AMD B550 + Ryzen 3300X Gaming PC Build - Benchmarks, Upgrades, & Overclocking ($600-$900)
### Article Based on the Provided Text
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#### **Introduction**
The provided text details a comprehensive guide to building a PC, focusing on selecting components like the CPU, GPU, motherboard, cooling system, power supply, and case. The article emphasizes testing various configurations and their performance outcomes in different gaming scenarios. Below is the full text reorganized into a readable format for clarity and ease of understanding.
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#### **Building a High-Performance PC: A Comprehensive Guide**
The following guide outlines the process of building a high-performance PC tailored for gaming and general-purpose use. The article discusses component selection, testing methodologies, and performance benchmarks to ensure optimal system performance.
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### **Component Selection and Testing**
#### **CPU Considerations**
The CPU is the heart of any PC build, and the 3300 X was chosen for its balance of performance and affordability. The text highlights the importance of cooling solutions, as the stock cooler proved insufficient for heavy workloads like Blender rendering. Upgrading to a better cooler, such as the *be quiet! Shadow Rock 3*, was essential for maintaining stable temperatures during overclocking.
#### **Cooling Solutions**
Thermal management is critical for ensuring longevity and performance. The text details how the stock cooler struggled to keep the CPU cool under load, leading to frequency drops. Upgrading to a tower cooler like the *be quiet! Shadow Rock 3* significantly improved thermal performance, allowing the CPU to maintain higher frequencies during heavy workloads.
#### **Motherboard and Power Delivery**
The motherboard's power delivery (P-D) system directly impacts CPU performance. The Asus ROG Crosshair VI Hero was tested for its ability to handle the 3300 X's power requirements. While the board performed adequately, it was noted that under-reporting of power usage could affect overclocking stability.
#### **Power Supply Selection**
A reliable power supply is essential for consistent performance. The text recommends a 450-600W PSU for this build, emphasizing efficiency and quality over raw wattage. This ensures the system operates smoothly without compromising component longevity.
#### **Case Options**
The case plays a dual role in aesthetics and thermal management. The Lian Li P30A was praised for its affordability and ability to handle additional fans, making it an excellent choice for budget builds. However, adding extra fans is recommended to ensure optimal airflow.
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### **Gaming Benchmarks**
#### **Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2)**
The build achieved impressive performance in RDR2 at 1080p with high settings:
- Stock configuration: 70 FPS average.
- Overclocked configuration: 73 FPS average.
These results demonstrate the system's capability to handle modern AAA games smoothly, even when paired with a mid-range GPU like the RTX 2060 KO.
#### **Shadow of the Tomb Raider**
The Tomb Raider benchmarks revealed similar performance trends:
- Stock configuration: 103 FPS average at 1080p.
- Overclocked configuration: 105 FPS average.
While the gains from overclocking were minimal in this GPU-bound scenario, the system still performed well overall.
#### **F1 2019**
At 4K, the build struggled due to the high graphical demands of F1 2019. However, it managed to achieve playable frame rates at lower settings, showcasing its potential for competitive gaming.
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### **Performance Analysis and Recommendations**
The text highlights that pairing the 3300 X with a mid-range GPU like the RTX 2060 KO or RTX 2070 Super is ideal for balanced performance. Upgrading to a higher-end CPU like the Ryzen 5 5600X or Ryzen 5 5700 XT could further enhance performance in CPU-bound tasks.
For those seeking better thermal management and quieter operation, upgrading to an aftermarket cooler like the *be quiet! Shadow Rock 3* is highly recommended. Additionally, investing in a higher-quality power supply ensures long-term stability and efficiency.
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### **Conclusion**
This guide provides a detailed breakdown of building a high-performance PC tailored for gaming and general-purpose use. By focusing on component selection, thermal management, and performance testing, the article highlights the importance of balancing cost and performance to achieve optimal results. Whether you're an enthusiast or a casual gamer, this build offers a solid foundation for achieving great performance without breaking the bank.
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This reorganized version maintains the original content while improving readability and structure for a broader audience.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe're doing a mid-range gaming PC build for AMD Rison today specifically using the new and the B 550 motherboard so that's the point of the build is to try one of those out our content includes detailed testing and charts including things like power consumption some baseline thermals gaming performance a lot of overclocking and memory tuning efforts and more and more importantly this is our first attempt at a new format for us of PC builds that we're referring to as PC build templates since we're basing our builds heavily off of data and testing like from our reviews we're playing with the idea of doing this templated rather than just providing a firm list of exactly what parts to buy this one solves the availability and supply issues right now and - it gives you the expected freedom to modify the build and still have data that's useful to figure out how good it's going to be so this provides a modular list with enough benchmarks that you can figure out which components to drop in and for anything else will point you to dedicated content throughout this video that might help further in things like overclocking tuning case selection power supplies all that kind of stuff so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by us and our brand new gamers Nexus wireframe mouse mat aside from being the best way to directly support our long-form investigative reporting you can also get a custom made high quality mouse mat made with a high detail 3d design that we created to show off heat sinks coolers of video cards and more the mouse mat uses a stitch to blue border for added longevity a blue rubber underside for unique Flair and a microfiber cloth first smooth tracking the mat is 36 inches by 12 inches and fits a keyboard and mouse easily we sold out of the first run in 48 hours but have more getting made right now to backorder your mouse mat and ensure you get one in the next run go to store gamers nexus net and backorder yours while reducing our reliance on advertisers or click the link in the description below so the objectives today we are as stated doing a template which means we're gonna give you a list of parts that we use for this build but we've swapped stuff in and out different GPUs we've got a CPU overclock in memory tuning versus just straight XMP depending on how adventurous you feel we have different cooler selections all kinds of stuff like that so that it it gives you a fuller picture as to what happens if Part A or B is out of stock or if you just decide you want something different than what we've chosen the data is still there to support what you're trying to ultimately build so for this one we did use an ace USB 550 motherboard it's a $150 motherboard it's the cheapest one that we've received so far so keeping in mind that we started this testing a little bit before embargo lifted so it's not like we could buy them yet we're working with parts that we received ahead of launch and that means the cheapest one we had was the $150 Asus tough gaming plus B 550 board and that board for a lot of reasons was a pain in the ass to work with for overclocking memory tuning but the well specifically memory tuning the overclocking wasn't too bad but the rest of it was all very straightforward we don't have any major gripes we'll talk about it as we go through this and what the downsides are there are obviously a lot of be 550 boards out there at this point we haven't really worked with many of them but this is the one we've worked with for this review and that brings us to the other point of the way we do PC builds for our PC builds we don't just throw parts together randomly we specifically test everything at some point or another so these are things that have emerged from reviews or at least internal testing at one point which to to support the selection of the parts we have data is what we're getting at here so there are a million ways or more to build a PC you might have a different idea for what cooler motherboard whatever you want to use maybe something's on sale whatever go for it is plenty of ways to do it this is the way we're doing it and we chose these because we know they work together so the parts chosen we have a the $150 motherboard as stated we've got some footage of that that's new we have a $60 case but there are plenty of other options out there it's $10 off now in the u.s. at least so it's about 50 but we do strongly recommend that you add a 7 to $10 120 mil fan minimally and you can see our fan tax p300 a review for more information specifically on that point so P 380 we've done a full individual review on one of the nice things about the case working with it especially with this larger cooler if you go with the shadow rock 3 as opposed to the stock air cooler this thing like most large coolers its size is feisty so I did get at least one cut while working with it when connecting the EPS cable the upside is that the top panel of the P 300 a very much to its credit because this is can be removed and we have shots of that from era p300 a review and so it's pretty easy to get in there and access stuff which we liked in the review but you check the review of the case for more information on stuff like that other parts the 3300 ex is our go-to CPU for absolute budget but highest performance possible gaming at the budget the GPU we chose is the RT X 2060 KO we can show some charts from the 2060 KO benchmarks we did but that one was really interesting to us because it Nvidia accidentally forgot to turn some parts of the die off for the revision of the 2060 the new dies they released that were just 28 es repurposed those things fused off they didn't fuse all of it off and so it ends up being actually really advanced for things like blender as opposed to where it should fall and so we like that card for that reason it's also a reasonable gaming card at the cost and you're not gonna bottleneck on the cpu we've done a whole bottleneck benchmark and you can go almost up to a 20 atti on the CPU you shouldn't but you could for the most part okay rest of the parts for memory we used some t4s Ram it's just the blackout version I think they call it dark za or something but we had it lying around and it happens to be about $70 so it's some of the cheaper Ram that we have that's still good - reasonable at least PSU we recommend about a 50 to $60 power supply we'll talk about the power spec in a bit and then some hard drive or SSD rather would be the better choice but you're spending something about maybe $70 for a baseline there and then maybe a game storage drive the cooler is optional we chose this one first day on the shelf but that's about 47 bucks we've got thermal numbers for you and the rest of this as far as memory tuning goes when you see the numbers for overclocking on tuning we end up doing a 4.4 gigahertz all core OC on the 3300 X we already have a bunch of data on that from our reviews and for this specific kit of memory which is different from our review memory we tuned it a bit so we did all the primary timings we tuned Tifa TR c t-- c WL obviously Rask ass RTR dt w TR c ke a couple others in there and spent most of a day on this kit this amount of work would have normally taken maybe two hours or so one to two hours on a high on board but because of the limited troubleshooting capabilities okay let's get into it the motherboard deserves early discussion we decided to work with the cheapest of the AMD B 550 boards that we've received thus far just to see how it works at the low end we're mixed on it overall the Asus tough gaming be 550 plus we used is supposed to be sold for about $150 and considered we're just powering a 4 core 8 thread CPU with relatively low power requirements it doesn't take much of a vrm or vrm heatsink to run it that said it does lose almost every single useful tuning feature aside from debug LEDs and that makes memory tuning a nightmare without a retry and without any baked in safe boot features which would retain BIOS settings without applying them most of the memory overclocking experience on this board is spent staring at a black screen and pulling the CMOS battery that's the easiest way to get into BIOS after a failed set of memory timings so it's a bit of a deterrent to actually go in try hard mode because there's a good chance you'll end up pulling the CMOS battery anyway that really slows things down for memory tuning you can save and load profiles but it's still nothing like working with a higher-end board for OC it'd be way worse if you had already built the system because then you'd be crawling around on the floor to pull the battery out between failed overclocks and that might also include removing the GPU there's no built-in button on this board that actually works for clearing CMOS at least in our experience thus far so pulling the battery was the best way we'd recommend tuning it on an open bench before ever assembling the system that way you can dial it in with the least amount of frustration possible on this particular motherboard CPU overclocking is still straightforward and it retains most of the mainstream features that you'd want from the higher-end boards if you're not doing anything too crazy it's not as debug friendly as something like a high-end x5 70 board but if you're just doing something like a 4.3 or 4.4 gigahertz all core overclock that's really not any different on this platform than the others there's still the usual mess of an these triple redundant settings all over the BIOS some of that is a.m. these problems some of it is on the board maker but ultimately there's nothing really new here if you're new to memory timings tuning and overclocking and want to get some of the benefits from it the hours saved for going with a board that has safe boot would really justify the price and a lot of instances for anyone less serious are not intending to tune memory this is less of a concern as for the rest we'll put a chart on the screen for Andy's be 550 versus X 570 chipset differences this comes from a separate video and article we ran on B 550 versus X 570 trips that differences so if you were wondering what the actual result is from going to be 550 and saving some money this is what it looks like the B 550 chipset only changes a few things first you lose PCIe gen 4 from the chipset but you keep support from the CPU that means boards that pull PCIe lanes from the CPU will still get gen 4 speeds so that include the top slot on nearly every motherboard you also get Gen 4 nvme on most boards from the CPU and that's really all there is to it if you're worried about X 570 vs. B 550 differences aside from auxilliary features the only real point of consideration is the PCIe generation support from the chipset check our chipset differences content for more discussion on this and we'll link that below as well for the CPU we're using the AMD r3 3300 X we've done some tuning content on this in the past if you're curious how that looks but will flash through some of the charts of our recent eye 310 100 CPU review to show you the newest of our game benchmark data that highlights the performance differences of the 3300 x stock and overclocked especially as compared to other similarly priced CPUs another item to glance at would be the 3100 in these charts and note again that these charts they're focused on CPU benchmarks and reviews so that means this is trying to present a scenario where the CPU is constrained rather than the GPU will look at a GPU constrained build the specific set of benchmarks after this even when we heavily tuned to the AMD r3 3100 in a separate peace with all core infinity fabric and memory tuning we were unable to get it above the 3,300 X in almost all metrics especially if applying simple all core OC to the 3300 acts at the same time this is because the 3300 X uses a single CC X we have some block diagrams for this that we can show to illustrate the differences that means no splitting of the cache and no CC x to CC x latency to worry about on the 3300 X which uses a 4 + 0 configuration rather than two plus two there's more of this in our 3300 acts tuning video and in the 3300 acts review if you're interested to learn more gaming performance as you can see in these quick charts that we're flashing through from our reviews is about as high as you'll get from AMD on the CPU side it's not really worth upgrading from the r34 only gaming to something like a 3600 but an hour 5 3600 to make a lot of sense as a budget choice for someone interested in the extra thread count and there is value if you do something like tile based rendering and say cycles renderer with blender or you do maybe cycles CPU plus CUDA or optics then the 3600 would be well worth the investment if none of that really sounds like something you do and you don't plan to work with any production applications and r3 is definitely enough for gaming at least today the i5 10 600 K would be our next step up recommendation for gaming for which we've got plenty of benchmarks and tuning content on on the channel but then that's a completely different bill we ran some open air thermals to establish a baseline of overclocking capabilities with an all core CPU workload using blender cycles to render a scene tile by tile we quickly found the stock 3300 X cooler inadequate for anything that would involve heavier overclocking especially because we want to hold four point four gigahertz and all work loads including blender and gaming alike we need to consider a cooler upgrade for our PC build so this is the first optional add-on you'd do if you wanted to expand the budget and it's one that we think is definitely worth it from an enthusiast standpoint the stock cooler at max fan speeds ran at about 83 degrees for half of the render eventually hitting steady-state slowly and painfully at 90 degrees Celsius TDI for the heavy all core workload precision breeze to Hertz the clocks at this point although this is something of a real-world worst-case scenario for all core and by real-world what we mean is this isn't prime95 this is an application you might actually use in the old world use that said games will run cooler and games are often bound by the GPU or loaded heavily on it anyway so thermals aren't as concerning there you really want a case fan pointed near or at these downdraft coolers to help things out throwing a be quiet shadow rock 3 on there which is about $47 you as it's just the first thing we pulled off the shelf we were able to maintain in the range of 73 degrees Celsius with the stock result overclocking the 3300 X to 4.4 gigahertz and holding a get voltage of 1 point 3 6 2 v core we ran at about 77 to 79 degrees Celsius the shadow rock 3 or similar tower coolers of which there are plenty you mind you would be a good choice for anyone interested in more advanced overclocking with the CPU remember that this board is trying to cheat the power numbers whether intentionally or not so that means more power budget available to the CPU that doesn't mean it uses it though and we'll look at that in a moment here's a recent CPU thermal chart from one of our case reviews this uses our standardized case test bench so it's a different build and then our build today clearly but it provides a baseline from which you can determine a good case for your build especially if you're doing something that's at our cooler oriented configuration because then the results in the hierarchy will be about the same as here the P 300 a with two extra fans totally in about $70 would be one of the cheaper paths to acceptable cooling while the P 400 a RGB or a TD 500 at about 90 to 100 dollars would be the higher-end solutions without the need to buy extra fans we do think if you look at our P 300 a review this is probably one of the better budget courses to getting the cheap case right now but it really does need at least one extra fan thrown into it this next chart is zoomed in to look at frequency over time on the B 550 built tested with the stock cooler and with the shadow rock 3 in our open air configuration again cases are going to be worse in general than open air so use our case review charge to determine the right case for your build this one provides us a pure baseline that is not really influenced by anything else in this scenario the 3300 acts with its stock cooler fell to about 40 93 megahertz all core which is entirely due to thermals and some power leakage a lot of cases will really exacerbate that and make it a lot worse the shadow rock 3 had a much more dynamic frequency that was less thermally constrained posting an all-court average of about 4200 240 to 10 megahertz that's a significant uplift and as thanks to our precision boost 2 works as we've shown in the past and we'll put our r9 thermal frequency chart up now from our ln2 experiments every 5 degrees south or so of change will net a frequency impact with precision boost to which is not the same as precision boosting overdrive it may be worth considering the better cooler even if running stock it's capable of lower temperatures out of quieter noise level but also natively boosts performance without a manual OC just due to PB - as for power reporting deviation the asus board under reports by a lot we recently ran an in-depth research piece on hardware infos power reporting deviation metric which is useful for determining how far off a motherboard is from baseline of 100% power reporting the power reporting deviation metric is one that is useful only under 100% all core workloads but that's what this test is so we can see that the asus board under-reported from a baseline of 100 percent down to 83 to 87 percent this means that the board is tricking the CPU just like a shunt mod would on a GPU into thinking it's drawing less power than it really is this means that it's permitting a higher power budget then is natively intended that doesn't mean the CPU is actually drawing that much power but rather that it can ideally this number should read 100% anything greater than a 5 to 7 percent deviation downward begins to get into questionable territory of resembling what functionally amounts to PBO reapplied maybe asus will update this with a later bios version as we saw with asrock in our initial research piece where the special review bios was cheating the terms of peril omits a lot more than the later bios's moving on from the motherboard we next needs to determine how much power is necessary for this build and our CPU reviews we tests at the EPS 12-volt cables to cleanly measure the preview ram efficiency lost power consumption numbers will show two of those power consumption charts on the screen and highlight the 3300 ex stock and OC results these are from our 10 100 review which is one of the most recent CPE reviews and first note that the OC results will change based on the voltage configured so it's not just magically that power consumption because it's that frequency it depends on the voltage you set just like the stock numbers depend on the voltage that the motherboard OTO applies if that's how you use it second this number only gets us part of the equation to determine the total power supply wattage that we need for a build which is what this is today we need to test the total system our consumption instead here's the total system power consumption numbers idle with windows in the rise in performance mode we're at 47 watts stock and 66 overclocked that includes a higher memory and SOC voltage for the OC mind you but overall this is about what we'd expect or something where we've disabled at least some of the power saving options and windows especially simple youtube playback runs at 66 watts and 73 for total system power consumption when overclocked the highest number we measured overall was the overclocked f1 4k results marked at 260 Watts red dead twos gaming results at 1080p medium which is a pretty balanced workload of CPU and GPU here measured at 244 Watts overclocked blender rendering the GN logo measured 233 watts for GPU and CPU tile rendering simultaneously each power supply is different but as a general rule of thumb you want to be around sixty percent of the maximum continuous power capabilities of the power supply for maximum efficiency but that's gonna change a little bit units unit that doesn't mean you couldn't run at 80% or 90% load of the PSU but it's more efficient and generally better for the power supply to stay below those marks to that end we'd be comfortable pairing this build with the power supply anywhere from 450 watts to 600 Watts 400 watts you start getting into territory where a lot of them are just lower quality period because it's not that expensive in terms of power supply cost these days to go up another 50 watts but you could do it it's just that the quality overall gets a lot lower depending on how much of an upgrade pathway you want on the same power supply in the future 450 to 600 is good if you're planning to use the system until it retires with no upgrades really in sight 450 watts or 500 watts would be where we'd settle depending on the pricing and the quality of the power supply at that price point and then we'll make some recommendations on options in the description below for more help on that get into the game benchmarks for this specific build then we've already shown you some numbers from a CPU constrained scenario so that be how we review CPUs like the 3300 acts in our original review where we remove to the extent possible with in reality the GPU limitation and that's to determine the efficacy of the CPU at least down to 1080p with maybe medium settings depend on the game we don't really go lower than that because it is just too unrealistic it's too much of an academic exercise at that point which is fun but not particularly useful so for this what we're doing is a more graphics bound load this is the same benchmarking we do for our bottleneck testing where we're testing what's the maximum reasonable GPU you can couple with the CPU that's what we're deploying here same games higher settings for the most part and this is a as stated graphics constrained so it's under the assumption that you like to play your games maybe yet say high settings or ultra or something like that and your last CPU bound so for the most part a CPU overclock won't really do that much which is fine it's just an important thing to show because CPU OSI and memory tune doesn't always get you a lot it just depends on how bound you are by other components now a couple of things here we are going to and some of these charts have data from our 3,300 x review and bottleneck testing in those tests we used an x5 70 master that has a 100 point 0 0 B clock that's very stable works properly this board seems stuck at about ninety nine point eight most instances and that the net result is you have a bit lower frequency which can impact the performance even when GPU bound to some extent so you see that reflected a bit where what seems like a like for like actually ends up being a little bit different by color percentage points another difference is that the memories obviously changed so it's much looser timings than the tighter times we do reviews with and then also for the stock results without the shadow rock cooler so the OC tune results that's the shadow rock stock results heard with the stock cooler for the 3300 X and those results you're going to have a slightly lower at least for the duration of these tests clock because of t die raising by a couple degrees so in the very least so that affects the results as well and then for more you can check the GPU bottleneck charts from the 3300 racks in a separate video we did previously but let's go through the gains for this build in red dead redemption to with higher settings and at 1080p the are 330 300 X and 2060 ko configuration that we built ran at 70 FPS average with the new be 550 platform and the cheaper memory with looser timings that's the main difference for this build as opposed to our formal bench numbers which present a 72.4 FPS average the 70 FPS allows the ten 600k stock configuration and its twenty sixty KO a lead of nine point six percent it make more sense to pair the ten six hundred k with a higher end GPU seen as it scales relatively cleanly all the way up to a twenty eighty TI the 3300 acts in 2060 KO with a cpu and memory tune together gained another two FPS average pretty pretty miserable really but since we're GPU bound more than anything this makes sense it only normalized with the other test bench platform results where we did our previous 3300 ex GPU bottleneck testing and to get anything more than that we would need to be CPU constrained at 1440p the 3300 acts in 2060 build ran at about 54 FPS average you could hold 1440p with lower graphic settings if desired but it'd be a bit rough the overclock got us 256 FPS average which is only as minimal as it is again because of the GPU bind remember that if you want to see how it looks in a CPU constrained scenario you need to check our CPU reviews for how the overclock would affect CPU constrained performance an upgrade pathway might include something like a 5600 XT in this particular game it doesn't always work out that way which would bump us to 60 FPS average here or the 2070 super which is more universally an improvement bumping to 72 FPS average 4k with this game is brutal on all the parts including the 20 atti that we tested previously don't build this system expecting 4k gaming and most configurations there are times it's doable it obviously depends on the game especially lighter games like f1 but this isn't one of those times well show f1 2019 with higher settings as well but mostly to illustrate that overclocking can still be beneficial even when running higher graphics settings our 3,300 X and 2060 KO build is now running at about 114 FPS average stock or 117 FPS average overclocked we're falling behind the 3300 X in 2060 ko on our test bench marked at 123 FPS average which is again a result of the lower B clock on the board and other differences like the timings the cooler on the stock model for stock to stock things like that even though it's not running at 90 here like it was in blender for the CPU TDI with that stock cooler you'll still have some frequency loss for everyone few degrees higher than it is with something else performance is overall great for the price though considering our other tests on this chart we're all done with expensive motherboards I've 1440p and with the same settings our build ran at 88 FPS average with the overclock and with the memory tuned both applied the RT X 2070 super as tested in our previous bottleneck testing landed at 120 FPS average that'd be a few points ahead given the motherboard difference that we've already discussed but it's close enough for a reference point so if you wanted to run this particular be 550 board we're using today with the 2070 super you could expect it to be with the same 3300 X obviously within a couple of percentage points of the previous result on the X 570 board they're close enough it's a B clock difference for the most part well stop with shadow of the Tomb Raider we know it's not as many games as we normally publish for these but there's a reason for that we've established a pattern and the pattern says we're within a few points of the original 3,300 X bottleneck content where we tested a 2060 ko about a month ago with the 3,300 ax and a bunch of other CPUs so you can check that content for more of these gaming charts it'll be about the same performance as this PC build except this one's just a little bit lower it's easy enough to extrapolate it most the time it's not appreciable to human anyway in Tomb Raider at 1080p the ro3 26 th ombo ran at 103 FPS average an hour builds the B 550 board for stock and 105 when overclocked with no appreciable difference anywhere in sight including the lows it's not particularly worth the OC effort if you're going to be GPU bound basically all the time the clearest upgrade would be something like a 2070 super or not shown with the 3300 X here maybe a 5700 XT we're GPU bound again not CPU bound and the motherboard is dealing with a light enough load from the CPU that the via Rams aren't even close to a concern even if there are better boards out there and there are we just haven't gotten to them yet it's good overall the the output you get is plenty on the 3300 X for gaming scenario is you don't need to worry about being GPU constrained if you're buying anything even remotely close to what should be paired with this so once you start going over a twenty eighty super that's just it's way too imbalanced and you by even 2080 super you should definitely buy a different CPU just it just it starts to become too imbalanced so 2070 super and below no problem pairing it with a 3300 X and otherwise check our other charts for more information on that so if you were to look for something higher end we'd recommend the 10 600 K and an overclocked really fun CPU to work with extremely easy to overclock comparatively and great enthusiast starter CPU strong baseline gaming performance if you want something that lasts gaming focused more production and maybe you want to drop it into a build like this just a different CPU the 3600 still gets a recommendation you can check our best CPUs content for 2020 so far if you want to learn more about why we recommend different CPUs we do but the 3600 is and I'm assuming here we're talking with a less frequent visiting audience to gamers Nexus then maybe our core audience because typically people who need help with builds don't watch every day so recapping a lot of stuff this time but 3600 gets you a couple extra threads and that is beneficial in things like blender and premiere to some extent and 7-zip compression decompression compile could compile it's just it isn't as useful really in gaming so that'd be an option to upgrade if you're doing more of that type of workload and then file you could save a lot of money with a lower end GPU and still be plenty happy for 1080p gaming this one gets you to 1440p and a lot of instances obviously it depends on the game and even 4k sparingly like f1 4k we didn't show the chart earlier we can pop it up if we have it but f1 4k is really not terrible it's just it's gonna depend on the game obviously so that's it for this one thanks for watching this was as stated a slightly more consumer-friendly approach to the content but also adding in a lot of templated information for our enthusiast audience who want to see what happens when you drop different parts of the build and replace it with something else so let us know what you think of the pc build template approach as opposed to just like here's the build that's that's what it is because this is a little bit more fun for us based on our data driven approach typically so we enjoyed it thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store documents access net to help us out directly or patreon.com slash gamers Nexus and we'll see you all next timewe're doing a mid-range gaming PC build for AMD Rison today specifically using the new and the B 550 motherboard so that's the point of the build is to try one of those out our content includes detailed testing and charts including things like power consumption some baseline thermals gaming performance a lot of overclocking and memory tuning efforts and more and more importantly this is our first attempt at a new format for us of PC builds that we're referring to as PC build templates since we're basing our builds heavily off of data and testing like from our reviews we're playing with the idea of doing this templated rather than just providing a firm list of exactly what parts to buy this one solves the availability and supply issues right now and - it gives you the expected freedom to modify the build and still have data that's useful to figure out how good it's going to be so this provides a modular list with enough benchmarks that you can figure out which components to drop in and for anything else will point you to dedicated content throughout this video that might help further in things like overclocking tuning case selection power supplies all that kind of stuff so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by us and our brand new gamers Nexus wireframe mouse mat aside from being the best way to directly support our long-form investigative reporting you can also get a custom made high quality mouse mat made with a high detail 3d design that we created to show off heat sinks coolers of video cards and more the mouse mat uses a stitch to blue border for added longevity a blue rubber underside for unique Flair and a microfiber cloth first smooth tracking the mat is 36 inches by 12 inches and fits a keyboard and mouse easily we sold out of the first run in 48 hours but have more getting made right now to backorder your mouse mat and ensure you get one in the next run go to store gamers nexus net and backorder yours while reducing our reliance on advertisers or click the link in the description below so the objectives today we are as stated doing a template which means we're gonna give you a list of parts that we use for this build but we've swapped stuff in and out different GPUs we've got a CPU overclock in memory tuning versus just straight XMP depending on how adventurous you feel we have different cooler selections all kinds of stuff like that so that it it gives you a fuller picture as to what happens if Part A or B is out of stock or if you just decide you want something different than what we've chosen the data is still there to support what you're trying to ultimately build so for this one we did use an ace USB 550 motherboard it's a $150 motherboard it's the cheapest one that we've received so far so keeping in mind that we started this testing a little bit before embargo lifted so it's not like we could buy them yet we're working with parts that we received ahead of launch and that means the cheapest one we had was the $150 Asus tough gaming plus B 550 board and that board for a lot of reasons was a pain in the ass to work with for overclocking memory tuning but the well specifically memory tuning the overclocking wasn't too bad but the rest of it was all very straightforward we don't have any major gripes we'll talk about it as we go through this and what the downsides are there are obviously a lot of be 550 boards out there at this point we haven't really worked with many of them but this is the one we've worked with for this review and that brings us to the other point of the way we do PC builds for our PC builds we don't just throw parts together randomly we specifically test everything at some point or another so these are things that have emerged from reviews or at least internal testing at one point which to to support the selection of the parts we have data is what we're getting at here so there are a million ways or more to build a PC you might have a different idea for what cooler motherboard whatever you want to use maybe something's on sale whatever go for it is plenty of ways to do it this is the way we're doing it and we chose these because we know they work together so the parts chosen we have a the $150 motherboard as stated we've got some footage of that that's new we have a $60 case but there are plenty of other options out there it's $10 off now in the u.s. at least so it's about 50 but we do strongly recommend that you add a 7 to $10 120 mil fan minimally and you can see our fan tax p300 a review for more information specifically on that point so P 380 we've done a full individual review on one of the nice things about the case working with it especially with this larger cooler if you go with the shadow rock 3 as opposed to the stock air cooler this thing like most large coolers its size is feisty so I did get at least one cut while working with it when connecting the EPS cable the upside is that the top panel of the P 300 a very much to its credit because this is can be removed and we have shots of that from era p300 a review and so it's pretty easy to get in there and access stuff which we liked in the review but you check the review of the case for more information on stuff like that other parts the 3300 ex is our go-to CPU for absolute budget but highest performance possible gaming at the budget the GPU we chose is the RT X 2060 KO we can show some charts from the 2060 KO benchmarks we did but that one was really interesting to us because it Nvidia accidentally forgot to turn some parts of the die off for the revision of the 2060 the new dies they released that were just 28 es repurposed those things fused off they didn't fuse all of it off and so it ends up being actually really advanced for things like blender as opposed to where it should fall and so we like that card for that reason it's also a reasonable gaming card at the cost and you're not gonna bottleneck on the cpu we've done a whole bottleneck benchmark and you can go almost up to a 20 atti on the CPU you shouldn't but you could for the most part okay rest of the parts for memory we used some t4s Ram it's just the blackout version I think they call it dark za or something but we had it lying around and it happens to be about $70 so it's some of the cheaper Ram that we have that's still good - reasonable at least PSU we recommend about a 50 to $60 power supply we'll talk about the power spec in a bit and then some hard drive or SSD rather would be the better choice but you're spending something about maybe $70 for a baseline there and then maybe a game storage drive the cooler is optional we chose this one first day on the shelf but that's about 47 bucks we've got thermal numbers for you and the rest of this as far as memory tuning goes when you see the numbers for overclocking on tuning we end up doing a 4.4 gigahertz all core OC on the 3300 X we already have a bunch of data on that from our reviews and for this specific kit of memory which is different from our review memory we tuned it a bit so we did all the primary timings we tuned Tifa TR c t-- c WL obviously Rask ass RTR dt w TR c ke a couple others in there and spent most of a day on this kit this amount of work would have normally taken maybe two hours or so one to two hours on a high on board but because of the limited troubleshooting capabilities okay let's get into it the motherboard deserves early discussion we decided to work with the cheapest of the AMD B 550 boards that we've received thus far just to see how it works at the low end we're mixed on it overall the Asus tough gaming be 550 plus we used is supposed to be sold for about $150 and considered we're just powering a 4 core 8 thread CPU with relatively low power requirements it doesn't take much of a vrm or vrm heatsink to run it that said it does lose almost every single useful tuning feature aside from debug LEDs and that makes memory tuning a nightmare without a retry and without any baked in safe boot features which would retain BIOS settings without applying them most of the memory overclocking experience on this board is spent staring at a black screen and pulling the CMOS battery that's the easiest way to get into BIOS after a failed set of memory timings so it's a bit of a deterrent to actually go in try hard mode because there's a good chance you'll end up pulling the CMOS battery anyway that really slows things down for memory tuning you can save and load profiles but it's still nothing like working with a higher-end board for OC it'd be way worse if you had already built the system because then you'd be crawling around on the floor to pull the battery out between failed overclocks and that might also include removing the GPU there's no built-in button on this board that actually works for clearing CMOS at least in our experience thus far so pulling the battery was the best way we'd recommend tuning it on an open bench before ever assembling the system that way you can dial it in with the least amount of frustration possible on this particular motherboard CPU overclocking is still straightforward and it retains most of the mainstream features that you'd want from the higher-end boards if you're not doing anything too crazy it's not as debug friendly as something like a high-end x5 70 board but if you're just doing something like a 4.3 or 4.4 gigahertz all core overclock that's really not any different on this platform than the others there's still the usual mess of an these triple redundant settings all over the BIOS some of that is a.m. these problems some of it is on the board maker but ultimately there's nothing really new here if you're new to memory timings tuning and overclocking and want to get some of the benefits from it the hours saved for going with a board that has safe boot would really justify the price and a lot of instances for anyone less serious are not intending to tune memory this is less of a concern as for the rest we'll put a chart on the screen for Andy's be 550 versus X 570 chipset differences this comes from a separate video and article we ran on B 550 versus X 570 trips that differences so if you were wondering what the actual result is from going to be 550 and saving some money this is what it looks like the B 550 chipset only changes a few things first you lose PCIe gen 4 from the chipset but you keep support from the CPU that means boards that pull PCIe lanes from the CPU will still get gen 4 speeds so that include the top slot on nearly every motherboard you also get Gen 4 nvme on most boards from the CPU and that's really all there is to it if you're worried about X 570 vs. B 550 differences aside from auxilliary features the only real point of consideration is the PCIe generation support from the chipset check our chipset differences content for more discussion on this and we'll link that below as well for the CPU we're using the AMD r3 3300 X we've done some tuning content on this in the past if you're curious how that looks but will flash through some of the charts of our recent eye 310 100 CPU review to show you the newest of our game benchmark data that highlights the performance differences of the 3300 x stock and overclocked especially as compared to other similarly priced CPUs another item to glance at would be the 3100 in these charts and note again that these charts they're focused on CPU benchmarks and reviews so that means this is trying to present a scenario where the CPU is constrained rather than the GPU will look at a GPU constrained build the specific set of benchmarks after this even when we heavily tuned to the AMD r3 3100 in a separate peace with all core infinity fabric and memory tuning we were unable to get it above the 3,300 X in almost all metrics especially if applying simple all core OC to the 3300 acts at the same time this is because the 3300 X uses a single CC X we have some block diagrams for this that we can show to illustrate the differences that means no splitting of the cache and no CC x to CC x latency to worry about on the 3300 X which uses a 4 + 0 configuration rather than two plus two there's more of this in our 3300 acts tuning video and in the 3300 acts review if you're interested to learn more gaming performance as you can see in these quick charts that we're flashing through from our reviews is about as high as you'll get from AMD on the CPU side it's not really worth upgrading from the r34 only gaming to something like a 3600 but an hour 5 3600 to make a lot of sense as a budget choice for someone interested in the extra thread count and there is value if you do something like tile based rendering and say cycles renderer with blender or you do maybe cycles CPU plus CUDA or optics then the 3600 would be well worth the investment if none of that really sounds like something you do and you don't plan to work with any production applications and r3 is definitely enough for gaming at least today the i5 10 600 K would be our next step up recommendation for gaming for which we've got plenty of benchmarks and tuning content on on the channel but then that's a completely different bill we ran some open air thermals to establish a baseline of overclocking capabilities with an all core CPU workload using blender cycles to render a scene tile by tile we quickly found the stock 3300 X cooler inadequate for anything that would involve heavier overclocking especially because we want to hold four point four gigahertz and all work loads including blender and gaming alike we need to consider a cooler upgrade for our PC build so this is the first optional add-on you'd do if you wanted to expand the budget and it's one that we think is definitely worth it from an enthusiast standpoint the stock cooler at max fan speeds ran at about 83 degrees for half of the render eventually hitting steady-state slowly and painfully at 90 degrees Celsius TDI for the heavy all core workload precision breeze to Hertz the clocks at this point although this is something of a real-world worst-case scenario for all core and by real-world what we mean is this isn't prime95 this is an application you might actually use in the old world use that said games will run cooler and games are often bound by the GPU or loaded heavily on it anyway so thermals aren't as concerning there you really want a case fan pointed near or at these downdraft coolers to help things out throwing a be quiet shadow rock 3 on there which is about $47 you as it's just the first thing we pulled off the shelf we were able to maintain in the range of 73 degrees Celsius with the stock result overclocking the 3300 X to 4.4 gigahertz and holding a get voltage of 1 point 3 6 2 v core we ran at about 77 to 79 degrees Celsius the shadow rock 3 or similar tower coolers of which there are plenty you mind you would be a good choice for anyone interested in more advanced overclocking with the CPU remember that this board is trying to cheat the power numbers whether intentionally or not so that means more power budget available to the CPU that doesn't mean it uses it though and we'll look at that in a moment here's a recent CPU thermal chart from one of our case reviews this uses our standardized case test bench so it's a different build and then our build today clearly but it provides a baseline from which you can determine a good case for your build especially if you're doing something that's at our cooler oriented configuration because then the results in the hierarchy will be about the same as here the P 300 a with two extra fans totally in about $70 would be one of the cheaper paths to acceptable cooling while the P 400 a RGB or a TD 500 at about 90 to 100 dollars would be the higher-end solutions without the need to buy extra fans we do think if you look at our P 300 a review this is probably one of the better budget courses to getting the cheap case right now but it really does need at least one extra fan thrown into it this next chart is zoomed in to look at frequency over time on the B 550 built tested with the stock cooler and with the shadow rock 3 in our open air configuration again cases are going to be worse in general than open air so use our case review charge to determine the right case for your build this one provides us a pure baseline that is not really influenced by anything else in this scenario the 3300 acts with its stock cooler fell to about 40 93 megahertz all core which is entirely due to thermals and some power leakage a lot of cases will really exacerbate that and make it a lot worse the shadow rock 3 had a much more dynamic frequency that was less thermally constrained posting an all-court average of about 4200 240 to 10 megahertz that's a significant uplift and as thanks to our precision boost 2 works as we've shown in the past and we'll put our r9 thermal frequency chart up now from our ln2 experiments every 5 degrees south or so of change will net a frequency impact with precision boost to which is not the same as precision boosting overdrive it may be worth considering the better cooler even if running stock it's capable of lower temperatures out of quieter noise level but also natively boosts performance without a manual OC just due to PB - as for power reporting deviation the asus board under reports by a lot we recently ran an in-depth research piece on hardware infos power reporting deviation metric which is useful for determining how far off a motherboard is from baseline of 100% power reporting the power reporting deviation metric is one that is useful only under 100% all core workloads but that's what this test is so we can see that the asus board under-reported from a baseline of 100 percent down to 83 to 87 percent this means that the board is tricking the CPU just like a shunt mod would on a GPU into thinking it's drawing less power than it really is this means that it's permitting a higher power budget then is natively intended that doesn't mean the CPU is actually drawing that much power but rather that it can ideally this number should read 100% anything greater than a 5 to 7 percent deviation downward begins to get into questionable territory of resembling what functionally amounts to PBO reapplied maybe asus will update this with a later bios version as we saw with asrock in our initial research piece where the special review bios was cheating the terms of peril omits a lot more than the later bios's moving on from the motherboard we next needs to determine how much power is necessary for this build and our CPU reviews we tests at the EPS 12-volt cables to cleanly measure the preview ram efficiency lost power consumption numbers will show two of those power consumption charts on the screen and highlight the 3300 ex stock and OC results these are from our 10 100 review which is one of the most recent CPE reviews and first note that the OC results will change based on the voltage configured so it's not just magically that power consumption because it's that frequency it depends on the voltage you set just like the stock numbers depend on the voltage that the motherboard OTO applies if that's how you use it second this number only gets us part of the equation to determine the total power supply wattage that we need for a build which is what this is today we need to test the total system our consumption instead here's the total system power consumption numbers idle with windows in the rise in performance mode we're at 47 watts stock and 66 overclocked that includes a higher memory and SOC voltage for the OC mind you but overall this is about what we'd expect or something where we've disabled at least some of the power saving options and windows especially simple youtube playback runs at 66 watts and 73 for total system power consumption when overclocked the highest number we measured overall was the overclocked f1 4k results marked at 260 Watts red dead twos gaming results at 1080p medium which is a pretty balanced workload of CPU and GPU here measured at 244 Watts overclocked blender rendering the GN logo measured 233 watts for GPU and CPU tile rendering simultaneously each power supply is different but as a general rule of thumb you want to be around sixty percent of the maximum continuous power capabilities of the power supply for maximum efficiency but that's gonna change a little bit units unit that doesn't mean you couldn't run at 80% or 90% load of the PSU but it's more efficient and generally better for the power supply to stay below those marks to that end we'd be comfortable pairing this build with the power supply anywhere from 450 watts to 600 Watts 400 watts you start getting into territory where a lot of them are just lower quality period because it's not that expensive in terms of power supply cost these days to go up another 50 watts but you could do it it's just that the quality overall gets a lot lower depending on how much of an upgrade pathway you want on the same power supply in the future 450 to 600 is good if you're planning to use the system until it retires with no upgrades really in sight 450 watts or 500 watts would be where we'd settle depending on the pricing and the quality of the power supply at that price point and then we'll make some recommendations on options in the description below for more help on that get into the game benchmarks for this specific build then we've already shown you some numbers from a CPU constrained scenario so that be how we review CPUs like the 3300 acts in our original review where we remove to the extent possible with in reality the GPU limitation and that's to determine the efficacy of the CPU at least down to 1080p with maybe medium settings depend on the game we don't really go lower than that because it is just too unrealistic it's too much of an academic exercise at that point which is fun but not particularly useful so for this what we're doing is a more graphics bound load this is the same benchmarking we do for our bottleneck testing where we're testing what's the maximum reasonable GPU you can couple with the CPU that's what we're deploying here same games higher settings for the most part and this is a as stated graphics constrained so it's under the assumption that you like to play your games maybe yet say high settings or ultra or something like that and your last CPU bound so for the most part a CPU overclock won't really do that much which is fine it's just an important thing to show because CPU OSI and memory tune doesn't always get you a lot it just depends on how bound you are by other components now a couple of things here we are going to and some of these charts have data from our 3,300 x review and bottleneck testing in those tests we used an x5 70 master that has a 100 point 0 0 B clock that's very stable works properly this board seems stuck at about ninety nine point eight most instances and that the net result is you have a bit lower frequency which can impact the performance even when GPU bound to some extent so you see that reflected a bit where what seems like a like for like actually ends up being a little bit different by color percentage points another difference is that the memories obviously changed so it's much looser timings than the tighter times we do reviews with and then also for the stock results without the shadow rock cooler so the OC tune results that's the shadow rock stock results heard with the stock cooler for the 3300 X and those results you're going to have a slightly lower at least for the duration of these tests clock because of t die raising by a couple degrees so in the very least so that affects the results as well and then for more you can check the GPU bottleneck charts from the 3300 racks in a separate video we did previously but let's go through the gains for this build in red dead redemption to with higher settings and at 1080p the are 330 300 X and 2060 ko configuration that we built ran at 70 FPS average with the new be 550 platform and the cheaper memory with looser timings that's the main difference for this build as opposed to our formal bench numbers which present a 72.4 FPS average the 70 FPS allows the ten 600k stock configuration and its twenty sixty KO a lead of nine point six percent it make more sense to pair the ten six hundred k with a higher end GPU seen as it scales relatively cleanly all the way up to a twenty eighty TI the 3300 acts in 2060 KO with a cpu and memory tune together gained another two FPS average pretty pretty miserable really but since we're GPU bound more than anything this makes sense it only normalized with the other test bench platform results where we did our previous 3300 ex GPU bottleneck testing and to get anything more than that we would need to be CPU constrained at 1440p the 3300 acts in 2060 build ran at about 54 FPS average you could hold 1440p with lower graphic settings if desired but it'd be a bit rough the overclock got us 256 FPS average which is only as minimal as it is again because of the GPU bind remember that if you want to see how it looks in a CPU constrained scenario you need to check our CPU reviews for how the overclock would affect CPU constrained performance an upgrade pathway might include something like a 5600 XT in this particular game it doesn't always work out that way which would bump us to 60 FPS average here or the 2070 super which is more universally an improvement bumping to 72 FPS average 4k with this game is brutal on all the parts including the 20 atti that we tested previously don't build this system expecting 4k gaming and most configurations there are times it's doable it obviously depends on the game especially lighter games like f1 but this isn't one of those times well show f1 2019 with higher settings as well but mostly to illustrate that overclocking can still be beneficial even when running higher graphics settings our 3,300 X and 2060 KO build is now running at about 114 FPS average stock or 117 FPS average overclocked we're falling behind the 3300 X in 2060 ko on our test bench marked at 123 FPS average which is again a result of the lower B clock on the board and other differences like the timings the cooler on the stock model for stock to stock things like that even though it's not running at 90 here like it was in blender for the CPU TDI with that stock cooler you'll still have some frequency loss for everyone few degrees higher than it is with something else performance is overall great for the price though considering our other tests on this chart we're all done with expensive motherboards I've 1440p and with the same settings our build ran at 88 FPS average with the overclock and with the memory tuned both applied the RT X 2070 super as tested in our previous bottleneck testing landed at 120 FPS average that'd be a few points ahead given the motherboard difference that we've already discussed but it's close enough for a reference point so if you wanted to run this particular be 550 board we're using today with the 2070 super you could expect it to be with the same 3300 X obviously within a couple of percentage points of the previous result on the X 570 board they're close enough it's a B clock difference for the most part well stop with shadow of the Tomb Raider we know it's not as many games as we normally publish for these but there's a reason for that we've established a pattern and the pattern says we're within a few points of the original 3,300 X bottleneck content where we tested a 2060 ko about a month ago with the 3,300 ax and a bunch of other CPUs so you can check that content for more of these gaming charts it'll be about the same performance as this PC build except this one's just a little bit lower it's easy enough to extrapolate it most the time it's not appreciable to human anyway in Tomb Raider at 1080p the ro3 26 th ombo ran at 103 FPS average an hour builds the B 550 board for stock and 105 when overclocked with no appreciable difference anywhere in sight including the lows it's not particularly worth the OC effort if you're going to be GPU bound basically all the time the clearest upgrade would be something like a 2070 super or not shown with the 3300 X here maybe a 5700 XT we're GPU bound again not CPU bound and the motherboard is dealing with a light enough load from the CPU that the via Rams aren't even close to a concern even if there are better boards out there and there are we just haven't gotten to them yet it's good overall the the output you get is plenty on the 3300 X for gaming scenario is you don't need to worry about being GPU constrained if you're buying anything even remotely close to what should be paired with this so once you start going over a twenty eighty super that's just it's way too imbalanced and you by even 2080 super you should definitely buy a different CPU just it just it starts to become too imbalanced so 2070 super and below no problem pairing it with a 3300 X and otherwise check our other charts for more information on that so if you were to look for something higher end we'd recommend the 10 600 K and an overclocked really fun CPU to work with extremely easy to overclock comparatively and great enthusiast starter CPU strong baseline gaming performance if you want something that lasts gaming focused more production and maybe you want to drop it into a build like this just a different CPU the 3600 still gets a recommendation you can check our best CPUs content for 2020 so far if you want to learn more about why we recommend different CPUs we do but the 3600 is and I'm assuming here we're talking with a less frequent visiting audience to gamers Nexus then maybe our core audience because typically people who need help with builds don't watch every day so recapping a lot of stuff this time but 3600 gets you a couple extra threads and that is beneficial in things like blender and premiere to some extent and 7-zip compression decompression compile could compile it's just it isn't as useful really in gaming so that'd be an option to upgrade if you're doing more of that type of workload and then file you could save a lot of money with a lower end GPU and still be plenty happy for 1080p gaming this one gets you to 1440p and a lot of instances obviously it depends on the game and even 4k sparingly like f1 4k we didn't show the chart earlier we can pop it up if we have it but f1 4k is really not terrible it's just it's gonna depend on the game obviously so that's it for this one thanks for watching this was as stated a slightly more consumer-friendly approach to the content but also adding in a lot of templated information for our enthusiast audience who want to see what happens when you drop different parts of the build and replace it with something else so let us know what you think of the pc build template approach as opposed to just like here's the build that's that's what it is because this is a little bit more fun for us based on our data driven approach typically so we enjoyed it thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store documents access net to help us out directly or patreon.com slash gamers Nexus and we'll see you all next time\n"