My Current AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Gaming Rig

Introduction

One thing that I have done over the past year during the ongoing human malware situation is to refocus my attention on desktop computer hardware. This includes building and tweaking a number of AMD Ryzen desktop systems for various purposes. This has been a useful distraction that I have enjoyed. I have also increased my knowledge of PC hardware by doing this. So, I thought it might be interesting to talk about my my current AMD Ryzen 5 5600X gaming rig as it stands at the moment. BTW, the last change to this system was yesterday…

My Current AMD Ryzen Gaming Rig

Perhaps surprisingly, nothing about this machine is especially fancy or extreme high-end. No custom loop liquid cooling for example. Everything is current generation hardware, but none of the components are absolute top of the line choices. I think it is a nice machine that meets my needs pretty well, and I am quite happy with it.

Here are the current components and peripherals.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X on Amazon
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black on Amazon
• Motherboard: MSI MPG B550 Gaming Edge WiFi on Amazon
• Memory: 64GB (4x16GB) G.SKILL Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600
  • G.SKILL CL16 F4-3600C16D-32GTZNC
• Video Card: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super XC Ultra
• New Video Card: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Vision OC
• Storage: 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 on Amazon
• Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow on Amazon
• Power Supply: ASUS ROG Thor 850 on Amazon
• 140mm Case Fans: ARCTIC P14 PWM – 140 mm Case Fan on Amazon
• 120mm Case Fan: ARCTIC P12 PWM – 120 mm Case Fan on Amazon
• PCIe Slot Covers: Silverstone Aeroslots BP on Amazon
• Keyboard: Corsair K100 RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard on Amazon
• Mouse: Corsair M65 Pro RGB
• Mouse Pad: Corsair MM800 RGB POLARIS Gaming Mouse Pad on Amazon
• Headset Stand: Corsair ST100 RGB Premium Headset Stand with 7.1 Surround Sound on Amazon
• Headset: Corsair Void Elite USB on Amazon
• Monitor: ASUS MG279Q Gaming Monitor – 27″ 2K WQHD (2560 x 1440), IPS, up to 144Hz, FreeSync

The Corsair 4000D Airflow case is very easy to build in and it has pretty good cable management features. It also does pretty well on both thermal performance and noise. This case is wide enough that the big Noctua CPU cooler fits.

The back side cable management is good enough for now,

The mesh front panel helps air flow quite a bit, especially with the Arctic PWM fans.

The ASUS ROG Thor 850 power supply has an LCD readout that shows the total system power draw. Unfortunately, it is upside down (by default) when you install it with the proper fan orientation. It is also hidden in the power supply “basement” on most modern cases.

My gaming rig sits on a cheap plastic table…

More Details

Here are a few screenshots.

On CPU-Z, this system trounces an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X for ST performance, and comes within 10% for MT performance, despite only having 6C/12T vs. 8C/16T.

The CrystalDiskMark sequential write scores are a little lower than I expected for this drive. That is something I am going to investigate further.

Current Issues

The MSI MPG B550 Gaming Edge WiFi motherboard has fewer USB Type-A ports than I would like, but I am able to connect everything I have (barely). The EVGA RTX 2070 Super is a triple slot monster that runs very cool with a large heatsink, but it is my current bottleneck for gaming.

I don’t think I need 64GB of RAM for gaming, but I wanted to try using four DIMMs instead of only two DIMMs, since Ryzen 5000 processors seem to like having four instead of two.

There is a Cat 7 Ethernet cable going directly from the Realtek 2.5Gbe port on the motherboard to the 2.5Gbe port on my Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 router. I figure that reduces my network latency just a little, at least with what I can control. My keyboard, mouse and headset are all wired rather than wireless.

Future Upgrade Plans

I am thinking about getting a larger, 4K gaming monitor, but I need to do some research. Eventually, I want to get a Radeon RX 6800XT video card, so I can see how well AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM) actually works. Next month, we should see the new AGESA 1.1.8.0 version that has Precision Boost Overdrive 2 support.

Getting four 8GB DDR4-4000 DIMMs with tight timings is another possible improvement, especially for a Ryzen 5000 CPU.

January 2021 Update: I ended up getting a beautiful Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Vision OC video card, just by pure dumb luck. I went to Micro Center to try to get a Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. While I was in line, they were handing out vouchers for various RTX 3000 series GPUs, and I got the last voucher for a 3070, which just also happened to be a very nice Vision SKU.

It looks pretty nice in the white case.

Related Posts

I have several recent posts that you might find interesting.

• Flashing Your BIOS with No CPU Installed
• AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Review Recap
• Essential AMD Desktop PC Configuration Checklist
• What Speed RAM Do You Need For a Zen 2 CPU?

Final Words

The main purpose of this post is to document what I had at this point in time, but I hope you found it interesting.

If you have any questions about this post, please ask me here in the comments or on Twitter. I am pretty active on Twitter as GlennAlanBerry. Thanks for reading!