WE’RE REALLY PLEASED with how this
system turned out, because building it
wasn’t easy. The NZXT H1 is a fantastic case
with a bunch of cool innovations that benefit
its small form factor, but actually building
in it is an exercise in cramped spaces and
fiddly cabling. Were we to start afresh, we
might wait until the motherboard cables are
all in place before installing the memory,
as it got in our way while we were trying to
connect the ATX motherboard power cable.
Thankfully, though, once we closed
the case up and plugged this bad boy in,
it booted and ran perfectly straight away.Praise be! All too often we have to delve
back in to rectify a little mistake that
prevents a boot. Not this time around,
though. We got our peripherals and
monitor set up and boom, the pre-loaded
copy of Windows 10 on the Corsair Force
MP600 is up and running.
The first thing we noticed is the noise.
Yes, this build isn’t exactly quiet, although
it obviously pales in comparison to bigger,
beefier machines. The main offender here
is the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super FE; the flat
twin fans are quite loud, though only when
the card is running at load. We detecta faint bit of pump whine from the AIO
cooler too, although the 140mm radiator
fan seems to run quietly. The system
makes very little noise when idling or
during low-intensity tasks.
The Ryzen 9 3950X demolishes our
benchmarks, as expected. This 16-
core beast chews through CPU-bound
tasks with ease, nailing great scores in
Cinebench and Fry Render, among others.
Gaming performance still lags a bit
behind Intel, but this will only affect CPU-
bound titles like Total War: Warhammer II.
General graphical performance in games
and real-time rendering is fantastic,
which is no surprise given the powerful
GPU we’re using. However, a factory-
overclocked model of the RTX 2080 Super
from a third-party manufacturer is liable
to perform better.
In fact, we had originally planned to use
an MSI graphics card for this build. All was
going well until we reached Step 12... then
couldn’t fit the GPU inside the case. We
tried everything: Removing the front I/O
to clear some room, unscrewing the PCIe
riser to plug it in before trying to mount
the card, even disassembling the entire
top half of the case. Nothing worked. But
we’d checked the height clearance! Turns
out that wasn’t our problem, though. The
card we had initially chosen was too wide
for the space. Learn from our mistakes,
dear readers—find a compact card.ALL-ROUND PERFORMER
Anyway... back to assessing this build’s
performance. It’s great across the
board, really: Renders are speedy, and
file transfers are more or less as fast
as you’re going to get. The Force MP600
SSD gets mighty close to that coveted
5GB/s, although performance is a smidge
lower than we were expecting: Probably
because this B550 board can’t handle the
drive quite as well as a more expensive
X570. Still, you’re not likely to notice
any difference in practice. The MP600
remains blazing fast, streamlining bulk
data transfers and trivializing load times
in games.
One area our system seemed to fall
down on was memory performance.A small machine that packs a big punch
COMPACT COMPUTING
CONCLUSIONS
compact computing
26 MAXIMUM PC SEP 2020 maximumpc.com
BENCHMARKS
ZERO-
POINT
Cinebench R15 Single (Index) 192 214 (11%)Cinebench R15 Multi (Index) 2,952 3,985 (35%)Te ch A RP x 26 4 (fp s) 61.08 79.09 (29%)Fry Render (m:s) 1:17 1:10 (9%)AIDA64 Memory Bandwidth
(MB/s) 55,051 38,961 (-29%)AIDA64 Memory Latency (ns) 71.4 93.9 (-32%)SSD 1: CrystalDisk QD8
Sequential Read (MB/s) 4,992 4,924 (-1%)SSD 1: CrystalDisk QD8
Sequential Write (MB/s) 4,284 4,252 (-1%)SSD 1: CrystalDisk QD1
Random 4K Read (MB/s)^6046 (-23%)SSD 1: CrystalDisk QD1
Random 4K Write (MB/s)^220 237 (8%)Adobe Premiere Pro 5-Minute
4K Render (m:s) 1:19 1:11 (10%)Adobe After Effects
10-Second 4K Render (m:s) 6:14 5:27 (13%)Total War: Warhammer II (fps) 54 46 (-15%)3D Mark: Firestrike (Index) 21,453 24,539 (14%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Our zero-point consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, 32GB (4x8GB) G.Skill Trident Z RGB Neo @ 3600,
an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Super XC Ultra, and a 1TB Corsair Force MP600 M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD.
All game tests were performed at 3440x1440 on Ultra.