THIS BUILD COSTS (something around) £3300 RIGHT NOW!

This build costs.. Well I don’t exactly know. See when you watch these videos, you might watch them the very second they are uploaded, or you might watch them three weeks from now, or three months, and especially with PC builds the price of the various components changes often considerably right now. So, I’ve pulled a Tom Scott and this video’s title should match what the two PC Part Picker links I’ll leave in the description. So what’s on those lists? Well I’ll start with the CPU – that’s a Ryzen 7950X. That is AMD’s flagship CPU with 16 full fat cores and 32 threads. It’s an absolute monster as we’ll see – and that’s dropped inside an ASRock X670E Taichi Carrara motherboard. That’s also a flagship option, complete with PCIe Gen 5, more M.2 slots than you’d ever need and VRMs that could keep an i9 at bay. We’ve also got one of the fastest SSDs available, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB, 32GB of 6000MT/s DDR5 RGB RAM, a Corsair H150i 360mm AIO to keep this beast cool, a Gigabyte RX 6900 XT for powering through games, a Phanteks REVOLT PRO 850W PSU to keep everything powered, and the beautiful Phanteks Evolv X in white housing everything. I just love this case so much.

As for the build, installing an AMD CPU is now the same as installing an Intel chip. Unhook the arm at the side of the socket and lift the bracket up. Gently place the CPU down into the socket, put the bracket back down and latch the arm back down – and don’t forget to remove (and keep safe) the socket cover. RAM is the same as always, open the locks on the second and fourth slots, line up the notches then apply even force to click the stick into place. Repeat for the second stick and you’re good to go. The SSD is a bit of a funny one on this board. We’ll use the top slot here so unscrew the heatsink, slide the drive into the connector then use one of the tiny screws to hold it down. Peel the protective covering off the thermal pad on the heatsink then put it back and screw it down. You could, if you were insane, install the actively cooled version of the heatsink that comes in the box. I have no idea why you’d ever use this, but hey, you can if you really want. The last thing to do to the motherboard is remove the four screws holding the cooler mounting clips on – Corsair doesn’t use this style of mount so we’ll need these and the plastic clips out the way.

With the board prepped, we can get to work on the case. I’ve taken the liberty of removing all the removable panels here – it’s one of the things I love about the Evolv line as it makes it so much easier to build in. I’ve also attached the power supply bracket to the PSU and I’m now just sliding that in and screwing it down. I’ve pre-routed some of the wires we’ll need, then we can install the motherboard. This takes 9 screws in total, then you can start connecting things like the 24 pin power connector, the two 8 pin EPS power connectors at the top left, the two USB front panel header connectors on the middle right, the front panel audio connector at the bottom left and the power switch connector at the bottom right.

Next I think it’s time to install the cooler. I’ve attached it to the removable plate that slots on to the top of the case and am routing the horrible rats nest of wires behind the motherboard where the controller will live. I’ll also need to screw in the four standoffs the cooler will mount to, and of course apply some thermal paste too. I’ll also need to switch the mounting brackets on the pump to the AMD ones, then it can sit down on the chip and be held in place by the four thumb screws. Before I go connect up the controller I’m also going to install the GPU – that’s nice and simple. Just remove the two covers on the back that line up with the top PCIe slot, then slide the card into place, add the two screws in the back, then connect the three 8 pin power connectors. See NVIDIA? This is how you do high power GPUs!

Turning the system around reveals the horror. This is the thing I hate the most about building a system – especially one with all the RGB. It’s an absolute mess, but luckily Phanteks knows this and has designed the case to hide the madness. So I’ll just hook up all the fans and RGB lines to the controller, connect the pump in too, add power, and for good measure I’ll install a couple fans on the front too and hook them up. Then stick all the panels back on and finally we are done. It’s a stunning system – the fake granite actually kinda works with the white case, and of course the RGB is shiny and obviously adds 10% more performance to the system. Obviously.

Speaking of performance, let’s see how it does! I’ll start with the all-important gaming. I’ll include some numbers from the Cyberpower 7900X and 4090 system I’ve been testing with recently for the sake of comparison. Testing at 1440p, CSGO on low settings as always runs ludicrously fast. It’s averaged nearly 550 FPS here, with over 200 FPS in the 1% lows. That is lower than the 4090 system though, but realistically there isn’t much of a difference in the playing experience. In Cyberpunk, if you choose to keep the Ray Tracing Medium preset (without DLSS) enabled, well it’s rather obvious that the soon-to-be last gen AMD card doesn’t hold up quite as well. If you switch ray tracing off you do get a much better experience as you’d expect of course. Shadow of the Tomb Raider also offers less, but still perfectly adequate performance well above most 144Hz or even 165Hz monitor’s refresh rates, and that’s on the highest settings! Flight actually matches the 4090, and actually the 6900XT offers better 1% and 0.1% low numbers meaning you should get a slightly smoother playing experience. It’s pretty clear flight is a CPU limited title seeing as the 7900X and 7950X are pretty well matched for gaming. And finally in Fortnite the 6900 XT is back to being a touch slower, but still excellent performance on epic settings with over 150 FPS average.

If CPU horsepower is what you’re after, the 7950X has that in spades. Cinebench R23 mutli thread runs 33% faster, unsurprisingly with 33% more cores. Still, that’s an impressive amount of performance from something that runs at the same power limit – and 20W less than a 13900K! Single threaded is equally decent performance, albeit running a touch behind a comparable 13th gen chip – that’d be more like 2100 points here. Equally in Blender you get excellent performance, both in the BMW scene and in Gooseberry. Speaking of power and thermals, the 360mm AIO didn’t manage to quell the beast that is these chips, but it did let it reach much closer to its power limit of 230W, running at 219W average over the render. That’s not bad!

So, there’s the build, and the performance. If you were really hunting for performance, swapping the 6900 XT with a 4090 would be a great choice IF you are willing to splash out another grand or so. As it stands, this build is – at least as of filming anyway – well into the 3 grand mark. I’m not sure if that means the sort of person willing to drop 3 grand on a system would be just as happy dropping 4 grand instead for something indistinguishably faster (save for ray tracing of course)… Either way, if you want to see more of these live-priced builds – perhaps something more in the normal human price range – leave a like on the video and let me know in the comments.