Building with Ryzen: A Journey of Discovery and Exploration

We embarked on an ambitious project to build a high-performance gaming PC using the AMD Ryzen 3950X processor, and our journey was filled with excitement, challenges, and surprises. From the initial setup to the final product, we encountered numerous obstacles that pushed us to think creatively and outside the box.

One of the significant issues we faced was with the GPU detection. We were expecting the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti card to be detected by our motherboard, but it didn't happen. This led us back to the days of PCIe Gen 4 cards being detected as PCIe Gen 3 cards, which is a familiar problem for many builders. We shared our experience on Twitter, and after some troubleshooting, we discovered that reinstalling the RTX 3090 Ti card and switching the motherboard's PCIe signaling to Gen 3 resolved the issue.

Another challenge we encountered was with eco mode and its behavior on certain motherboards, specifically the ASUS ROG series. In most cases, RyZen Master is supposed to take over eco mode, but in our case, the motherboard seemed to override it. Fortunately, we found a workaround by enabling the 65W power mode, which allowed us to bypass the motherboard's interference and enjoy stable performance.

Temperatures and Performance

We were excited to see how our build would perform under heavy loads. Under full core load, the Ryzen 3950X stayed within an impressive temperature range of 80°C, while gaming both the CPU and GPU reached a maximum temperature of around 85°C. We ran an open test bench with the RTX 3090 Ti card, which yielded performance results that were virtually identical to those of our stock 3950X.

A closer examination of our case revealed that the GPU's exhaust system was causing some heat issues. The top-mounted design allowed for excellent airflow, but the exhaust air also flowed directly upwards, creating a mini-heat sink effect. We realized that this setup would lead to some excess heat being trapped in the area, which could impact performance.

To mitigate these effects, we experimented with modifying the case to force more air out of this hotspot region. By carefully observing the airflow patterns and tweaking the layout, we aimed to create a more efficient cooling system for our GPU. We're eager to try out this modification in future builds and see if it can lead to even better performance.

Tinker- Friendly Designs

We began this build project with a somewhat unorthodox approach – throwing together an assortment of parts to see what worked. However, as the build progressed, we found ourselves becoming increasingly invested in its potential. The case's unique design and our own creative problem-solving led us to appreciate this PC not just as a machine but also as a statement piece.

We're now keenly aware that our seven-liter case is an opportunity for customization and upgrade exploration. We invite our readers to share their suggestions for modifications, upgrades, or innovative ideas that could be implemented within the constraints of this compact form factor. By embracing this challenge, we can unlock new possibilities for PC building and make these creative solutions more accessible to a broader audience.

A Brief Detour: Poland

In the midst of our build journey, our minds wandered to other destinations, including Poland. We'd always been fascinated by Polish culture, cuisine, and language. Who wouldn't want to visit a land famous for its pierogies, latkes, and rich history? Unfortunately, none of us has ever set foot in Poland, but we're eager to change that soon. Perhaps one day, our journey will take us to this captivating country, where we'll immerse ourselves in the sights, sounds, and flavors of Polish culture.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engood people today we are gonna be pushing the limits of what's possible with an itx system by building an extreme itx pc into a super compact seven liter you heard that right seven liter case honestly i've never been this excited about a build before and i'm sure you guys are gonna love it why you may ask well that's because we're jamming in a 16 core processor and an rtx 39 d into a case that's sitting right next to my shoulder as you can tell it's the same size as a gpu box isn't that crazy i'm sure by now everybody knows what nvidia's new rtx 3000 series gpus can bring to the table the performance improvement over the previous generation it's just incredible but to get that kind of performance in an enclosure that's about the same size as one of those consoles that everyone's been talking about lately it's definitely going to be interesting so i'm really excited about this build i hope you guys are as well so let me walk you through the rest of the components right after we pay some bills the rival 3 wireless nice you get up to 400 hours of play time with two aaa batteries at 1 000 hertz that's plenty of time to own in games with a good shape user defined weight and the mouse that is also bluetooth ready the steel series rival 3 wireless check it out below okay so let's talk a little bit about the case because it's the main star of the show you see as we were doing our inventory before moving into the new office we came across this beautiful navy gray dr zaber sentry 2.0 itx case it's super compact comes in just under seven liters and it's i just love the way how it looks it's built really well it's compact it's super stealth and it just fits in within any environment taking a look at the case itself the first thing that stood out to me was the build quality this thing is built out of steel and then powder coated in gray you'll instantly notice the quality of craftsmanship when you lay your hand on it the side panels are perforated for both the cpu and the gpu one thing that you guys won't see in this case is a dust filter so we're getting pure unrestricted airflow but yeah that also means more dust as well it also has some really intelligent inwards and outwards airflow because of that basically the gpu and the cpu are in their own zones and both get direct access to fresh air through the perforations also since the gpu is mounted at the top a lot of the hot air will be exhausted out the top events too like with all cases you'll need to live with some limitations here there's no triple slot gpu support and if you choose a full length gpu you'll need to use an air cooler for the cpu and that air cooler is limited in height uh to just 47 millimeters you can orient the case both horizontally or vertically i chose to go with the vertical orientation because it looks better with the vertical stand attached now just keep in mind that just like other boutique itx case vendors dr zaber only does a limited production run every now and then based on how much interest they get recently they did post a tweet mentioning that this might be the last batch for the year now moving on to the cpu we chose the ryzen 9 3950x this is the fastest cpu that amd has come out with for the am4 platform featuring 16 cores and 32 threads now i know what most of you guys are thinking eber this processor has a tdp of 105 watts so you'll need to find adequate cooling solution to cool this processor well remember the air cooler restrictions that i talked about earlier with the sentry 2.0 case we had to be a little bit creative with that and so we decided to go with noctua's l9a chromax first of all this looks incredible with the matte black heatsink and the fan but most importantly its height is exactly 37 millimeters with the fan installed so we're right in line within the limits secondly we're gonna be running that 3950x in eco mode now that essentially limits its tdp to 65 watts which in theory will reduce its top end performance but you're still getting 32 threads and we'll talk about that a little bit later in the video housing the cpu and the cooler is the strix b550i gaming this board is just jam-packed with absolutely everything asus could possibly fit into a small form factor it has an eight plus two phase pwm design that's actively cooled by a fan and it's also the only motherboard in its entire lineup that supports memory speeds up to 5100 megahertz the primary m.2 slot is right over here with a heatsink for connectivity you name it and this board has it there's wi-fi 6 an intel 2.5 gigabit lan port plenty of usb 3.2 gen2 connectors and and built-in io shield the board's back is pretty straightforward but there is an additional m.2 slot and for those of you wondering we will be populating both m.2 slots with nvme ssds the primary slot is going to feature corsair's mp600 2 terabyte drive this is a gen 4 drive and given their insane bandwidth capabilities it does tend to run hot so the built-in heatsink on the motherboard should help dissipate that the rear slot will feature crucial's p5 2 terabyte gen 3 drive for memory crucial hooked us up with these amazing ballistics 32 gigabyte kit with a memory speed of 4 000 megahertz which we're running at 37 33 megahertz cl 17. i love the matte black industrial design on the heat spreader and it's low profile so we shouldn't run into any compatibility issues with the case all right so moving on to the gpu and this one was a really tough call to make you see initially we wanted to go with the rtx 3080 founders edition graphics card um it was dual slot gpu the dimensions were right in line within the case specs and let's be honest it's the best looking graphics card that i've ever seen the problem is the fan orientation nvidia designed the 3080 fe in such a way that it directly exhausts hot air at the back but then on the other side it's exhausting hot air into a blank panel which might get deflected into the general area like the motherboard and the psu area and that could increase interior case temperatures so we had to look elsewhere and guess what evga sent us their rtx 3090 xc3 dual slot card the cooling design on this gpu is pretty standard with the downdraft layout on top of a massive heatsink i'm not really a fan of how it looks especially with this thing over here that just sticks out like a sore thumb actually it does remind me of something i'm just gonna leave this here right now powering the entire build is silverstone's sx 700 watt 80 plus platinum rated power supply it's compact has plenty of power for the 39d and the 3950x so now that you're aware of what's going inside this beautiful navy gray sentry 2.0 case let's put this thing together and hope we don't run into any issues all right so the build is complete as you can see uh we're in a different setting and of course we have another member joining us uh mike say hello mike is back mike is back so uh it's been about a couple days since i've completed this build and honestly uh man i i got to deal i got to deal with a lot of the the optimizations and issues because it was actually at my place so um i've been working on this for a couple of days too and you might notice i look a little bit more tired because uh i wasn't originally convinced that this was going to work as well as it did but i was hell-bent on getting it optimized to the best of my abilities but that doesn't mean that there weren't some issues so i think ebay wants to start with one of those the first thing that i want to talk about is the non-sleeved cables uh with the power supply i had to actually uninstall a lot of the components to route the cables like the memory for instance uh and yeah it was just so frustrating honestly i just gave up to a point where like mike can you just come and do this for me he doesn't like cable routing so the problem with those those flat cables is that in order to get them through the case they're vertically flat and the last thing you want in such a slim chassis like this is something that's vertically high and then trying to sort of manipulate them and move them around it's a lot harder than just regular sleep cables but another issue that we ran into the second we started the system is that the gpu wasn't detected and that brought us back to the rx 5700 days when you plugged a pcie gen 4 card into a pcie gen 3.0 riser cable and in this case it's a sort of a riser pcb and it just wasn't detected by the motherboard we had that printing matrix thingy exactly we actually posted that on twitter and we're both laughing our asses off you first need to install an older gpu switch the motherboard over to gen 3 signaling reinstall the rtx 3000 series card and then it'll boot without a problem so the other thing i want to talk about quickly is eco mode and how we address that there's an issue with the asus rog motherboards where it's actually the motherboard itself that takes over eco mode in most situations what should happen is that ryzen master you should be able to enable eco mode there turn on precision boost overdrive in the bios and then basically ryzen master will take over that eco mode and there's no problem it seems like asus's bios is taking precedence over ryzen master luckily that rog motherboard you can just enable that 65 watt power mode and you're off to the race you only have to worry about ryzen master so i think we sort of want to transition at this point to temperatures and also clock speeds over time so under full core load the 3950x stayed under 80 degrees celsius and when gaming both the cpu and the gpu were around 85 degrees celsius max now performance in gaming versus the 3950x in an open test bench running at its default 105w tdp uh was literally the same since the gpu is being bottlenecked most of the time and the likely thread workloads have very similar results to the stock 3950x all right so i wanted to go into a little bit more about what's happening here with the temperatures so what's happening with the case right now is that the gpu is on the top and all of the it has direct access to cool air from the outside through a grill on this side but a lot of that heat is also being exhausted out the top here because what dr zebra did is they gave this whole case a compartmentalized approach what will end up happening in this case though is that there is going to be some excess heat that does get built up here because the gpu exhausts its air all the way around so what i really want to try is a modification maybe in another video where we try and force some air out of this area in order to speed up that cooling of the gpu now underneath there is still some heat soak from that gpu going into the general area of the cpu but what also happens here is that with the cpu getting fresh air from outside any of the heat is exhausted directly down into the the motherboard area but because of the additional perforations on the side a lot of that is also exhausted through there right now i think that we can do a couple more little voltage modifications in order to get the most out of that processor right now it's on a full core load it's performing really really well in gaming it's performing phenomenally yeah but i would like to see the temperatures just a little bit lower but i think what that also means is that even though this build started it off as a you know what we're just gonna put some crazy together we're gonna see if it actually works uh it's gone from that to i really want this as my main pc and i just want to tinker around with this so i hope you guys enjoyed this build i'm super jealous of mike in the first place because this case looks amazing but i also want to hear from you guys do you guys have any suggestions about potential you know upgrades or potential mods that we might be able to do inside a seven liter case let us know in the comments uh thank you so much for watching and we'll talk to you guys in the next one see you guys it's made in poland oh it is yes okay well yeah that's great have you been to poland no i haven't oh no i want to go there one time out of anywhere you can go in this world why poland no offense to any polish people but i want to know this it's a burning question of mine uh i've heard really good things about like the polish culture and like a lot of these like i know my high school english teacher was a polish was polish and when she used to teach like english well listen lessons and things like that she brings in some of her like cultural uh examples and it's it's i mean to me it was fascinating so plus you get pierogies you get latkes okay all the good food mangood people today we are gonna be pushing the limits of what's possible with an itx system by building an extreme itx pc into a super compact seven liter you heard that right seven liter case honestly i've never been this excited about a build before and i'm sure you guys are gonna love it why you may ask well that's because we're jamming in a 16 core processor and an rtx 39 d into a case that's sitting right next to my shoulder as you can tell it's the same size as a gpu box isn't that crazy i'm sure by now everybody knows what nvidia's new rtx 3000 series gpus can bring to the table the performance improvement over the previous generation it's just incredible but to get that kind of performance in an enclosure that's about the same size as one of those consoles that everyone's been talking about lately it's definitely going to be interesting so i'm really excited about this build i hope you guys are as well so let me walk you through the rest of the components right after we pay some bills the rival 3 wireless nice you get up to 400 hours of play time with two aaa batteries at 1 000 hertz that's plenty of time to own in games with a good shape user defined weight and the mouse that is also bluetooth ready the steel series rival 3 wireless check it out below okay so let's talk a little bit about the case because it's the main star of the show you see as we were doing our inventory before moving into the new office we came across this beautiful navy gray dr zaber sentry 2.0 itx case it's super compact comes in just under seven liters and it's i just love the way how it looks it's built really well it's compact it's super stealth and it just fits in within any environment taking a look at the case itself the first thing that stood out to me was the build quality this thing is built out of steel and then powder coated in gray you'll instantly notice the quality of craftsmanship when you lay your hand on it the side panels are perforated for both the cpu and the gpu one thing that you guys won't see in this case is a dust filter so we're getting pure unrestricted airflow but yeah that also means more dust as well it also has some really intelligent inwards and outwards airflow because of that basically the gpu and the cpu are in their own zones and both get direct access to fresh air through the perforations also since the gpu is mounted at the top a lot of the hot air will be exhausted out the top events too like with all cases you'll need to live with some limitations here there's no triple slot gpu support and if you choose a full length gpu you'll need to use an air cooler for the cpu and that air cooler is limited in height uh to just 47 millimeters you can orient the case both horizontally or vertically i chose to go with the vertical orientation because it looks better with the vertical stand attached now just keep in mind that just like other boutique itx case vendors dr zaber only does a limited production run every now and then based on how much interest they get recently they did post a tweet mentioning that this might be the last batch for the year now moving on to the cpu we chose the ryzen 9 3950x this is the fastest cpu that amd has come out with for the am4 platform featuring 16 cores and 32 threads now i know what most of you guys are thinking eber this processor has a tdp of 105 watts so you'll need to find adequate cooling solution to cool this processor well remember the air cooler restrictions that i talked about earlier with the sentry 2.0 case we had to be a little bit creative with that and so we decided to go with noctua's l9a chromax first of all this looks incredible with the matte black heatsink and the fan but most importantly its height is exactly 37 millimeters with the fan installed so we're right in line within the limits secondly we're gonna be running that 3950x in eco mode now that essentially limits its tdp to 65 watts which in theory will reduce its top end performance but you're still getting 32 threads and we'll talk about that a little bit later in the video housing the cpu and the cooler is the strix b550i gaming this board is just jam-packed with absolutely everything asus could possibly fit into a small form factor it has an eight plus two phase pwm design that's actively cooled by a fan and it's also the only motherboard in its entire lineup that supports memory speeds up to 5100 megahertz the primary m.2 slot is right over here with a heatsink for connectivity you name it and this board has it there's wi-fi 6 an intel 2.5 gigabit lan port plenty of usb 3.2 gen2 connectors and and built-in io shield the board's back is pretty straightforward but there is an additional m.2 slot and for those of you wondering we will be populating both m.2 slots with nvme ssds the primary slot is going to feature corsair's mp600 2 terabyte drive this is a gen 4 drive and given their insane bandwidth capabilities it does tend to run hot so the built-in heatsink on the motherboard should help dissipate that the rear slot will feature crucial's p5 2 terabyte gen 3 drive for memory crucial hooked us up with these amazing ballistics 32 gigabyte kit with a memory speed of 4 000 megahertz which we're running at 37 33 megahertz cl 17. i love the matte black industrial design on the heat spreader and it's low profile so we shouldn't run into any compatibility issues with the case all right so moving on to the gpu and this one was a really tough call to make you see initially we wanted to go with the rtx 3080 founders edition graphics card um it was dual slot gpu the dimensions were right in line within the case specs and let's be honest it's the best looking graphics card that i've ever seen the problem is the fan orientation nvidia designed the 3080 fe in such a way that it directly exhausts hot air at the back but then on the other side it's exhausting hot air into a blank panel which might get deflected into the general area like the motherboard and the psu area and that could increase interior case temperatures so we had to look elsewhere and guess what evga sent us their rtx 3090 xc3 dual slot card the cooling design on this gpu is pretty standard with the downdraft layout on top of a massive heatsink i'm not really a fan of how it looks especially with this thing over here that just sticks out like a sore thumb actually it does remind me of something i'm just gonna leave this here right now powering the entire build is silverstone's sx 700 watt 80 plus platinum rated power supply it's compact has plenty of power for the 39d and the 3950x so now that you're aware of what's going inside this beautiful navy gray sentry 2.0 case let's put this thing together and hope we don't run into any issues all right so the build is complete as you can see uh we're in a different setting and of course we have another member joining us uh mike say hello mike is back mike is back so uh it's been about a couple days since i've completed this build and honestly uh man i i got to deal i got to deal with a lot of the the optimizations and issues because it was actually at my place so um i've been working on this for a couple of days too and you might notice i look a little bit more tired because uh i wasn't originally convinced that this was going to work as well as it did but i was hell-bent on getting it optimized to the best of my abilities but that doesn't mean that there weren't some issues so i think ebay wants to start with one of those the first thing that i want to talk about is the non-sleeved cables uh with the power supply i had to actually uninstall a lot of the components to route the cables like the memory for instance uh and yeah it was just so frustrating honestly i just gave up to a point where like mike can you just come and do this for me he doesn't like cable routing so the problem with those those flat cables is that in order to get them through the case they're vertically flat and the last thing you want in such a slim chassis like this is something that's vertically high and then trying to sort of manipulate them and move them around it's a lot harder than just regular sleep cables but another issue that we ran into the second we started the system is that the gpu wasn't detected and that brought us back to the rx 5700 days when you plugged a pcie gen 4 card into a pcie gen 3.0 riser cable and in this case it's a sort of a riser pcb and it just wasn't detected by the motherboard we had that printing matrix thingy exactly we actually posted that on twitter and we're both laughing our asses off you first need to install an older gpu switch the motherboard over to gen 3 signaling reinstall the rtx 3000 series card and then it'll boot without a problem so the other thing i want to talk about quickly is eco mode and how we address that there's an issue with the asus rog motherboards where it's actually the motherboard itself that takes over eco mode in most situations what should happen is that ryzen master you should be able to enable eco mode there turn on precision boost overdrive in the bios and then basically ryzen master will take over that eco mode and there's no problem it seems like asus's bios is taking precedence over ryzen master luckily that rog motherboard you can just enable that 65 watt power mode and you're off to the race you only have to worry about ryzen master so i think we sort of want to transition at this point to temperatures and also clock speeds over time so under full core load the 3950x stayed under 80 degrees celsius and when gaming both the cpu and the gpu were around 85 degrees celsius max now performance in gaming versus the 3950x in an open test bench running at its default 105w tdp uh was literally the same since the gpu is being bottlenecked most of the time and the likely thread workloads have very similar results to the stock 3950x all right so i wanted to go into a little bit more about what's happening here with the temperatures so what's happening with the case right now is that the gpu is on the top and all of the it has direct access to cool air from the outside through a grill on this side but a lot of that heat is also being exhausted out the top here because what dr zebra did is they gave this whole case a compartmentalized approach what will end up happening in this case though is that there is going to be some excess heat that does get built up here because the gpu exhausts its air all the way around so what i really want to try is a modification maybe in another video where we try and force some air out of this area in order to speed up that cooling of the gpu now underneath there is still some heat soak from that gpu going into the general area of the cpu but what also happens here is that with the cpu getting fresh air from outside any of the heat is exhausted directly down into the the motherboard area but because of the additional perforations on the side a lot of that is also exhausted through there right now i think that we can do a couple more little voltage modifications in order to get the most out of that processor right now it's on a full core load it's performing really really well in gaming it's performing phenomenally yeah but i would like to see the temperatures just a little bit lower but i think what that also means is that even though this build started it off as a you know what we're just gonna put some crazy together we're gonna see if it actually works uh it's gone from that to i really want this as my main pc and i just want to tinker around with this so i hope you guys enjoyed this build i'm super jealous of mike in the first place because this case looks amazing but i also want to hear from you guys do you guys have any suggestions about potential you know upgrades or potential mods that we might be able to do inside a seven liter case let us know in the comments uh thank you so much for watching and we'll talk to you guys in the next one see you guys it's made in poland oh it is yes okay well yeah that's great have you been to poland no i haven't oh no i want to go there one time out of anywhere you can go in this world why poland no offense to any polish people but i want to know this it's a burning question of mine uh i've heard really good things about like the polish culture and like a lot of these like i know my high school english teacher was a polish was polish and when she used to teach like english well listen lessons and things like that she brings in some of her like cultural uh examples and it's it's i mean to me it was fascinating so plus you get pierogies you get latkes okay all the good food man\n"