I love the beige and brown. I think it is because of what it stands for: it shows the stubbornness, the will to not give in to fashion. It shows that the looks of the fan are not what you bought the fan for: the great engineering and vastly better performance makes the NF-A12x25 a fan that does not need to care about looks.
And because of that, I actually like the looks. I know I’m weird.
(couldn’t find a similar graph in English: this test shows airflow in cfm at a measured sound level, for a fair comparison between fans)
Last week I put some pretty low bids on reference RX 6800 XTs on Marktplaats (Dutch Ebay). It looked like they were going to be selling for 950 eur, and I had been trying unsuccessfully to get a refetence RX 6900 XT directly from AMD for 1k.
I was starting to give up and bid 860 on some 6800XTs.
Yesterday one of those bids was accepted, and I got myself the RX6800XT I’ve been wanting since October.
Of course, this weekend we are going camping with Jansovich, so no time to properly test it until Monday.
Yes that is a tent drying in the background. I felt I had to turn on the RADEON RGB logo, otherwise half the case was a black void. I think the bluish white works better than red here.
I added one of the fans to the CPU cooler, the NH-U12A, so ti now runs as it was originally intended, and added the other one as a front intake.
I was able to keep the 2x 140 mm fans in the front and add a 120mm fan. However, the 120mm was ‘too low’ to reach the 120mm mounting holes in the bottom positions, so I ended up keeping the bottom 140mm fan with just the top screws attached, and added the 120mm fan in the middle.
Now my PC is complete as intended:
Ryzen 5 5600X
Radeon RX 6800XT
Whole lotta beige Noctua
I need to write an update.
3 things have happened on the pc building side. I have been helping friends and family compose parts list and build their pc’s so I have had a look at the current state of pc hardware. It has been an expensive ordeal but might get a lot less expensive now.
So that was a no-brainer purchase. 500 euros yes, but an easy drop-in replacement for anyone already on Ryzen 5000 or a B450/B550/X570 motherboard.
As graphics card prices have been coming down this spring, I was looking to upgrade to a cooler and quieter version of the RX 6800 XT. When I got the reference card, the premium for a better cooler was about €400 but now I could upgrade at a net cost of only half that.
Scrolling through the tweakers.net (Dutch tech site) pricewatch, I noticed that there was an RX 6900 XT Red Devil Ultimate available for only €80 more than the cheapest 6800 XTs (€1000). This is a binned 6900 chip with a huge heatsink.
I bought it immediately, installed it, and started selling my old CPU and GPU.
The 5800X3D does not overclock and is very cool so I moved the second CPU cooler fan to the top of the case since taking this picture.
More airflow for the GPU.
However, yesterday I noticed there is an ASUS TUF RTX3080 OC now on sale for way less: €850 !
I remember reading that the RTX 3080 performs comparably to the 6900XT in DCS VR and since I am still within the 30-day return period, I will probably swap it.
Looking forward to your benchmarks. I’ve been eyeballing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D but have to be able to justify purchasing it. Everything seems to indicate that the performance justifies the cost. Please do share your experience.
I haven’t measured the 3D but it feels like it is a lot smoother in those busy multiplayer / many units scenarios.
There are many reports of people comparing 5600X and 5800X vs 5800X3D in all kinds of situations (including VR) in this DCS World forum thread, so I did not feel the need to do a numeric A/B myself
I did a little benchmark with the RX 6900 XT, both in silent and max overclock / undervolt mode, will post numbers comparing the GPUs, both with the 3D cpu since I sold my 5600X already
The 5800X3D runs a LOT cooler. Most reviews found it to run about 20°C cooler than the 5800X at stock.
Underneath my Noctua NH-U12A with both fans mounted but at almost minimum rpm, when I ran Cinebench multicore it never got past 55 °C.
Any serious cooler is overkill for this CPU, that is how cool it runs.
My overclocked Ryzen 5 5600X could easily exceed 70 °C even when the fans on the cooler spun up to higher speeds.
I hope I am as happy as you are with the ASUS TUF RTX3080. It sure is nice to upgrade from the reference card now the shortages are over.
I just ran the DCS benchmarks on RTX 3080, looks like it’ll be close but I’ll make a separate topic on that.
@Elby I also did the Gryz CPU-heavy mission with the TUF RTX3080 so you can compare it to your setup with the non-3D Ryzen. Will post settings, .miz file and results later this evening.
I measured the frametimes using FRAPS. Be sure to disable ‘Stop benchmark after 60 seconds’ and pay attention to the messages in the top right to get the timing of the measurement right.
Frames: 18641
Time (ms): 195578
Min fps: 88
Max fps: 103
Avg fps: 95.312
But there is a good chance the resolution and settings are too high here to see what difference the CPU makes, as I also got about 100 fps in the much less populated mission when testing the video cards against each other
The 5800X3D looks good but you made me have a look at current CPU prices and they’re looking REALLY good! I’m going to pick up a 5950X tomorrow to max out my mobo. Talk me out of it.
Well if your day job is rendering videos or 3D models, or running numerical simulations, then the 5950X is a great CPU.
But for gaming, the 5800X3D is simply the best CPU out there, by a large margin.
How large that margin is, depends on the game, but simulators can really use that 3D cache. Racing simulators too, but especially flight sims. As we can see in the DCS forums thread I linked to, the performance increase in CPU-intensive DCS scenarios is 30% when coming from a non-3D Ryzen 5000.
By comparison, you are lucky to get a 3% performance increase in games when going from a 5800X to a 5950X.
Just have a look at these MSFS measurements and know that the numbers for DCS are roughly the same.
I’ll wait for better 5800X3D availability where I live then. Thanks