Join Us As We Assemble A Killer Ryzen 9 9950X Gaming PC Just In Time For Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day 2024 is here (for the next couple of days, actually), and it just so happens to coincide with a project we've had on the back burner at HotHardware for months now. No, we're not talking about scouring the web for more tech deals. Instead, it has been far too long that my longtime friend, business partner, and fellow PC geek enthusiast Marco Chiappetta and I built a killer gaming and content creation powerhouse rig for all to see on video. Hijinks eventually ensue, of course, and we did have a couple of retakes as well, but it was also a whole lot of fun.
So, what are some of our top choices in high-end PC components for building a super-brawny many-core PC powered by AMD's Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 Series? You're about to find out...
A Quality Gaming Workstation Starts With A Great Case And Cooling
PC building of any sort has evolved into an art form over the years, and starting with the skins that will house your next finely-tuned machine is an important choice of not only aesthetics, but also a balance of both form and function. Here we landed on Corsair's extremely accessible, full-featured and tempered glass-strapped 6500X Mid-Tower ATX Dual Chamber PC Case. Check out the panoramic views...
We decided to go with an ultra-clean-looking all-white build, and Corsair continued to deliver the goods with its iCUE Link H150i Liquid CPU Cooler. This 360mm all-in-one cooler has a 2.1-inch LCD display on its pump and cold plate assembly that will show system vital signs, like CPU package temps and cooling liquid temps. It also comes with a Corsair iCUE Link System Hub controller that, when paired with other Corsair iCUE Link fans in the system, makes for not only clean cable-free snap connections—check our build video below, around the 7:30 mark, to see these in action—but all are also controlled in unison with the iCUE software. The 140mm fans have built in temperature sensors and can move push up to 82.5 CFM of air.
Check Our Ryzen 9 9950X Build Video For The Full Tour And Build Action
We won't get into the nitty-gritty details of every single component in the build; we have a full list in the conclusion and you can likewise check out most of that our in our magical mystery guided tour and build video above. However, at the heart of our system is ASRock's X670E Steel Legend motherboard, which is a great socket AM5 host with a stout 16+2+1 VRM design, solid heat sink cooling, multiple PCIe Gen 5 SSD slots in addition to its X16 Gen 5 steel-reinforced graphics slot and 2.5-Gb LAN, among other excellent features. We also dig its white camo colorway.
Alternatively, you could go with ASRock's all new X870 Pro RS motherboard that will allow you to hit DDR5 memory speeds up to 8000MHz, even faster than the X670E Steel Legend's rated 6600MHz, and which comes with USB4 along with other goodies.
Of course, we needed gobs of high-speed RAM, a duty fulfilled by Corsair's sweet 64GB Vengeance RGB DDR5-6000 MHz memory kit, and will you look at that: Corsair pre-pastes the cold plate of its H150i liquid cooler. Gotta love that, but if you prefer, you can re-paste yourself, say, with some Artic MX-6.
The Corsair iCUE Link H150i LCD Cooler's Cold Plate Is Pre-Pasted
Ahh, but that beefy Corsair RM1000x Shift power supply gave us a bit of pause in our build plan. We love perfecting and optimizing cable management in our systems, and the RM1000x Shift (29% off deal) moves its modular cable connections to one of the sides of the PSU instead of the traditional end location. Depending on the case, this allows for easier cable connections and changes, and possibly cleaner cable management, too. As such, in the interest of cable routing, we first mounted this PSU with its larger intake fan facing into the chassis. This isn't a horrible choice, but we realized that when installed this way, it will pull warm air from inside the chassis and vent it out its rear exhaust fan, which will also obviously warm up the PSU a touch as well. After some consideration, we flipped it around as you see above, and just had to live with slightly less immaculate cable routing so we could pull in cool air from the right perforated side panel of our Corsair 6500X chassis. Decisions, decisions.
Oh-So Clean And Oh-So Pretty
Final Assembly Complete: Here's The Specs Run-Down With Deals
That about wraps us up for this turbo build guide (hit our video guide on YouTube for much more detail), but above is our primary components build list, and many of the selections we made here are on great deals for Amazon Prime Day right now. So, how does this rig perform? As you might imagine, it slices through benchmarks like a hot knife through butter...
While 3DMark Time Spy is one data point indicator of performance, we'll point out that we also pulled down a Cinebench 2024 multi-thread score of over 2200 points. That puts us slightly ahead of Marco's Ryzen 9 9950X review system, with fantastic compute power on tap for all the content creation work we can throw at it here at HH.
And of course, just for a bit of kick-back, we fired up Black Myth: Wukong for a little mythical monkey beat-down. At about 75 FPS, in 4K resolution with all graphics and ray-tracing settings maxed out, our GeForce RTX 4090 was just getting warmed up, while AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X was a cool breeze at just 58C. Good times. GG!
Update, 10/10/24 - More System Benchmarks On This New HH Workstation
We know you'd probably like to see what this new HH gaming and content creation powerhouse can do, so we did a little light-duty tuning and optimization with AMD Precision Boost Overdrive in the ASRock UEFI and DDR-6000 memory timing, to achieve some nice performance gains over what we noted above in our original coverage. Let's take a look...
Cinebench 24 Multi-Core Benchmark Results Top 2400
A Nice Bump In Over 3K Points 3DMark Time Spy As WellAnd OS MSI Spatium M570 PRO OS Drive Is No Slouch Either
We can't argue with those numbers, and at a -20mv PBO offset with an 85C limit on the CPU, we'll take that multi-threaded throughput, along with our fast PCIe 5 SSD, to the bank every time. However, with the GeForce RTX 4090 under the hood pushing well over 29K 3DMarks, we're going to have a productivity issue at some point, due likely to lack of focus. Again, decisions, decisions.
