Hi Guys,
About a year ago I bought myself an entry level gaming pc, which very much reminded me how much I used to enjoy fiddling with computers. At the time I spent around £700 and picked up the following.
SEVEN MICRO ATX CASE
MSI B450 PRO-VDH M-ATX
AMD RYZEN 5 2600
MSI GTX 1050ti GAMING X
16GB G.Skill 3000 DDR4 RAM
256GB KINGSTON SSD
ARTIC BLUE 650w PSU
Corsair H100i AIO COOLER
24” MSI CURVED GAMING MONITOR
TECKNET RGB KEYBOARD
LOGITECH GAMING MOUSE
This is the computer as it was purchased, there were several bits and pieces that I wasn't happy with in terms of wiring etc not being tidy enough, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and like things done to the best of my ability. After around 6 months of owning the PC I decided that it was time to upgrade my GPU.
I spent hours upon hours looking at reviews and benchmarking of some of the higher end graphics cards, I knew that one of my biggest issues was going to be the physical space inside of my micro ATX case. Based on that I took some measurements of what would actually fit, that quickly narrowed it down for me. I started looking into the Radeon RX5700XT, sapphire seemed to offer some good versions of this card. My first choice was the Nitro but much to my disappointment it was far to large, then i came across the Sapphire Pulse which was the perfect size and seemed to offer what looked like great performance for a reasonable price.
£430 later my nice new Sapphire Pulse RX5700XT Arrived
Now, after looking to install my new GPU i quickly noticed that the Chinese cheap PSU that was installed didn't have the right 8+6 connectors required to power this card, after looking at some reviews of the artic blue PSU it became very apparent that this PSU was a massive pile of dog s*** and needed to go straight into the bin. After some recommendations from this forum i purchased a 650watt super flower leadex III as a replacement.
A few days later the new PSU unit arrived which meant in with the new and out with the old, this was good as it gave me a chance to rewire the entire PC exactly how I wanted it. I spent a few hours routing cables the best way possible, i was very happy with the results as it made it was more eye pleasing.
So here is the PC after the new GPU and PSU. Another issue was that the GPU was so meaty it physically blocked the PCI-E for the Creative Sound Blaster 7.1 sound card that i purchased to run my headsets via optical out.
Now this was quite a problem, there was really only 2 options to get around this. One being use a PCIe ribbon and the other option being buy a new motherboard. Obviously i tried the cheaper option first, i purchased a ribbon which did fit into the PCI slot, the issue was mounting the card was nearly impossible with the ribbon in place. As a temp solution i mounted the sound card externally around the back of the PC and ran it out of sight. Not ideal but worked perfectly for now.
So now the PC is up and running with a new new PSU, GPU and Sound Card. Instantly better performance all round in game, better graphics quality and better FPS than before. It didn't take me long to notice that my little Ryzen 5 2600 was bottlenecking my system, the calculations were like 21% bottleneck IIRC. This made me start looking into CPU options, i didn't want to spend big money on a top end CPU, I wanted the best bang for my buck which pointed me directly to the Ryzen 5 3600. After a bit of research I decided that this was the right CPU for me based on performance and price. I went ahead and ordered my new CPU, that arrived next day. While I was waiting for the CPU to arrive I was seriously questioning my motherboard, the whole sound card thing etc. I ended up doing some late night shopping and ordered myself a MSI MAG B550 MORTAR as it had good onboard sound and an optical out port.
A few days later I had my new motherboard and CPU on the table ready to install, I was just waiting for the last piece of the puzzle which was the Artic Silver 5 thermal paste and cleaning kit which actually arrived exactly when I needed it for once.
I got to work with installing the new motherboard and CPU, I'd never done this before so I was super careful to make sure it was done properly. Pleased to report that everything went according to plan and about an hour or so later I had successfully installed my new motherboard and CPU.
Next thing that was bothering me was the way the AIO kit was installed, to me being a race car engineer the cooling on the radiator made no sense what so ever. It was setup by the previous owner so that it would suck warm air from inside of the case, blow it through the fins of the radiator and out of the case. To me this was stupid, in my head it should be sucking cold air from outside the case, blowing the cold air through the fins of the radiator which is what cools the circulating coolant. So I though I would test my theory, the idle temp with it setup as it was was 35-36c and under 100% load it would go up to around 70c.
The way i went about this cooling mod was to remove the fans from the radiator and placed them on the other side of the radiator so that they are sucking cold air from outside the case, in a car you don't want the cooling fans mega close to the radiator, they are more efficient spaced out. I used washers to space the fans a few mm away from the radiator fins.
Here is how the fans were mounted by the pervious owner
Here is how they were mounted after I made some changes
So after making the changes and rebuilding the PC it looked something like this
I then went on to compare data from the previous setup, my new idle temp was 32-33c and under full load i was seeing MAX temps of 66-67c which I was very pleased with as its a few degrees cooler and it didn't cost a penny. I'm no expert here and have never claimed to be but this little mod really seemed to work. I've had it setup like this for a week now and can confirm that its a forward step not a backwards one.
So now the pc is really looking and performing quite well, from doing some research I understood that the Ryzen CPU's likes fast RAM so I decided to purchase another 16GB of the G.Skill 3000Mhz DDR4 giving me a combined total of 32GB.
That's pretty much where I'm at with the build at the moment, i will update things as I go along. If anyone has any questions I will do my best to answer them for you. If anyone has anything to add good or bad feel free to post it below.
Thanks for looking.
About a year ago I bought myself an entry level gaming pc, which very much reminded me how much I used to enjoy fiddling with computers. At the time I spent around £700 and picked up the following.
SEVEN MICRO ATX CASE
MSI B450 PRO-VDH M-ATX
AMD RYZEN 5 2600
MSI GTX 1050ti GAMING X
16GB G.Skill 3000 DDR4 RAM
256GB KINGSTON SSD
ARTIC BLUE 650w PSU
Corsair H100i AIO COOLER
24” MSI CURVED GAMING MONITOR
TECKNET RGB KEYBOARD
LOGITECH GAMING MOUSE
This is the computer as it was purchased, there were several bits and pieces that I wasn't happy with in terms of wiring etc not being tidy enough, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and like things done to the best of my ability. After around 6 months of owning the PC I decided that it was time to upgrade my GPU.
I spent hours upon hours looking at reviews and benchmarking of some of the higher end graphics cards, I knew that one of my biggest issues was going to be the physical space inside of my micro ATX case. Based on that I took some measurements of what would actually fit, that quickly narrowed it down for me. I started looking into the Radeon RX5700XT, sapphire seemed to offer some good versions of this card. My first choice was the Nitro but much to my disappointment it was far to large, then i came across the Sapphire Pulse which was the perfect size and seemed to offer what looked like great performance for a reasonable price.
£430 later my nice new Sapphire Pulse RX5700XT Arrived
Now, after looking to install my new GPU i quickly noticed that the Chinese cheap PSU that was installed didn't have the right 8+6 connectors required to power this card, after looking at some reviews of the artic blue PSU it became very apparent that this PSU was a massive pile of dog s*** and needed to go straight into the bin. After some recommendations from this forum i purchased a 650watt super flower leadex III as a replacement.
A few days later the new PSU unit arrived which meant in with the new and out with the old, this was good as it gave me a chance to rewire the entire PC exactly how I wanted it. I spent a few hours routing cables the best way possible, i was very happy with the results as it made it was more eye pleasing.
So here is the PC after the new GPU and PSU. Another issue was that the GPU was so meaty it physically blocked the PCI-E for the Creative Sound Blaster 7.1 sound card that i purchased to run my headsets via optical out.
Now this was quite a problem, there was really only 2 options to get around this. One being use a PCIe ribbon and the other option being buy a new motherboard. Obviously i tried the cheaper option first, i purchased a ribbon which did fit into the PCI slot, the issue was mounting the card was nearly impossible with the ribbon in place. As a temp solution i mounted the sound card externally around the back of the PC and ran it out of sight. Not ideal but worked perfectly for now.
So now the PC is up and running with a new new PSU, GPU and Sound Card. Instantly better performance all round in game, better graphics quality and better FPS than before. It didn't take me long to notice that my little Ryzen 5 2600 was bottlenecking my system, the calculations were like 21% bottleneck IIRC. This made me start looking into CPU options, i didn't want to spend big money on a top end CPU, I wanted the best bang for my buck which pointed me directly to the Ryzen 5 3600. After a bit of research I decided that this was the right CPU for me based on performance and price. I went ahead and ordered my new CPU, that arrived next day. While I was waiting for the CPU to arrive I was seriously questioning my motherboard, the whole sound card thing etc. I ended up doing some late night shopping and ordered myself a MSI MAG B550 MORTAR as it had good onboard sound and an optical out port.
A few days later I had my new motherboard and CPU on the table ready to install, I was just waiting for the last piece of the puzzle which was the Artic Silver 5 thermal paste and cleaning kit which actually arrived exactly when I needed it for once.
I got to work with installing the new motherboard and CPU, I'd never done this before so I was super careful to make sure it was done properly. Pleased to report that everything went according to plan and about an hour or so later I had successfully installed my new motherboard and CPU.
Next thing that was bothering me was the way the AIO kit was installed, to me being a race car engineer the cooling on the radiator made no sense what so ever. It was setup by the previous owner so that it would suck warm air from inside of the case, blow it through the fins of the radiator and out of the case. To me this was stupid, in my head it should be sucking cold air from outside the case, blowing the cold air through the fins of the radiator which is what cools the circulating coolant. So I though I would test my theory, the idle temp with it setup as it was was 35-36c and under 100% load it would go up to around 70c.
The way i went about this cooling mod was to remove the fans from the radiator and placed them on the other side of the radiator so that they are sucking cold air from outside the case, in a car you don't want the cooling fans mega close to the radiator, they are more efficient spaced out. I used washers to space the fans a few mm away from the radiator fins.
Here is how the fans were mounted by the pervious owner
Here is how they were mounted after I made some changes
So after making the changes and rebuilding the PC it looked something like this
I then went on to compare data from the previous setup, my new idle temp was 32-33c and under full load i was seeing MAX temps of 66-67c which I was very pleased with as its a few degrees cooler and it didn't cost a penny. I'm no expert here and have never claimed to be but this little mod really seemed to work. I've had it setup like this for a week now and can confirm that its a forward step not a backwards one.
So now the pc is really looking and performing quite well, from doing some research I understood that the Ryzen CPU's likes fast RAM so I decided to purchase another 16GB of the G.Skill 3000Mhz DDR4 giving me a combined total of 32GB.
That's pretty much where I'm at with the build at the moment, i will update things as I go along. If anyone has any questions I will do my best to answer them for you. If anyone has anything to add good or bad feel free to post it below.
Thanks for looking.
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