APC – May 2021
English | 115 pages | pdf | 112.35 MB
Upgrade time Things we need, and things we don’t.
As Chris explains in his Two Bits column on page 18 of this issue, we’re switching out the main testbed PC used in the APC Labs from Intel to AMD. The main reason is to take advantage of the PCIe 4 support that AMD’s AM4 platform offers, and has offered long enough for it to be mature, stable and reliable. Intel will surely get there in time too, but with an increasing number of PCIe 4 SSDs being released it’s important we have a platform we can trust for those reviews.
We change the testbed platform once a year or so. Unlike my main gaming / desktop rig at home, which hasn’t been upgraded since late 2017 when I built it around an Intel i7 8700K. It’s starting to show its age a bit in some games I like, and while
it truly has years of use left in it, I want more performance, so I’m switching to an AMD Ryzen 5950X build. Outside the APC Magazine Labs, I don’t have a lot of hands-on time tinkering with the AM4 platform and its BIOS, so I’m really looking forward to getting into it and really learning its its quirks and features.
I actually run two gaming rigs; my big spare time hobby is sim racing and I have a pretty nice triple-screen setup with ann unnecessarily fancy cockpit to sit in. An i9 9900K powers thatt one, and while it’s true that racing sims love a fast CPU with many cores for the physics, being a triple screen setup with a resolution of 7790×1440 (bezel-corrected), it’s the video card that’s bottlenecking things. There’s a 2080Ti in there handling that workload, and despite the big res plus game detail set quite high, it’s absolutely adequate, giving me frames in the 70-80 range for most of the sims I play. G-Sync takes care of making it all buttery smooth, so that Ben PC won’t need upgrading for a while.
Unless you count the sim rig upgrade that did truly excite me recently. A couple of months ago I added the Asus ROG Bezel Free Kit, and boy oh boy is it magical. I wrote a few words about it in Gadgets this month, on page 24 of this magazine issue. It’s just two clear strips of plastic, really, and while I’m excite to be enjoying the power of all 19.2 billion transistors inside the new desktop Ryzen PC, the simple bezel kit makes me smile every time I climb in for another race. The bezels are gone now. Damn things. A simple little upgrade can often be aa big deal, and sometimes it’s just nice to get something new. BEN MANSILL
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