Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Revisiting the Fractal North: Still a Great Build Experience?”.
Foreign, this is the fractal North. You may remember it from such videos, as this is the fractal North and gosh darn. It I’m having a lot of fun building computers. This is kind of the six month.
Follow-Up. It’S not quite six months. It’S pretty good defeat.
Come off easily, I don’t like that love. This case love the design. It’S a little 1970s wood grain with the gold, but not really I mean everything that comes around goes around anyway. I found an off-label use, and that is this 280 millimeter fan mounted sideways here.
Now this is the fractal Prisma, so you know it’s fractal’s own cooler. It kind of makes sense that that would work, but what about somebody else’s cooler, the liquid freezer 2 RGB 80.. Now fractals cooler is very good. There’S nothing wrong with it. It’S totally fine.
However, I want to rock a 7950x in this system and the cooling performance of the Arctic 280 millimeter is just a little bit better and enough people have written in on the level one forums to say. I can’t Source the fractal cooler, I’m really interested in Arctic. What do you think about arctic and I’ve already taken a look at the Arctic 420, which is pretty much hands down the best AIO cooler you can get for a monster CPU like the 3900ks AMD just launched their 7900x 3D and generally it’s less wattage. It runs cooler even in the 7950x, so you really don’t need one of these monster coolers for it. But I want to try to do PBO and let the CPU stretch its legs as far as possible, and also the upcoming 7800x3d, which is probably going to be very modest in terms of its cooling requirements.
But nevertheless, I’m going to set that up in this system. And I’m going to set this up with the Tai Chi live mixer motherboard and that’s the version. That’S got the special 10 gigabit card that was made just for me. You should definitely check out that video, because it’s a b650 motherboard that you can turn into an x670 motherboard with an add-in pcie card.
This is the system that that system is going to live in forever, with its 10 gigabit Ethernet, and I’ve got some other plans in mind for my fractal 280 millimeter cooler. So I’m going to swap in this Arctic 280 liquid freezer liquid freezer 2 and see if it fits as well, because I’m sort of curious and for some of you, especially if you’re around Germany, Arctic Germany, the availability is maybe a little bit better in Europe and Arctic has some really solid stuff, they’re, definitely worth a look, but let’s see if I can get this built and do some benchmarks and configuration and all that sort of fun stuff. If you didn’t catch the other video, this thing is normally meant to just have fans. Put the fan and the cooler in it and the fractal cooler is pretty good because it’s got the built-in wires. So it’s kind of neat: you know you just get the tubes and that sort of stuff it’s worked out. It’S worked out: fine, okay, let’s unbox our liquid freezer too.
So two main things give the Arctic its increased cooling capacity, one at thick, radiator and two, the fans. Even though the fans are roughly the same thickness, they have a different design and they’ll move at a higher RPM, more RPM. You know it’s going to mean more noise, but you can control that in software, so that it’s not more noise unless you need it, but there’s also this ring around the outside of the fan, which gives it a higher static pressure, which is good when we’re talking About a thicker radiator, I mean it’s not that I’m criticizing any design choices. The fractal made it’s a thinner radiator. It doesn’t require as high as static pressure, less airflow through the radiator. It makes sense and it makes sense for CPUs even like am5, because am5 CPUs typically don’t need a lot of power.
But in this case I’m going to be overclocking. It I’m going to be pushing it to the absolute limit. And so I don’t want cooling to be an issue now for the motherboard.
As I said, the live mixer the b650, but this is a special version, because I was one of the people that complained about the lack of pcie slots on am5, especially high-end am5 boards. How are we going to rock 10 gigabit Ethernet or you know those kind of things, but it’s an engineering challenge. You know most people aren’t going to add a 10 gig ethernet.
Most people aren’t going to do those kind of things. So how do you give enthusiasts something? That’S also not a thousand dollar motherboard, and what Ezra came up with. Was you put the extra chipset on a pcie card which would turn this b650 into an x670.? The x670 solution from AMD two chipsets, but that also gives you more pcie connectivity. Well, it’s Daisy, chained, pcie connectivity. It doesn’t give you more pcie bandwidth, but it does let you connect more pcie devices more easily, so they put their 10 gig network controller on a pcie card, with more USB and more m.2 and more SATA. One of the cool things I like about the Arctic system is that you can do offset mounting, is what it’s called, and so the plate for the CPU actually ends up being offset just a little bit, which you know.
The hot spots of the CPU are kind of down there like, if I can show you so that’s what it looks like under the hood literally under the heat spreader. So the offset Mount shifts the cooler down just a little bit to better cover the actual CPUs. The CPUs are at the bottom part and the i o part is in the middle, so the part of the chip that gets the hottest is this little part toward the bottom. To be clear, these kinds of thermals are really not a huge concern for AMD users.
At least not in the universe of CPU thermal concerns that we find ourselves in, but it is nice that Arctic has done this little touch to give you the offset mounting. That is an option on Intel CPUs, of course, but the dial position on Intel CPUs is different, and so the offset mounting really doesn’t benefit you there now for our Cooling Arctic MX-5 Arctic has you covered, and the MX-5 is good thermal paste. In fact, Arctic mesh 5 is what I use almost exclusively. The only other thermal paste I really use is the Kingpin special EVGA, the blue stuff, that stuff is a little better in certain scenarios, but if you just want to buy a thermal paste without thinking about it MX-5 now I’ve got news for you.
If you’re thinking, I don’t, the orange doesn’t go well with the black and gold accents. I’Ve got some good news for you remember. I said this is a mesh side panel. It’S not glass, you’re, not going to be able to see it.
What counts is how the thing purrs. What’S under the hood, the engine, I don’t care about the color scheme I actually kind of like that ASRock is trying something different foreign. So, let’s dub that the level one maneuver when you flip and twist around the radiator, to get it to fit you’re, trying to make sure that the tubes are not bent or crimped out of the way, don’t just force it in there try to find which way.
The tubes want to go and you could go tubes up or tubes down now. Tubes down means that it’s going to be near your GPU, which is okay, but in my case I’m probably going to be switching things in and out of the system. I wanted to twist the radiator the other way so that the tubes kind of go up out of the way, but then that creates a high point in your system. That’S not inside the radiator, which I guess is maybe okay in this scenario. Now, what are we adding for a GPU wow, the 7900 XTX Tai Chi, of course three slot card of dominating nonsense insanity, but I can still see the inside and there’s all these colors and blah blah blah.
And oh my gosh and what’s happening. I don’t know it’s just sad now: the Tai Chi. You can turn off the RGB if you prefer not to have RGB, not a big deal and boom. Look at that in our live, mixer, bios yeah! So there’s two things that are missing from our build storage.
I’M going to use the p5800x from Intel uh, don’t blink! If you look that one up ooh that price it’s it’s an Enterprise Drive, it’s not meant for desktop computers, but I’ve gone a bit off label with this build, but it also has this. This is the expansion kit, the x670 on a pcie card. Special Edition live mixer.
I don’t know if ASRock is going to turn this into a product, but I love this. Now there was one company that did the same thing: there’s an x70 ITX board. That only has an extra m.2 Port like it uses four pcie lanes to give you four pcie lanes.
This uses four pcie lanes to give you a heck of a lot more connectivity to pcie m.2 that are also by four lanes: they’re mucks together. Yes, of course, but if you use two pcie three m.2, there’s no bandwidth sacrifice here. Two PCI 3 m.2 will not bottleneck through this pcie4 connection. Now, if you’re, looking for a high-end performance without high-end price, the Samsung 980 or the 990, I mean you’re, paying a premium you’re still paying a significant premium. I think one of the best deals in storage right now is probably the solidime p44 pro it doesn’t have. Dram and solidime has done more with less than most of their competitors.
I’Ve got a separate review of some of the offerings from solidon coming up, but I continue to be impressed by by that drive, especially it’s like a game drive because it’s got reasonable burst performance and the burst performance is off the charts on our p5800x. That’S what I’m looking for more than transfer rates, in fact burst performance is one of the reasons that pcie5 SSD, some of the first ones that are out are so disappointing. I mean yeah. Those pci5 ssds can do 10 gigabytes per second in stream performance when you’re loading a level, but the random access is actually worse than a lot of the existing pcie, 3 and 4 drives.
This configuration with the 7900 XTX would be my preferred configuration for a Linux. Workstation, the open source driver and everything that AMD is doing on the Linux side of the world. It’S pretty much Unstoppable, 7900 or 7950x. I think for the Linux workstation again fabulous Choice, two sticks of memory. That’S definitely my recommendation. I don’t recommend four sticks of memory on this platform. 64 gigabytes of memory is 232 gigabits and you can also get 48 gig bims.
Is that right? I think you can get 48 gig names. I don’t have any that I have my hands on, but that’s the thing or maybe you can do 24 gig dims and have 2 times 24 gigabytes of memory. Maybe that’s your thing. 48 gigabytes memory, instead of 64 a little bit less money. It’S also a pretty good sweet spot 7950×3 D, even on Linux, actually does work really well and in this platform, absolute Maximum Overkill – and you can hear I wasn’t even sure it turned on all right – I’m one of those level, one there’s been a fun quickie, build Signing out you find me in the level one forums .