fit it down so it's safe and secure really is as simple as that and that believe it or not I think is actually the hard part done I have used this chassis before a couple of times as I say so I at one point moved this fan here for whatever ever reason I can't remember but I'm going to move this to the back just to sort of help out this CPU Cooler for the best possible air flow I mean you can actually put a full 360 mil radiator at the top of this as I said it's a small case but it fits a lot of Hardware while we're here we also remove this little plate so we can get our power supply in try not to lose the screws I'll then grab the cable for this fan and plug it in to CPU fan 2 next to the one we've already connected and then we also have our USB type c which connects here to this little silver Port us B3 though is just above that HD audio is at the bottom left of the motherboard and then last but certainly not least we do have our front panel with a power switch going at the top right of our block with power LEDs on the left positive left negative right then it's a case I make that joke way too much of getting our power supply ready which I believe means taking this front panel off because our power supply is going to go in this little box here and we do have to unscrew this to get it detached and as for the power supply itself I know a lot of people are going to be wondering while I have sort of like skimped out on things like the ram but then gone for a slightly more premium power supply I mean I wouldn't actually necessarily say that's the case anyway because this is around about $100 or so so probably like $30 price premium over something from like a lesser known brand but the thing with be quiet is they're very reliable this one is rated at 80 plus gold 650 WS so it does give you a little bit of wiggle room and some upgradeability if you want to go for a better GPU in the future as well but as you can tell from all of these loose cables this is also a modular power supply which to be fair doesn't make as much difference in this chassis because obviously you're not going to see a lot of it anyway but if you do go for the glass version of this or pretty much any other case that does have a glass window then you're going to notice if there are a load of extra caes like flailing around this one is actually also ready for PCI Gen 5 as well so if you do want to go for an Nvidia card like a 4070 or something then you only need one cable to plug this in be aware it is only rated for 450 WS so no 490s with this but I mean yeah you're not building this system if you're going for a 4090 anyway and I love this bit just grab your power supply and then give it a little hat the king of the system look obviously then fix it down into position then you can flip it once more back onto its side and start to plug in all of your cables and you're not going to need anything crazy here all you need is one eight pin for the CPU two eight pins for the graphics card and then your ATX for the motherboard no Sater or anything else for accessories CU we're not using any it should then just be a case of picking this up and if you've done it right oh look what did I say what did I say check you've done it right I mean it's not a problem I just need to rotate the power supply around the other side cuz this is like a right angled connection and obviously this s sticks out then fix the PSU back down plug in your large ATX to the motherboard on the top right your CPU into this top left connection don't worry if there are two eight pins you're not going to use enough power or anywhere near enough power in your CPU for that to be an issue not with this chip anyway and then pretty much the last thing we need to do is to insert the star of our show our 7600 XT into the slot and you should immediately see well actually I want you to see a peel come on Asus don't let us down yeah you should now see just how much length we have in this case you'll see that I wasn't exaggerating Big Boy graphics cards can go in here I have already removed the two slot covers here by the way obviously you'll need to do that if you're following along at home but there for the most part actually you have your system you just need to secure your graphics card into position plug in with your power supply connections give it a spin round and tidy up the back if need be I mean here it's just this cable that you could tie down but to be honest I think you can probably just cheat here by sliding the panel on yeah there you go no fuss whatsoever replace the top the front the side that's always a little bit annoying to get in but not the end of the world just requires a bit of technique and if you do have loads of cables by the way the whole point of this bar is to hide it and I mean to be fair I don't really really think it necessarily needs it I didn't think this was going to be the cleanest build in the world which is one of the reasons we went for this chassis but I mean look this actually looks really good so let's grab a display and push the button I think we go for our 1080p monitor today of course we'll be needing ourselves a mouse mat you can grab this one today from the link Down Below pces end. store if you have bought one of these by the way please leave a review on the site good or bad but I mean come on look at it look at it so we're all plugged in let's go I mean there's barely any noise I don't know what I expected because this isn't a ryzen build it should actually be a fair bit quicker to build but I love how silent that is I mean listen to that like if you put this under your desk you just wouldn't know it was there I'm sure gaming load will be a bit louder but I mean come on come on we're in as well that has to be the easiest most seamless PC build I think I've potentially ever done even got Windows pre-installed on this SSD how about that there are some XMP profiles apparently on uh this set of memory but it's going to run at 4800 MHz by default because it's not a super fast kit but I would also suggest that you do always tune your fans so down the bottom here you can choose between like full speed silent or make your own if you go into fantastic tuning here we are then ladies and gentlemen all set up and ready to go and I'm afraid I've got a bit of bad news and this is something that I didn't know about until we looked into it a little bit later after filming the previous section and that is that the current price point of this tough the tough specifically 7600 XT is on its way to a massive £400 for what is essentially a slightly better 7600 that starts at around about 250 so that's ridiculous at the time of filming I mean the chances of me paying almost 400 for a 16 gig version of 7600 is basically zero and I don't think you should either and I think the reason is because there isn't a stricks card of this so Asus need something to charge a price premium for but it was already an expensive card at the RRP that would make sense to some people as we discuss it very shortly but otherwise I've been very happy actually with the rig and the way that it's come together so far I've got some games installed so let's jump in with some fortnite and rather interestingly this has actually been another case of the first time that you boot up this game you'll find you get like some of these like weird spikes on the top left hand side of your screen I think actually is down to sort of like texture preloading or caching or something because it does go away after a few minutes I've just changed the settings now from like medium textures to Epic and it's come back which is why I'm quite confident on that but yeah running in dx11 mode we seem to be getting around about 190 to 200 frames a second you might be able to increase this slightly by going to dx12 cuz it does lower the overheads but I mean not going to see like a dramatic difference to be fair I'm getting distracted by actually trying to take this guy out come on Marcus you've got the Talent yes but anyway as I was trying to say around about 200 FPS or so is really good I mean obviously this is only 1080p so if you turn this up to 1440p your frame rate will dip down a little bit but actually as you can see we are getting a little bit of CPU bottlenecking as our utilization on that GPU is only around about 75 80% and this is the point really where you probably do have to consider whether you're building a PC for now or for future upgradeability and what it is that you need because whilst we are getting that bottlenecking if you're playing at 1440 you probably won't really see it because you've got higher resolution and even if you do have it at 1080p I mean if you're still getting 220 FPS like we are now do you really need that extra frame rate from the 7600 I mean the choice is entirely down to you but clearly the smart money I think for a lot of people would maybe be to start with a 7600 get the 8 GB version of this card granted you get a slightly lower frame rate but then You' probably got a lot more of a future proof system but obviously with this this you can always just upgrade it to like a 13 or 14th gen I5 or i7 at a later date so don't go thinking that you don't have upgrade uh roots and possibilities with this because you do you're just not going to have like new CPUs coming out for the next four years like you'll probably get with am5 but let's move on to our next title now as it loads in rather dramatically there with amd's star child some star field and I've got this running at ultra settings with the resolution set to 1080p but FSR at I think it's 85% and I mean the game looks pretty good we're getting a little bit of I don't know what the right word is maybe like moare type stuff like a little bit of static so I think I probably would want to turn the FSR up slightly but I mean the game still looks very good it's just maybe a little bit oversharpened but crucially this is the thing that we need to talk about because our frame rate is good it's around about 55 frames a second so nothing crazy but you can lower the settings down a little bit but then if you look at our memory utilization we're currently sitting at around about 6,3 65 MB of vram that is significant of course because this is a 16 gig card and the default is8 so at the moment we're not actually utilizing any of the extra vram that we've paid extra money for which again sort of begs the question of why well actually the solution or the answer to this conundrum is pretty simple the extra vram is going to be used for high resolutions and more intense settings of things like Ray tracing but if we're running this game at 1080P and getting around about 60 frames a second then there's not really any extra head room is there to turn any extra settings on I mean this is Max for Starfield so I mean I suppose that's good but still even after wandering around we we're still not utilizing anywhere near that 8 GB of vram so you're paying extra money granted for a little bit extra performance but if you just had a regular 7600 you overclocked it manually I think you'd be be able to get sort of very close and in this particular game well you're not going to see any extra benefit from the vram or at least not in the limited sample that we've tested I mean don't forget as well this is with FSR so if we turn that off for a second the frame rate hasn't changed dramatically we've probably lost a few FPS but the game does now look just a little bit better it's not actually as dramatic as I would have thought I mean for 1080p this is actually looking pretty crisp and this isn't the best display in the world but it's high refresh rate so it's pretty good to play on but yeah do you see what I mean you see the issue with this card especially this rather expensive tough version you you're just paying for features that you're not necessarily going to use and this is going to be the case I think for a lot of people in the vast majority of games but don't go discounting it because there will be people that will love the extra vram and it's those that want to be as future proof as possible but then I'd still argue having more horsepower is more useful those that love to mod so I have a close friend that loves to mod Skyrim he's been doing this since it came out and he uses loads of vram so if this is you and you want to mod games and you do want to sort of fill up that buffer then clearly this is actually going to make a lot of sense cuz it's pretty much the most budget friendly card you can get with six 16 GB of vram or of course maybe you're a creative and you're running an application that also likes to take advantage of vram maybe something like blender but as long as it's going to sort of run as well on AMD as it does in Nvidia it will make sense to go down that route as well so for anyone that needs a vram this is a great way of getting it on more of a budget but just bear in mind that video gaming at this level isn't actually necessarily one of those applications but rather than just tell you about this how about I show you this in some games so this is some returnal I currently got this set to Epic with rate racing sets to medium we do have some uh vertical vertical resolution scaling visual resolution virtual resolution scale I don't know vrs is set to Quality and I find it actually works better than FSR in this particular title but you can see we're still getting a pretty decent frame rate actually of around about 70 to 75 frames a second which was almost unexpected really I mean I know this isn't Max rate racing and it is going to vary yeah I could definitely play like this easy I mean especially if you're using a controller with this you're sort of really only after about 60 frames a second or so aren't you so I've got to admit I am pretty impressed with the frame rate here I mean I was actually testing this earlier I thought rate tracing was on and it wasn't and the frame rate that we were getting was slightly higher around about 90 frames a second even when it got intense actually we were still able to sort of keep above the 75 frames a second Mark I will say that the latency feels a little bit higher with the frame rate with the frame rate with the rate tracing on uh but the thing I wanted to draw your attention to actually is the video memory because at the top left hand side of your screen you can see we are now utilizing more than 8 gig we currently got this set to what's that about 9,715 Meg which is cool but to be fair usage and utilization are not the same thing so just because it's allocating almost 10 gig of vram here doesn't mean that we necessarily need all of that so if we were to run this on an 8 gig card we might be fine but clearly the game is able to allocate more vram and I think you'd be a lot more comfortable running all of these high-intensity settings if you have the 16 gig version of the card but I would also like to reiterate that we're not using 12 gig of vram and you can still get the 6700 XT with 12 gig of vram for the same sort of money if not slightly less that will probably have more performance slightly less vram but then more performance and still have all the vram that you need so clearly my money would be on the 70 70 the 6700 XT over this GPU let's now move on to what has to be in the most intense game in our tests the latest Allen wake Allen wake 2 game I really enjoyed do highly recommend checking out if you haven't already this is one of those heavy rid Trace titles that actually has path tracing so if you're running a maxed out GPU then you can get some absolutely stunning visuals and this is one of the few games as well where if you're playing it without raate tracing it's just nowhere near as good we've actually got raate tracing disabled at the moment but if you had it on then all of this light would be sort of naturally reflected refracted and sort of moved around the room in a really realistic manner I mean to be fair it still looks pretty good even with rate tracing disabled and you can't argue with that frame rate it is going to vary a lot in this game I mean in the tunnels you're looking a much higher frame rate than when you get outside but still we're getting around about as I say about 125 so you're probably looking about 80 85 in the most intense parts of the game which means that this PC is going to be excellent for playing AAA games at 1080p but what happens if we turn rate tracing on I mean at the moment our video memory is 7877 let's go to rate tracing medium oh yeah the frame rate has absolutely tanked that is awful the latency through the roof this is also Runing with FSR as well so it's not even like true 1080p uh the quality honestly it looks so bad I mean what has happened is that all of the textures have just disappeared this has got to be the worst Allan Wake has ever looked well that I've seen anyway this is a prime example of what happens if you have a card with like almost too much vram but they're not enough power to actually sort of utilize all of those higher end settings so let's turn it down to low though and actually yeah that has made quite a dramatic difference we're now looking at around 76 frames a second or so which granted is a lot lower than it was when rage tracing was disabled but to be fair in something like Alan Wake you don't need any more really than about sort of 70 80 FPS so this would definitely be worth giving it a go I mean the game just looks way better now as well it's I'm not sure what was going on before but it really messed up so actually in a way we've almost disproved my theory a little bit because we've got a game or two games actually that do utilize more than the 8 GB of vram and and still can run rage tracing with a decent enough frame rate again this is down in the tunnels though so once you get into more intense areas I'm sure we drop nearer to like 50 or so so with freyn that's probably fine but I mean you get the point right there are instances where this card will make sense regardless of whether it's modding creative or certain games like this I would say this is definitely a tough sale at launch I think the prices will probably come down a little bit like they have with the other AMD cards over time but it's for you to know really how much vram that you need I mean the most sensible option I think is to probably go and spend a little bit more money if you are wanting settings like this with something like the 7700 XT or the 7800 XT or frankly I would save my money and get either the RTX 460 or the regular 7600 as both of these cards still have ample performance but actually come in at slightly lower prices especially the normal 7600 and while it's not going to be quite as feature brief I would still argue that most people just want to keep this card for a few years and then upgrade it and get loads more performance but then probably have more vram with the future release I will also leave you with a quick noise test which is basically silent there's a tiny bit of coil wine but I mean that's only because the rest of the system is so quiet but the question very much goes out to you on this what do you make of the 7600 XT do you have any use cases where you think it would make sense for you to go out and buy one or do you agree with me that actually most Gamers will be better off with something else we' love to hear your thoughts on both this GPU and the rest of the system smash this like button if you've enjoyed this video get yourself subscribe so you don't miss more videos like this and of course if you do want to check out current pricing on anything that was featured in this video including links to both Amazon and ueg you can find everything listed down below with our affiliate links and while you're down there why not discover your next PC case with the NZXT 86 flow available in black or wh in both RGB or solid flavors you get everything you need to create your cleanest build yet with three angled fans fitted as standard USB type-c and 360 mil radiator support as well as an easy to use cable management system what's not to love grab yours today with the link down below but thank you so much for watching this video we'll catch you in the next [Music] one

Channel: PC Centric

Views: 41,857

Keywords: pccentric, gaming, pc gaming, gaming computer, pc centric, pc build, gaming pc, rx 7600 xt, rx 7600 xt build, gaming pc build guide, pc build 2024, budget gaming pc, 7600 xt gameplay, 7600 xt ray tracing, 7600 xt rt, 7600xt, budget gaming pc build, 12400f, prime ap201, ap201, ap201 build, pc centric 7600 xt, pc centric 12400f, pc centric budget build

Id: -PioimfoVJA

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024