New mid-range desktop c. £1100

I've done a complete driver clean/DDU tonight and started over, which seems to have fixed it. Too many conflicting utilities/drivers giving info to the fans, methinks ... AMD has an overdrive/control tool, then Aorus have their own utility that comes with the mobo to control the GPU, then Gigabyte motherboards provide you with EasyTune ... not to mention Ryzen Master and a whole other bunch of apps that interfere with CPU clocks and cooling! Had a bit of a headache with it all so I'll let the AMD driver take care of things.

There's a physical switch on the Aorus card too, from Overclock to Quiet mode.

The Lian Li doesn't come with any fans unfortunately. As I bought a static pressure Noctua and a general airflow one, but only had one fan header spare after the heatsink went on, I've just mounted the static pressure one to the front for now. The same model of Noctua fan is fixed to the heatsink as standard so I've got a front intake and something pushing air out to the exhaust. I'll fit a rear exhaust fan using the 120mm 'airflow' Noctua I've got left over when my fan splitter arrives in the post.

It would be too much hassle to fit 2x slim fans in the 2x120mm bottom bays. The Aorus 5700XT really is about as close to not fitting in the case as possible :) And it has 3 great bloody fans only millimetres away from the bottom intake! So I'll dust mesh it and hope the intake->heatsink->exhaust array can cover the cooling. The entire case is really pushing it for a 3-slot card. Total working space can't be much more than 20x30cm.

Here's a few pictures real quick -- work in progress ;)
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Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/MGyFR8X

The only other thing of note was that I was hoping to mount an old mechanical SATA on the roof, above the heatsink. But God knows how it's done. I'm sure I lack the proper right-angled sata power connectors, because there just isn't room to stuff all the cables in there. Not essential anyway and I've had enough fiddling for now! I think the cable management is about as good as I'm going to get it, with the space that I've got. About time I junked mechnical drives anyway! I'll connect it up and fetch the data off it when I'm sorting out my NAS.

Thanks again.
 
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lookiong ace! didn't know about dual bios switch on the card !! should help a bit. Asian Customers for ASUS,GIGBYTE dont care about sound at all , so Cards have to be tweaked for EU especially!

they also dont car about warranty but price more... opposite here , will pay double for triple the warranty span on PSUs

might have to use a slim 2.5" LAPTOP hdd

Think you MIGHT get 12mm fans in the bottom !

but front and rear fan should help temps nicely !
 
Thanks, your advice helped immensely! I'll look into the bottom fans at a later juncture, if the exhaust doesn't sort it :)

With regards to warranty, yes, I've tried to register the Aorus online but their website email confirmation is totally borked. I've got a few more weeks yet so I'll try again later! I hadn't even heard of Aorus until about 2 weeks ago!
 
InKursion said:
Thanks, your advice helped immensely! I'll look into the bottom fans at a later juncture, if the exhaust doesn't sort it :)

With regards to warranty, yes, I've tried to register the Aorus online but their website email confirmation is totally borked. I've got a few more weeks yet so I'll try again later! I hadn't even heard of Aorus until about 2 weeks ago!
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Aorus is Gigabytes Gaming Brand- separated it a while ago. Kind of like what ASUS did with Strix branding but more full on.

Their rep is @GIGA-Man on here, which is handy. odd about the email reg.
 
OK, some last questions! I've fitted the exhaust fan this evening and I'm already seeing better case/system/chipset temperatures for it. I'm going to try pairing the exhaust and the intake on the same splitter, next, to see if I can further bring the temps down (the way the sensors are set-up on the mobo, the system sensor is near the GPU, so the case fans will generally be a higher RPM to combat it).

Would it be better to prioritise keeping CPU temps down, i.e. the set-up I have now with 2x fans on the CPU sensor, or to bring down the system/chipset/VRM temps, i.e. by pairing the intake and exhaust fan on the same splitter?


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Second, I notice in my monitoring programs that the 5700XT gets hot -- really hot -- when I'm in a game that is using 90%+ of the GPU. The thing is, no amount of cooling seems able to affect it, nor does undervolting the GPU. The 'junction temperature' will almost immediately get to 100 degrees, and sometimes tops out at 110-112 degrees. All the while the 'GPU Temp' sensor will be telling me that the GPU is 65 degrees, that is, whilst I'm under 100% load and in a game. No amount of fan curve changing will affect this. In fact, if I absolutely blast the 3 fans at 100%, the best it does is bring the junction temperature down to 105 ish, whilst the card sensor drops to low 50s.

Is this by design? Am I right in assuming that the card is just overdriving its core/memory clocks until it hits a max temp buffer? I'm not used to any current-gen graphics cards so I haven't the foggiest about this! I'm led to suspect it's something performance-related, because if I alt+tab out of a game to the desktop, the junction temp immediately drops to 55-60 ... and immediately is back up again to 100+ when I restore the game window. It's like a temp hose being turned on and off!

Which brings me onto my final question: would installing 2x 120mm fans beneath the card really affect this phenomenon? With sensible curves set-up, i.e. a max fan speed of 60% or so, the GPU temp reading rarely seems to get above 75 no matter what I throw at it. Will the alarming 110 degrees junction temp disappear if I put yet more fans in the case?
 
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what program are you using to measure GPU temps ?

I think to focus on GPU core temp, not the Junction . If the GPU hit 110/120c it would have throttled hard!!!

Personally would have Exhaust fan at higher RPM then intake . You'll be looking to set up a higher negative pressure set up in that case . this will cause air to be pulled into the case (even non filtered gaps) . Should supply your GPU with nice airflow .

You might get away with installing a 12mm fan underneath the bottom of the chassis and use the 3pin cable/header though second set of fan mounting holes at the bottom to go to the mobo . Filter might be issue though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ck1jjl/difference_between_gpu_temperature_and_junction/

Again focus on GPU core temp

 
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Very good point about having the fans externally! Why didn't I think of that!

By a set-up pulling air into the case, do you mean to have the fans directed so that the airflow is pointing 'in' to the case, rather than blowing it out? At the moment I've just got the fans in the regular way.

Reassuring to know about the core junction temperature on the 7nm chips -- but cor blimey! That's a lot of heat to be venting out of a small case :)
 
InKursion said:
The caveat with the NAS is that it eats my only available wallplug-Ethernet cable
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I didn't spot this issue being addressed: buy yourself a small switch and plug that into the wall then your NAS and the PC into the switch. Wifi is not necessary.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £36.32 (includes shipping: £7.39)​
​
 
Ah, fantastic! Thank you! The Synology set-up is my summer project ... about 1.5Tb of haphazardly organized music to sort ;)

I've just ordered from OCUK one of the new(ish) Zowie S2 mice to go with the desktop. I think I've had just about every design they've done over the years! Quality gear.

Waiting for the TKL wrist-rests to come back into stock!
 
InKursion said:
Very good point about having the fans externally! Why didn't I think of that!

By a set-up pulling air into the case, do you mean to have the fans directed so that the airflow is pointing 'in' to the case, rather than blowing it out? At the moment I've just got the fans in the regular way.

Reassuring to know about the core junction temperature on the 7nm chips -- but cor blimey! That's a lot of heat to be venting out of a small case :)
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rear as exhaust but faster speed, front as intake but controlled speed maybe , that way balance is shifted to negative
 
Makes good sense, thanks! I'll open her up tonight and have a look.

The only limitation of the mini-ITX mobo is that it has 2 fan headers, and one of those is the CPU fan header. So I can use a splitter to combine the heatsink/exhaust or a splitter to combine the intake/exhaust, which means they'll be slaved to the same speed!
 
InKursion said:
Makes good sense, thanks! I'll open her up tonight and have a look.

The only limitation of the mini-ITX mobo is that it has 2 fan headers, and one of those is the CPU fan header. So I can use a splitter to combine the heatsink/exhaust or a splitter to combine the intake/exhaust, which means they'll be slaved to the same speed!
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ah i see, might have to run front and CPU fan on one and exhaust on the other . GPU should draw in from the bottom with the exhaust aiding via negative pressure
 
I have the 3600 running stable at 4.0Ghz pretty handily, with boosts up to 4.1-2Ghz.

Coming from an ancient i5 760 but largely still doing the same tasks (office work, browsing, moderate gaming and media), it seems more than enough for my needs. For all of my music and CPU-heavy rendering, I tend to use my Macbook (still an i7 rather than an i9) so the desktop PC ends up doing more single-core-dependent stuff like gaming!

It's encouraging that AMD will continue to support the same chipset/mobos for the near-future, in any case, so that if I need an upgrade or see a deal, I won't have to rehaul my entire mobo/RAM like I've had to do in the past.

I can see myself picking up a Ryzen with more cores possibly in a year or two :). I'm not seeing any use-applications at the moment that make me feel throttled by my CPU!
 
InKursion said:
I have the 3600 running stable at 4.0Ghz pretty handily, with boosts up to 4.1-2Ghz.

Coming from an ancient i5 760 but largely still doing the same tasks (office work, browsing, moderate gaming and media), it seems more than enough for my needs. For all of my music and CPU-heavy rendering, I tend to use my Macbook (still an i7 rather than an i9) so the desktop PC ends up doing more single-core-dependent stuff like gaming!

It's encouraging that AMD will continue to support the same chipset/mobos for the near-future, in any case, so that if I need an upgrade or see a deal, I won't have to rehaul my entire mobo/RAM like I've had to do in the past.

I can see myself picking up a Ryzen with more cores possibly in a year or two :). I'm not seeing any use-applications at the moment that make me feel throttled by my CPU!
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most likely you;ll grab an 12 core Zen3/ryzen 4*** in 2-3 years time .

current 6 core 3600 matches 8 core 1700/2700 thorough better ram, speed and some tweaks. Zen3 is meant to have a bigger jump over Zen 2 then that had over zen1 :)


managed to measure gap between then case floor and the Aorus card?
 
InKursion said:
Ah, fantastic! Thank you! The Synology set-up is my summer project ... about 1.5Tb of haphazardly organized music to sort ;)

I've just ordered from OCUK one of the new(ish) Zowie S2 mice to go with the desktop. I think I've had just about every design they've done over the years! Quality gear.

Waiting for the TKL wrist-rests to come back into stock!
Click to expand...

While I don't have that exact switch I do have one made by TP-Link and it has been superb for such a small and relatively cheap bit of kit. Mine gets hammered now since I have a server, printer, my rig and a HTPC all connected to it. The printer is fully networked thanks to it too so any device can print from it dead easy! Rather off topic sorry for that :)

Stoner81.
 
orbitalwalsh said:
managed to measure gap between then case floor and the Aorus card?
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I think it's about 15mm exactly, maybe 14mm ish if I'm unlucky ;) Either way, slimline bottom fans would be almost resting flush on the thick plastic casing of the Aorus's own blowers.

Considering the options are either quite cheap and ineffective 12mm thins or the premo-15mm Noctua's (which would be another £40 for 2x), I think I'm happy with the temperatures overall now. Considering that I cheaped out on 1Tb of SSD storage over 512Gb, it seems a little exorbitant to then go ahead and spend £150 on case cooling!

Under maximum GPU load playing an AAA game (in a room with quite hot/stuffy ambient temps), I get GPU temps in the low 70s with a moderate fan curve (55% max fan speed limit). I'm happy with that considering the noise trade-off of going any higher. Even in ideal cooling set-ups, it seems the 5700XT's don't run junction temps much below the low-90s, so I'd effectively be paying £40 to get the junction temp down from 100 to 93. It seems the silicon in these things is just meant to run really hot. The CPU temps rarely go above 60 even at the 4Ghz overclock, and the chipset/case sensors near it normally get to mid 60s under heavy load. The case cooling that I have now, such as it is (1x Noctua 120mm on front, 1x Noctua 120mm on heatsink, 1x Noctua 120mm on exhaust), manages to get the case back down to sub-50 temperatures within 5 mins of quitting the game or application. Overall I'm happy with that. I'm sure it could be better, but ... !

At the moment I'm playing some Warcraft and the machine is humming along at 41 degrees CPU, 50 degrees on the VRMs, 52 on the overall system. The GPU gets to 64 or so when I'm tabbed in and that damn junction sensor will reach the mid-90s no matter what I do with the fan curve ... :D
 
My only complaint about the build, which isn't the fault of any of the hardware, really, is the AMD drivers. They are shocking to be honest. I've had an endless stream of issues with it, nearly a full-on week of troubleshooting overall!

Certain games or applications when made full screen (not borderless or windowed) will give a blinking black screen, as if there's no signal being received. Only a hard reset will fix it, or removing the HDMI from the back of the card and inserting a DVI, instead (and vice versa).

I've had several crashes and hangs, similarly too. Seems even the AMD driver native interface doesn't work very well: the in-game overlay causes more problems than it offers features!

I've never before had a graphics card where the drivers have been noticeably different, but installing some legacy drivers has made the world of difference. Internet forums are full of painful stories about 5700XT drivers!
 
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