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3800x set up for gaming.

WARburton

WARburton

WARburton

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So the guy next door as asked for some help making his pc into a gaming pc for his kids.

he ordered a 3070ti last night and a PA120 but he says the CPU runs hot, ive not yet seen the PC but dont think curve optimizer is an option on the 3000 chips?
if not what's the best PBO power setting for a 3800x.

system will be used for light gaming only the kids are young
 
Whats too hot ? Also I imagine the cooling solution is possibly the root cause of any overheating issues. My first port of call with anything like this is to remove the case sides as this will instantly rule out a potential poor airflow situation
 
The system was used for photo editing, with a very cheap box cooler, I told him to grab a pa120 this will help massively.
But I was also thinking of power limiting the cpu I know a 3800x can at time put upto 140w

Or even better dose it support eco mode?

I’ve not had the pc in my hands yet he’s bring it round Saturday when the GPU and coolers come
 
I should add he’s just made a new 7700x system for his work now.
So the pc is been repurposed for the kids, he’s only ever used it for photo editing.
 
WARburton said:
I told him to grab a pa120 this will help massively.
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I doubt you'll need to change anything with that cooler, it'll handle it fine.

WARburton said:
Or even better dose it support eco mode?
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Yes, though the BIOS would need to enable it too.

I wouldn't recommend doing much else, because you won't be there to check how it fares in the longer-term.
 
I'm running my 5950x on a £17 Assassin King and it's just about 'good enough' running at 142W, previously using it with 3700X (65W TDP, 88W PBO) it was very comfortable - The PA120 is twice the size and will be plenty assuming moderate case airflow, but if it struggles then turn the power limit down a little.

Is the PSU up to scratch? And what storage? - Modern games are stupidly large so I'd want at least 1TB nvme (or a smaller nvme for OS and 1TB+ SATA SSD for games)
As for RAM, I'd say 16GB minimum and preferably 3200MHz at c16 or below.... DDR4 is so cheap now that 32GB for £55 would be a worthwhile upgrade.

...obviously this all massively depends what games the kids want to play and what their tolerance to turning down some settings is

Edit: Re-reading the OP, if they're young and it's just for light gaming then it'll be fine as long as the PSU is enough for the card... If you stick it in a cool looking cheap case with some RGB they'll be over the moon!
 
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yer its light gaming like roblox haha, the gpu is massive overkill

he got 32gb of ram, and a 1tb sata ssd i belive it as a 500gb nvme for booting.
the only real concern was cooling the 3800x as i was lead to believe they run hot, ill set a temp cap of 85 in PBO and just leave it be
 
I was running 2700x with stock cooler and it was running hot however changed the cooler to thermalright peerless assassin 120 and made massive difference. With stock cooler fan use to ramp up and down all the time but with new cooler it's running quite.
 
Even a PA120 won't help much if the airflow through the case is poor. If the case is restrictive talk him into a new case as well. You can get a very good case with excellent airflow these days for less than £50. I suspect that's the cause of the overheating issues from the start as the new AMD coolers are not that bad.
 
tamzzy said:
oh lol. :cry: in which case, the PA120 would be a massive upgrade from the wraith prism
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It’s actually not much of a jump. The big advantage of an after market cooler is the lower sound levels, larger slower spinning fans offer. The stock prism is half decent. Even the older circular cooler with the copper camber will get the job done on 16 core parts.
 
tamzzy said:
oh lol. :cry: in which case, the PA120 would be a massive upgrade from the wraith prism
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7-10C difference at the same noise level on a 3800X depending on fan RPM, unless you push the fan to 100% on both where the difference is about 3.5-5C. Assuming reasonable case cooling.

At the kind of fan RPM/noise level most people would want to be running the difference is fair.

tamzzy said:
I would go round and remove the plastic protection on the base of the heatsink.
A pint says that wasn't removed
:cry:
Click to expand...

Common one I find is poor application of thermal paste and/or they've messed up the factory applied paste and stuck the cooler on anyhow.
 
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Rroff said:
7-10C difference at the same noise level on a 3800X depending on fan RPM, unless you push the fan to 100% on both where the difference is about 3.5-5C. Assuming reasonable case cooling.

At the kind of fan RPM/noise level most people would want to be running the difference is fair.



Common one I find is poor application of thermal paste and/or they've messed up the factory applied paste and stuck the cooler on anyhow.
Click to expand...
Or the paste must be about due for replacement by now even if it was a good paste job?
 
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