Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Case, The Wendell, but which GPU? AMD 7900 XTX reveal”.
I’Ve been itching to do a build and a fractal to find seven Mini because we’re sort of entering this age of giant gpus. So that’s what we’re gon na do. We’Re gon na do an AMD build in this it’s little, but it’s the Define. So we have type c two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3 ports, although it’s defined so expensive, maybe four USB 3 ports would have been better got the solid breathable front, the replaceable top. If you want a top that can breathe, I’m not going to put a top that can breathe in it.
We’Re gon na put a tower cooler in this and, like I said, we’re doing, am5 we’re going to use our noctua cooler for this we’re going to use a 12 core 7900x, our b50m mortar Wi-Fi from MSI, which I reviewed separately. Oh, let’s Dive In now, as with most builds it’s easier to do your pre-assembly before you put it all in the case, I’ve got our am5 processor here, 7900x, don’t handle it by the gold things handle it by the edges, and then I’ve got our MSI Motherboard. Prepped and ready for CPU installation. So if you want to be be careful not to get anything in the socket any debris or anything like that, don’t even breathe on it wrong! Because if you get anything in the socket, it’s going to probably mess up the pins and that’s very hard to recover from so you basically just insert your processor. The writing is up, so you can here.
I can kind of see what we get going on here and then you just flip your little door down and boom you’re good to go now, depending on what you’re, using for your CPU cooling Mount. It may just clip onto the socket as it is in our case, with the knock to a cooler. We actually have to unscrew the four mounting screws and put in the nocture mounting mechanism get our Nokia mounting mechanism here.
So this is what it looks like with the noctro mounting system installed. It’S it’s pretty good. Really. You need to put some thermal paste on your on your CPU and, if you can imagine what it looks like underneath the uh, the heat spreader here, the metal part, you know the hot spots for the chips.
You know you got the two chiplets and the i o die um, that’s sort of where you want to make sure that you got good coverage on your thermal paste. I’Ve actually got a thing to demonstrate that let me get it so this is what it looks like under the heat spreader and the parts that get hot are actually down here at the bottom, and then you get your i o dot here in the middle. Now you might be wondering, aren’t you worried about thermals? The 7900x is too chiplets. It gets really hot. It reports The Hot Spot temperature. This is maybe a one percent performance difference versus a 360 AIO, I’m not going to run with PBO or any kind of overclocking, or anything like that.
This will be fine. There we go now. While the motherboard is out of the system, it makes sense to go ahead and add our storage.
You know likely you’re going to choose m.2 for your storage solution which can go in the slot just below the CPU here, as well as memory I’ll start with the memory we’re going to be using the g-skill F5 6000j 3038f16 gx2-tz5, and this is ddr56016 gig. X2 kit, so 32 gigs of total memory. Cl30. 3838. 96.
1.35. Volts. I think this is a reasonable solution for a reasonable system. If I wanted something a little higher end, I would go for 64 gigabytes of memory on am5. I think that’s sort of the upper end of what you want to do on am5, at least right now. If you want maximum memory, throughput and lowest possible, latency and gaming system, basically 64 gigabytes is the max if you’re curious about that did a whole separate video on that check it out now.
For me for storage, this is going to be a test system. I’M going to rotate in and out some different storage. I’M going to start with the mushkin vortex Redline.
It’S a pcie, gen 4×4 solid state drive. This is not the fastest Gen 4 drive you can get, but it’s not the slowest and it’s been on sale lately. So it’s a pretty good choice.
I could also choose an Intel two and a half inch optane drive one like this one, but but wait a minute. This motherboard doesn’t have a u.2 connection. Oh yes, it does. You can use this m.2 breakout to connect your lower m.2 for your two and a half nvme. So it’ll connect right here in this m.2 slot, just like this and it’s low profile, so it’ll clear your GPU and come out and around like this it’ll work perfectly in this motherboard, even though it doesn’t support UDOT too. This will work.
Fine – and this is a nice large, fast first generation, optane drive, those are still really really fast for loading games and everything else. You look at the benchmarks and it’s like wait a minute that can only do two three gigabytes per second, it’s the latency that makes it fast did a separate video on that. If you’re curious, all right, let’s get this thing mounted in the case now for the power supply, I want something along the lines of 850 Watts and the reason for that is that’ll reasonably. Let me uh use most just about all gpus. This era notice that I Define mini 7, comes with two fans. One 120 at the rear one 140 at the front, probably should add another 140 at the front. I think with this uh, this heat load, but I’ll come back to that killer. Feature of these fractal cases is the top radiator bracket pops out you put fans or radiators whatever you want in this.
It makes life and mounting a lot easier. So you can kind of see it’s a little easier to work with the case in this configuration our MSI Motherboard already has the i o Shield built in so there’s nothing to worry about there. Basically, you’re just going to plop the motherboard in and you’re good to go if you’ve never built a computer before a trick that you should do whenever you’re doing any kind of build is to count the number of standoffs that you have and then go around and Count the number of holes and make sure that they line up or when you put the screws in make sure that the number of screws that you put in match the number of holes fractal is a little tricky. The middle nub is actually a peg.
That stands up. You don’t put a screw in that one, but it helps you line everything else up because it’s in the middle of the board. So it doesn’t matter that it’s not a screw, but you’ll want to count the number of standoffs to make sure that the numbers screws you put in match, because otherwise you could have a standoff under the motherboard somewhere that you can’t put a screw. And that may mean it’s shorting, something out like there could be pins sticking down or something like that, and you want to make sure that you uh don’t have that, because that can lead to a bad time.
Lots of weird intermittent troubleshooting. Now, with this good to go, we got to mount our power supply. Fractal makes a very nice line of power supplies it would be who, for you to check them out, there’s lots of other power supplies you can get as well. We also need to connect our front panel connections now.
This motherboard only has a single 30 pin a type c and two USB 2 ports. So our front panel configuration for the case mates up with the motherboard pretty much perfectly, because we don’t have any unused 30 pin headers a lot of motherboards come with two thirty pin headers. This thing’s got just the one, so this works out perfectly. We also need to connect our front panel.
I o and maybe dig up another fan, there’s plenty of options back here for cable routing and everything else that we need to do so. Yeah good job fractal be careful not to be confused USB for front panel audio. So, basically, just shove the cables through the rubber grommet, so you can kind of see them here.
The next thing you want to do is route. Your fan connectors, so our front panel fans, three pin fan three pin fan means it’s DC, not pwm. That just means how the fan is controlled, I’ll get an extra assist, fan header at the top of the motherboard.
That’S where I’m putting that one our front panel connections, you got all these little wires. It’S power switch power LED and reset switch. Those go to a special place on the motherboard you’ll have to check the manual to know exactly where and how to connect those.
It’S no big deal if you get them completely wrong, though so just try to follow the diagram in your motherboard manual and then can get them connected. In my case, I’m going to Route them through the same front panel USB connection this this grommet, that’s here in the front the front panel connection. Now all we got to do is hook up our power supply now getting the power supply mounted.
It’S basically just a question of tab. A into slot B. I’Ve got our power supply mounted here in the bottom.
You can route the cables around the back. You’Ve got your motherboard power connector. Here the motherboard CPU power connectors come around the back and connect here at the top, and then you sort of route your cables for your GPU, the same way that you did your front panel and your USB connection and then here I’ve got the MSI Supreme 3090.
This is pretty much the nicest 3090 that you can buy and with the 4000 series cards out, these are on sale. So, if you see these in stock, it’s probably going to be a pretty good deal. It’S pretty much one of the largest cards you can get as well. This size Rivals, you know even the flagship 4090 cards and it’s still oh, I’m gon na fit, but these Flagship cards even for this new fractal case, even though I haven’t put a radiator in the front, this card is too big for this case.
What about the uh OC formula from ASRock? This is a 6950 XT. Will it fit nope sure? Won’T it’s a little bit shorter than a supreme 3090, but not short enough definitely pays to check the manual on the cases that you’re buying in your gpus to know what the GPU clearance is shown pretty clearly in the manual two days later, man Giant gpus, and What, if you want 40, 80 and Beyond level performance? This is our Cooler Master, the insane case. Look at this thing. You could fit a family of four in here and have still have room. This is not everybody wants to build something this large. Oh, it’s literally crushing my chest. Won’T somebody save us from all this. Oh, what is what is this? An RX 7900 XTX AMD come to save the day with insane levels of performance.
Look at this office card. Look at this magic! Thank you. I broke in the Box: okay, cool cool cool cool cool, cool cool. This is a two and a half slot card. This is gon na block our other expansion slot on our MSI Motherboard. I don’t know why, but they moved the first x16 slot down the board. One slot that was this board is awesome. That’S really its only flaw. Two and a half slots and AMD has already disclosed the board power for this and a lot of technical details, but I can’t disclose any technical details. Yet only AMD is allowed to share their secrets, but soon soon, so you know okay, I really need to reroute the power cables.
For this a little bit better. Two and a half slots means it can still breathe and look it fits in there perfectly. I’Ve got all kinds of room at the front. I might even be able to get a radiator in the front with the clearance on this card and the 7900 XT is even shorter than this.
One amd’s already disclosed the performance a little bit. You know they talked about it, some without talking about specific cards, and it does look like the performance is going to be pretty good. Based on what they’ve said, but stay for the full review. I might hate it, you don’t know you guys come for the review, but in terms of fitting, in a case, that’s not, you know the size of New York.
You have the option now. Listen, I like cases the size of New York. Don’T don’t take that the wrong way, but I know there’s people out there that are thinking yes, a quiet, soundproofed defined case and a small form factor with Micro ATX and our really high-end am5 build with fast DDR memory.
We’Ve got all these USBC ports for video. We got dual DisplayPort 2.1 plus HDMI, it’s a nice package, but that’s all I can show you for now. I’M one of this level, one I’m selling out and you can find me in the level one forums I mean if I were, to hit the power button and plug it in and we start seeing performance what would happen? Foreign .