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Cat's mini(ITX) Ryzen 5 review!

I have added an X265 test,Fallout 4 testing under different power plans,and pictures of the new Wraith Spire cooler I installed.

Now I am doing some tests with the Wraith Spire instead of the Wraith Stealth.
 
Some IN-Spiring testing

So I decided to do some testing with the Wraith Spire plonked on.

The first test was with the same 50 RAW DxO jpeg conversion test.

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A whole 8 seconds faster,eh! That gives slightly more time to open the first page!

The core boost didn't seem to change that much - maybe 50MHZ to 100MHZ at most.

However,something did change - the temperature!!

Instead of around a 90C peak,the CPU peaked at just over 70C!!

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So was the cooler any noisier - not exactly but there was a bit more noticeable bearing noise IMHO,although YMMV.

Now onto everyone's favourite gamers benchmark....Cinebench.

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A 5 point increase in the single threaded score and a 3 point decrease in the multi-threaded score.The OpenGL score slightly increased too.

Now see if there is any "Fallout" from further testing?? Hehe!! :p

Lets move onto Fallout 4.

The first sequence is Abernathy Farm.

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The FPS with the Wraith Stealth was actually slightly higher at 49.2FPS as opposed to the 48.77FPS with the Wraith Spire,but the latter had better minimums.

Now,lets look at frametimes.

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Its six of one,and half a dozen of another TBH,but temperatures hovered at worst around the 60C mark,but a slight win for the Wraith Spire though.

Now,lets have a look at the Big City....Diamond City.

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Framerates definitely seemed better with the Wraith Spire with regards to minimums but surprisingly enough,but the average was the same in both cases at 50.77FPS!

Lets,look at the frametimes now.

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Frametimes,tad worse?? Hard to say overall,but I did have a Windows update before testing the game(still Win10 PRO 1803 though),so that might not be helping. However,Fallout 4 is finicky to test especially due to its sensitivity to storage throughput when modded.

Is the Wraith Spire worth it?? Yep,I think for the better cooling performance it is,and the CPU did seem to hit a slightly higher max clockspeed of around 3.9GHZ instead of the 3.7GHZ~3.8GHZ it did before. However,the Wraith Stealth will suffice but under heavy load you will reach near enough the max temperature the CPU can handle.
 
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I would have probably have sorted the timings out first as they can give big gains across a number of applications, then again you can always re-bench everything and compare.
 
RavenXXX2 said:
I would have probably have sorted the timings out first as they can give big gains across a number of applications, then again you can always re-bench everything and compare.
Click to expand...

That is the plan,I wanted to see how much of an effect the improved cooling would have,and pushing the memory controller more will probably mean more cooling is required anyway. I am actually surprised that even though the Wraith Spire was better,performance was still very close with the Wraith Stealth although the temperatures were much worse!
 
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Another day.....another Windows update!

It looks like the minions have been hard at work at Microsoft,so another set of Windows updates to get in the way!! Luckily I am still on Win10 PRO 1803.

Now,I decided to try and tweak the RAM. There is a useful utility which helps Ryzen CPU owners with this:

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/ryzen-dram-calculator/

So I selected the SAFE preset to get things started. Now the system booted fine after applying the new RAM timings in the BIOS,but after trying to do a few Fallout 4 test runs the game would rage quit in protest!! So I tried some more tweaking and more of the same - I suspect with some additional tweaking it would have worked and it was some of the more esoteric RAM settings which are the issue here.

However,Gibbo suggested that since the RAM was B-die that 14-14-14-31 settings should work,so I decided to try them out and left everything else on auto,ie,the original D.O.C.P. settings,and so far the RAM seems stable.

Now lets look at Cinebench R15. C14 scores are on the left and C16 scores are on the right.

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Useful improvements in the OpenGL and multi-threaded score but a regression in the single threaded score,which seemed repeatable.

Now moving onto DxO,I tried the same test sequence as before.

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A further 8 seconds knocked off the total time - I better start reading books quicker!! Time to go to the speed reading classes.

Peak power consumption was at 176W. The max temperature peaked at 74C although it might be slightly warmer today.

Not Fallout 76

Now moving onto some games testing with more Fallout 4.

First lets trouble more settlers at Abernathy Farm!

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There is definitely an improvement to the minimums. The average FPS increased from 48.77FPS to 49.44FPS,which is not too bad for a few quick tweaks in the BIOS.

Now lets look at some frametimes.

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Possibly slightly better with C14 timings,but hard to say IMHO although YMMV.

Now lets make a trip back to Diamond City.

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Again minimums seem better. The average FPS went up from 50.77FPS to 51.51FPS,which is not too bad of an improvement.

Now lets look at the frametimes(again).

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I would say with the C14 timings it does seem slightly better IMHO although YMMV.
 
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Sub timings are where the real uplift is. I'm surprised you never got the safe timings stable, you need to bump up the ram volts up to 1.4 and the soc to 1.1.
 
RavenXXX2 said:
Sub timings are where the real uplift is. I'm surprised you never got the safe timings stable, you need to bump up the ram volts up to 1.4 and the soc to 1.1.
Click to expand...

TBH,I will get around it at some point,but I went middle of the road,and everything else apart from Fallout 4 seemed OK. The issue is the game seems to be very RAM dependent too,so any slight instability and the game will have issues,so its going to a real PITA,especially since there is a metric ton of settings to tweak. At the very least I know the fallback settings.

Regarding RAM,I really don't like pushing past the recommended voltage settings for the RAM,as its a mini-ITX system,airflow will be an issue,and the extra heat needs to go somewhere. I will try to see what I can achieve on 1.35V and move on from there.

Also from what I gather the Ryzen 5 2600 is a bit worse off with RAM than a Ryzen 5 2600X - Techspot saw it with their examples.
 
CAT Ram uses no power, you don't need to worry about overheating them, run them at 1.4v its fine.
 
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