(^1)
The case airflow is
excellent, with air
being expelled from the
rear and upper side vents.
(^2)
Corsair’s iCue
software can be
used to customize the 24
addressable LEDs we’ve
got in our memory.
(^3)
The construction
quality of the A500
TG case is unquestionable,
but it’s seriously heavy; a
lot of work to carry about.
LOOKING AT THE NUMBERS, we’re
pleased with how this turned out. Roughly
20 percent performance improvement
over our zero-point 1440p system is in
line with the theoretical improvement of
the 2070 Super over the GTX 1080 that
system uses, and broader graphical
performance in Fire Strike Extreme is
great, too. The eight cores of the Ryzen 7
3800X work hard, hitting a good score in
Cinebench R15 with no overclocking.
There’s room for overclocking in both
the CPU and GPU. The 3800X can hit as
high as 4.5GHz with a manual overclock,
potentially higher on individual cores
with Ryzen Master’s auto-overclocking
mode—although you’re constrained by
the silicon lottery to a degree; the highest
manual clock we reached was 4.3GHz.
Cooling is well handled by this case, with
great airflow that kept idle temps very
low. The GPU and memory idle at 28 C,
while the CPU varies from 30 C to 45 C.
At maximum stress, the CPU peaked
at 68 C, proving that air cooling is very
much a viable option. Running graphical
benchmarks didn’t see the GPU
temperatures rise above 60 C, either.
This system should be able to play just
about any game on 1440p ultra settings,
with ray tracing as a definite option as
well, provided you’re willing to drop your
settings a tad to keep the frame rates
steady. GPU overclocking makes 4K ultra
a distinct possibility in some games, too.
Were we to build this rig again,
we’d make a few tweaks. You might be
wondering why we removed all the case
fans when there’s room for at least one
or two to stay—that’s because the MEG
X570 Unify only has seven fan headers,
and our build has seven fans. Seven
independently powered fans, anyway;
if you include the GPU and mobo fans,
this is a 10-fan machine. It’s surprisingly
quiet, though, as the Fractal Design case
fans are designed for minimum noise.
A fan controller might have been a
good addition, allowing for a couple of
extra fans in the front and roof, while
adding hardware RGB control. We didn’t
use the small physical RGB controller
included with the MA610P cooler,
because it wouldn’t have been properly
compatible with the fans. A PWM fan hub
would improve control; using the pump
header for a fan means the fan curves
have to be manually tweaked in the BIOS.
Talking of which, remember to engage
A-XMP in the BIOS. Running the memory
at full speed is important when using an
AMD processor; while some programs
only see very minor improvements,
Cinebench R15 saw a 9 percent rise in
performance when A-XMP was turned
on. There’s also Game Boost, which cuts
your core use in half, but drew a few extra
frames out of each game on our list (the
figures in the table are using A-XMP
only). Using Game Boost increases fan
noise, though, so experiment with it.
Our zero-point consists of an Intel Core i5-8400, 16GB (2x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX @ 2,666MT/s, an MSI GeForce GTX
1080 Armor, and a 500GB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 PCIe SSD. All tests were performed at 1440p at the highest graphical profile.
BENCHMARKS
ZERO-
POINT
Cinebench R15
Multi-Thread (Index)^959 2,144 (124%)
CrystalDisk QD32
Sequential Read (MB/s) 3,442 4,971 (44%)
CrystalDisk QD32
Sequential Write (MB/s) 1,706 4,252 (149%)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (fps) 95 107 (13%)
Total War: Warhammer II (fps) 55 70 (27%)
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Wildlands (fps)^48 58 (21%)
3DMark: Fire Strike Extreme 9,126 11,813 (29%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
maximumpc.com MAR 2020 MAXIMUMPC 33
BIG, BLUE, AND BEAUTIFUL
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antfer
(Antfer)
#1