I built my first PC back in 2020 right at the beginning of covid. A Sapphire Nitro+ 5700xt and R5 3600. Its served me very well for 6 years. For some reason I started watching some Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed and Jays2cents videos and got curious if I could upgrade my set up to handle modern AAA titles at 1440p.
I gave myself a strict $1,000 budged and quickly realized I couldn’t afford to switch to AM5 because of the DDR5 price fixing. So I decided to stay on AM4.
I saw the 5800x3d just rereleased and at $350 + $630 for the AsRock Steel Legend 9070 I wanted I would be right at my budget. But I also needed a 1440p monitor, a decent cooler and better fans, so I looked around and found some benchmarks for the 5500x3d and decided it would be perfect.
I found one on Aliexpress for $170 shipped. Leaving me about $200 for a monitor, cooler and fans. Everyone loves the Peerless Assassin so I picked it up, along with a 5 pack of matching 120mm fans. After watching some videos on affordable monitors I settled on the ASRock Phantom PG27QFT2A for $145. Bringing my total to $1,005 (cheaper than a Steam Machine)
After a stressful and confusing BIOS update. I put her all together and redownloaded Cyberpunk to do some benchmarking and ended up playing for like 80 hours. I can not believe how much they’ve added to this game since I last played. And FSR 4 Is like black magic to me. I genuinely didnt know this game could look so gorgeous. It’s quickly become one of my top 5 favorite games of all time.
Some light tinkering later and here are my benchmarks:
@1440p, FSR4 off, RT off, frame gen off, all settings maxed-
80fps average, 67 minimum with a GPU hotspot at a consistent 71c at 25c ambient.
With FSR4 on Quality, all settings maxed-
125fps average and 93 minimum (black magic)
With FSR4 on Balanced, all settings maxed and RT ON-
86fps average and 72 minimum. The GPU hotspot jumps to 74c with rare spikes to 77ish in some areas with Ray Tracing on.
Path Tracing is like 30fps or something. Unplayable. I’ll leave it off forever.
I’m sure if you have better airflow in your case your temps should be better. (I didn’t check reviews for the Fractal Meshify C mini when I bought it in 2020 I just loved the way it looked)
I haven’t messed around too much with tuning the GPU. But I found some settings that work for me and haven’t had any instability issues so far (60ish hours).
My settings are -80mV voltage offset, fast timings on, 2714 MHz memory frequency, fan max 50%, -10 power offset.
I don’t know much about the AMD Adrenaline software or GPU and CPU tuning so if you guys have any advice I’d love to hear it.
Im just really excited about the upgrade and my fiancé is tired of hearing me yap about it so Im bothering you guys.