It's been a long time since I last made a PC building article. But now, I've got myself a new PC and all the parts are picked by me. It was a long wait for this PC. But here I am sitting right behind this beast but also not getting broke (well, sort of) and writing this article. Now let's talk about the parts and see if I can justify my title.
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| 1440p PC with Powercolor Hellhound Radeon RX 7800 XT |
Specs of the PC
Before heading to benchmark or comment about the PC, let's talk about the specs
Internal components:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700
Cooler: DeepCool AG400 Digital CPU cooler
Graphics card: PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7800 XT
RAM: 2x Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 6000 MHz CL30
Storage:
1) Colorful CN700 Plus 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVME Drive
2) OCPC XTL-200 SSD 2.5" SATA III 512GB
Motherboard: MSI B650 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi ATX Form Factor
PSU: DeepCool PN750D 750W ATX 3.1 compatible
Case: Antec CX300 ARGB Mid-Tower
Now let's breakdown the parts one by one and explain why I choose these parts.
Parts explanation
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700
This CPU may be not the fastest within its generation, but it's really cheap in Bangladesh. And it's just a downclocked version of it's X variant. Everything else is the same as it's X counterpart. But you can save about 90 bucks (11000 BDT) which is huge considering the minimal difference in performance. And I also need a CPU for editing my YouTube videos. So, the Ryzen 7 7700 with those two extra cores was the best bet for me and my professional and gaming needs.
Cooler: DeepCool AG400 Digital CPU cooler
For the US readers, Yes, DeepCool is still producing their products in other regions. So, in our country, we can get those good CPU coolers for cheap. And this particular model named AG400 Digital, is a budget cooler with 7 segment LED digital display. It's a subjective matter. But I found digital displays very useful for me. That doesn't mean I need a display in all of my components. The display is dedicated to measuring the CPU temps and usage. You can configure the display of the cooler with the software provided by DeepCool. But not much since it's a 7 segment display. But for 25 dollars, this is absolutely worth it.
Graphics card: PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7800 XT
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| PowerColor Radeon RX 7800 XT Hellhound |
It's not surprising that PowerColor is one of the most reliable AMD-exclusive brands out there. So, I wanted to make my hands dirty with one of their min-ranging bad boy, the Hellhound Radeon RX 7800 XT. And boy, it is a beast. I will show the benchmarks later. But for now, let's see the specs. With 16 GB of GDDR6, 1440p ultra gaming shouldn't be an issue. And with PowereColor's over engineered cooling system, this card can stay cool and quiet even in intense scenarios. This GPU is an ideal for my 1440p all-rounding PC. But people usually built PCs with a Nvidia GPU if they want an all rounder PC. So, why I've gone for a Radeon card? There are mainly 3 reasons; the first one is obvious, the lower price tag. And when I purchased the 7800 XT, it was even cheaper than the slightly slower RTX 4070 and the equivalent Nvidia RTX 4070 Super wasn't even at stock. Which is the second reason to go for team red. And the third reason is, I don't need those Nvidia exclusive features. Video editing speeds are on par with Nvidia, I rarely use upscaling tech yet, I don't need CUDA professionally, etc. And if someday, I want to try GPU accelerated computing, ROCm is enough for me to make my hands dirty. And everything else is working fine on my Radeon card. I hope this justifies my purchase.
RAM: 2x Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 6000 MT/s CL30
It's no surprise that Kingston is one of the most popular and reliable RAM kit brand in the market. They use high quality A grade Hynix memory chips for their RAM kits, especially in recent models. And the model I've used in my PC can go up to 6000 MT/s and the CAS latency can be as quick as 30 ns. Not the fastest, but definitely enough for a upper mid-range built.
Storage:
1) Colorful CN700 Plus 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVME Drive
This drive is a solid mid-ranger for a PC like this. The read/write speed of this specific model is 4000/4000 (MB/s) and a endurance rating of whopping 640 TBW. This drive was mainly intended to use for gaming and heavy work. The only downside of this drive is that there is no DRAM cache. It uses HMB technology, which is decent. But it cannot match the performance of a drive with a DRAM cache. Other than that everything is fast enough for me.
2) OCPC XTL-200 SSD 2.5" SATA III 512GB
OCPC is probably unknown to many foreign readers. But in Bangladesh, it's a popular PC component brand. And their XTL-200 series is a popular SATA SSD lineup. This particular SSD is a 512 GB one. Unfortunately, this one also doesn't come with a DRAM cache, but it's decent enough to use it as a Windows and a secondary storage drive.
That was all for my storage, but I may add more in the future.
Motherboard: MSI B650 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi ATX
Now this is another crucial component of a PC. And as my budget was over a grand, AM5 was the way to go for me. I originally planned to get a B850 motherboard, but the specific board I wanted was out of stock and I had budget constrains. So I had no choice but to go for the mid-budget MSI B650 Gaming Plus motherboard. Although it's not a expensive motherboard, it has high quality VRMs to handle those high-end CPU with ease. It got enough NVME SSD slots and USB ports for me. Wi-fi and Bluetooth is always a plus for any motherboard, which is present in this model. Overall this is a nice motherboard for the price.
PSU: DeepCool PN750D 750W
Finding a well priced PSU suitable for mid-range builds is very tough nowadays. But after scraping numerous inventories, I finally found a PSU that fits all my needs in a good price. But the only problem with this PSU is it is non-modular PSU. This makes cable managing a nightmare even for experienced builders. But that doesn't mean the PSU is bad. It's a B- (minus) rated PSU in ZTT PSU tier list. Which is enough to provide stable power to my stock RX 7800 XT x Ryzen 7 7700 combo. And it has almost all the standard protection tech for the price. But another fact about this PSU is that it has a Cybenetics Gold, which is a strong point of this PSU. Overall, it's a mid-range PSU at best.
Case: Antec CX300 ARGB Mid-Tower
This case was released just four months ago. This newly released case from Antec is a budget single chamber fish tank case which was made to hold huge triple fan graphics cards. With support of up to 7 120mm fan support, 360mm radiator support, cooling isn't an issue. And the best part is, it comes with 4 pre-installed A-RGB fans. Overall, this is a solid case for a full AIO cooled ATX build. And the clearance for the graphics card is a decent 420mm. Which is enough to even hold those big RTX 50 series cards.
Building the PC:
Let me tell you the truth first, this PC was built by the shop. But it's not a pre-built, I didn't pay any extras for building the PC. I intentionally didn't want to build it myself not because I lacked confidence, I've swapped CPUs installed GPUs applied thermal pastes in my life. The real reason was I didn't want to get a DOA product after returning home and putting hours building this PC. So, I tested that PC in the shop and the PC was all good. But unfortunately, the USB 3.0 port of the case isn't working, and the case doesn't come with a warranty. And I fount the issue out later, but everything else is running fine and the performance was as expected. After some stress testing and installing, everything was ready to go. The only downside of this build was the cable management of the PSU. As this PSU is a non-modular one, the cable management for this PC is harder compared to a PC with a modular PSU. but overall this is a really decent looking and performing PC.
Benchmarking the PC
This section will focus on benchmarking the PC with a few benchmarking software and games. First, in CPU-Z, the CPU scores a decent 537.9 in single thread bench and 5861 in multi threat bench at 3.8 Ghz clock speed. Unfortunately, I couldn't push the maximum turbo even after running the benchmark for multiple times. Maybe it's a bug that needs to be fixed.
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| Cinebench multi-thread test |
However, moving onto Cinebench, the single thread score is 83 at 3.8 GHz, multi-thread is 854 at 3.8 GHz, and the GPU score is 10118. Which is decent enough for the system.
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| FurMark donut 1440p test |
And the hardest benchmark for the GPU, FurMark (donut) scores 12496 (208 FPS) at 1080p and 9549 (159 FPS) at 1440p.
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| CS2 gameplay test |
Moving to gaming benchmarks, CS2, the competitive shooter, gets about 200 to 350 FPS on average, depending on the map at 1440p medium with no Anti-aliasing enabled. A little older title like Forza Horizon 3 could deliver 155 FPS with everything maxed out at 1440p with 8x MSAA. And other games will also perform really well at 1440p max settings. And we can, therefore, expect that other games will perform great at 1440p high settings.
Conclusion and total cost:
This PC is a great 1440p build, but at what cost? The whole built, excluding any kind of peripherals, costs approximately 1354 USD (1 USD = 120 BDT). Which is not bad considering its impressive performance at 1440p. And productivity is okay because I mainly use this rig for editing and writing articles other than gaming. So if you live in Bangladesh region, this build is perfect for you if you want a 1440p Ultra gaming machine without braking your bank.