Today, I'm building a new video editing PC.
I'm getting increasingly jealous of everyone's new Ryzen builds,
so I want to do one of my own,
but using the new B550 boards
and I want to see how it impacts
my DaVinci Resolve performance.
Let's get undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and I'm never going to financially recover from this.
So, let's go over the parts for this build,
which were all supplied by GIGABYTE AORUS,
so thanks to them for that.
I told them I wanted to do a Ryzen 9 build,
and they sent pretty much all of this over, except for the case.
I've got a Fractal Define R6 sitting on the floor for that.
Let's start off with the power supply so I can ground myself.
-[boxes shuffling] -OK, like I said,
let's start with the power supply. By the way,
for those of you that are into pronunciation,
I've heard other people say "A-orus" for this line,
and so I asked GIGABYTE myself, cause I like that kind of stuff,
and they said that it's "Orus" like the Egyptian Horus,
so if you're like me and you like pronunciation stuff,
that's the origin, and they're going for "Orus" with this one.
-OK, let's... -[box scuffling]
get the power supply out here.
Now, power supplies aren't something that I've
ever really attributed to GIGABYTE before.
[box rustling]
Not really much in the way of frills,
but it's got, sort of, a nice aesthetic to it,
big fan, fully modular, whatever.
750 watts.
OK, so I've got that plugged in,
and now I'm going to ground myself,
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Alright, now I probably don't need to do this
for that long, so let's get to the
featured piece of today's build, the B550 Motherboard.
OK, so here it is, the B550 MASTER.
Few things to note, so, unlike the X570,
this one no longer has a fan, which is pretty great,
but you do lose a couple of things.
Not all of the slots are PCI Express 4.0.
This one, the top one is, and it's a x16 slot.
You can install all three NVMes in here
at PCI Express 4.0, but there are some trade-offs.
If you install the one up here again, no consequences,
and this one will still be x16, but if you install them in here,
then this x16 slot switches to an x8 4.0 slot.
Now, these two PCI Express slots,
although they are 16,
like, size, they're only x4 slots,
and they're PCI Express 3.0,
and if you use the bottom one,
you lose your last two SATA ports.
There's six SATA ports, so SATA port...
four and five will become inactive,
and you'll only have zero, one, two, three.
But, if you're just doing a straight build like I am,
where it's going to be one graphics card, one NVMe,
then everything's PCI Express 4.0, and that's good to go.
This one actually has a Thunderbolt 3 header,
which I don't think that the X570 did, uh,
uh, but it doesn't have the USB-C front-header,
so that's kind of annoying because my case
has a USB-C front port
and I'm not gonna be able to connect it to this motherboard.
I think, on the X570 board, it was right here,
and it's not there on this one.
The input/output panel is pretty good, though.
These are USB 2.0. We got four of those.
Those ones, I think, are on the chipset,
and then there's two USB 2.0s here that are on the CPU.
Then, we've got five USB 3.2 Gen 2,
so they're all 10GB,
USB Type-A ports,
and then also, a USB type C port,
also 3.2 Gen 2 10GB,
and then there's a 2.5GB Ethernet port,
which is a REALTEK port, not Intel.
OK, so let's move on to the CPU.
Now, when choosing the CPU, this is, kind of,
what the whole purpose of this video was.
So, this is the Ryzen 9 3900X,
and I considered a lot of different CPUs for this build.
The original idea behind this build was, sort of,
high-end video editing, but at the best value.
Now, value, can mean a lot of things,
cause you can do a value build at $500, at $1,000, whatever,
so what I did is I looked at the synthetic benchmarks
and divided them by the price of the different CPUs
to see which one,
for the benchmarks that are relevant to video editing,
produces the best
performance score per dollar. And shout out
to Puget Systems or "Pu-jay" Systems,
they have a benchmarking tool you can download
and run for your different programs like Premiere Pro
or DaVinci Resolve, and it'll give you,
kind of, a synthetic score as to
how good your computer is at those specific programs.
And, again, the 3900X seems to be a bit
of a sweet spot there for bang for buck.
[clicking]
OK, so, for memory, I've got the AORUS RGB memory,
this is 3600MHz.
This is CL18, and it's a 16GB kit.
Now, all this stuff, obviously, was provided,
like I said, by GIGABYTE AORUS, and you can't be too picky,
you know, with what you get supplied, but this is the only
area that I would say I didn't love their selection.
All the other hardware I really like from GIGABYTE,
and in some cases, it's some of the best in class,
and the RAM is probably good memory;
it's just that I don't like the options that they have.
So, for instance, with this combination,
I probably would have gone
with a 3600MHz CL16, but this is CL18.
I don't think you can get CL16, and you can't get it
in 16GB DIMMs, like a 32GB kit.
Since this is a new build, it would have been nice to put
in, say, two 16GB DIMMs, and then I can upgrade
to 64 in the future if I want,
but I can't do that with this current configuration
without completely getting rid of the RAM
and starting over from scratch.
So, again, it's probably a good memory.
I just wish that they would make 32GB kits with two 16GB DIMMs,
and it would be nice if I could pay a little bit extra
to get 3600 CL16 instead of 18-19-19-39.
But anyway, let's throw it in.
[paper crinkling]
It is nice looking, though, nice edges.
[clicking]
OK, the RAM is installed; let's move on to the NVMe drive.
Now, this is one thing that I'm pretty excited about,
and again, it goes back to what I was saying about GIGABYTE
being, you know, best in class in some cases with this,
so this is one of the new Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.
It's a 1TB version.
I haven't actually tested it yet,
but it says that it can do, like, 5GB per second,
gigabytes, like, 5000MB per second.
Oh, look at it, there's a tiny little gold guy.
Ooh, that's actually got quite a bit of weight to it;
that heat sink is serious business.
[screw clicking]
[base clattering]
[metal clanging]
[screw clicking]
OK, so, for the cooler, we've got this...
AORUS Liquid Cooler 280, which is 280 mm,
so two 140 mm.
So, the plan is to stick it here on the front as an intake
pulling in through, and I'll put the fans on the inside,
but I am curious, because, if that's going to be possible,
because I saw this Linus live stream where he did, like,
an all AORUS build and he was having issues mounting the fans.
It was, like, the fans could only be mounted in a certain way
on the cooler, so let's take a look at that and see.
This is what the problem that Linus was having, so,
there's, sort of, like a tall edge and a short edge,
and both sides have that, so if you put it
down this way, it can, kind of...
like, wobble. So, this is gonna go down in the CPU,
and this is gonna be over here at the front,
and the reason why I'm doing it that way,
you can see what the hose is-- coming out to the right,
is because, in all of the manuals
and everything that hose is coming out to the right
and again, on Linus' stream,
I saw that he didn't put the hoses on the right at first
and the display that shows you the temperature because,
there's like, an on-screen display here
that you can customize and put the temperature and stuff on it,
it was upside down, and I ended up turning it.
Now, I don't know if you can switch it in software,
but I don't want to risk it. However, on the front box,
they have the hoses coming out the bottom,
and it seems to work, so I'm not sure,
but I'll learn that, obviously, when we turn it on.
On this side is the way I want the fans,
and I want them blowing into the case,
so I want them like this, which is their
uneven side, and obviously, I don't want the--
the blades to actually have any contact on them.
I really do feel like these fans were only meant
to be installed the opposite way that I'm doing it,
but I checked on the AORUS YouTube video
where they talk about this actual product, and they have
one of their radiators installed on the front
with the fans on the inside in this exact array.
OK, so it's on, and it seems pretty level, and...
the fan spins fine, it's not, like, you know,
rubbing up against anything, so it seems like it should work.
Like I said, I'm just a little bit concerned about that
leakage of the air, but...
we'll see what the temps are like.
[tools ratcheting]
So, for the GPU, this one is not AORUS,
this is still GIGABYTE, this is their, uh,
RTX 2080 TI Gaming OC.
Now, there is an AORUS RTX 2080 TI,
but it wasn't in stock
at the time that I was doing this build,
so they, you know, said, "What other GPUs you want?"
and obviously, they have others ones too,
like AORUS 2080 Supers and that kind of thing,
but I wanted the 2080 TI because I've been finding
that I kind of run out of VRAM sometimes with Resolve,
depending on which cameras I'm working with,
and the 2080 TI is really the only thing that you
can get more VRAM out of with the current lineup,
without going to, like, the RTX Titan, which is absurd.
This one, definitely, isn't cheap, though, either.
I think it's, like, 1,300 USD, so depending on the build
and what you need, you can probably get away with,
like I said, the 2080 Super.
That might fit better with this board, too,
because then you can bifurcate down to x8
and probably still be OK on your PCI Express.
But, this card is fantastic, I popped it into my old system
to run some of the same tests so I could see what was
affected by just the GPU, and it cut my render time
in half from the GTX 1080,
and because of the new NVENC encoder in the 2000 series,
it actually made the file even smaller,
but with the same quality.
I'm just gonna go to put the finishing touches on this,
like power supply and cable management,
then I will install Windows, overclock it
and then rerun all of my tests.
And I'm also going to edit this video
up to this moment on it and see how it performs.
Bye, for now.
[futuristic beats]
♪
OK, so it's actually been closer to two weeks since I
recorded that first segment, and, as promised, I did edit
up to that point on this machine,
and I'm probably gonna edit this part here
on this machine as well.
And I've got it in the shot here
so we can both see it running but also hear it.
-[barely audible hum] -Which I think is pretty good,
and we can see from the gauge in there
that it's idling around 32°C.
I thought, for overclocked 3900Xs,
that's actually a pretty good result.
Price-wise, I didn't mention it but, uh, this rig,
all-in, costs about 3,000 USD, and that is pricey,
a bit more than I would have wanted to spend otherwise.
Like I said, a lot of the parts were
actually supplied by GIGABYTE, but I priced them out
based on the parts that they provided.
But, if you were to build this yourself,
I think that you could make a couple changes.
If you don't need all that VRAM, you could go with a 2080 Super
like we talked about, which is gonna trim, I don't know,
$600-$700 off the budget, and then there's a couple
other parts where you could probably make some changes
based on whatever is on sale at the time.
And, I think you could probably get a similar build
to this down to about 2,200 bucks
while still taking the key,
uh, GIGABYTE AORUS parts that I really liked.
Alright, so let's go over the results, so,
if you see, I'm going-- I think I'll probably just
put my Excel document on the screen for you,
and I have the same one here.
If you look, we start all the way over
at the 2600K, that's the Intel i7 2600K.
That was my editing rig before 2018,
before I rebuilt it and that 2600K is coming up on,
I think, close to ten years old now,
and it's still cooking, which is pretty impressive.
Now, we can see that there's obviously a big jump going from
2600K to 8700K, and I noticed a big jump in performance
when making that change, but I did find that
there still was a little bit of, like, lagginess if you
started layering up the highly compressed video streams,
so, like, H.264 and H.265, if you had multiple
versions of them, even the 8700K overclocked
would still be, kind of, little bit chuggy
in those segments. So then,
moving over, we now have the stock.
I did a stock, and I did an overclock for the 3900X
with the RTX 2080 TI, this one here.
And, all these rigs, I think, are using pretty much
the same RAM, by the way, they're--
I mean, not the same speed, this is using faster RAM,
but they're all, I think, on 32GB.
The Resolve benchmark went way up from 750 to 1117,
and I did notice, in terms of practical,
that a lot of my complaints about multi-layered H.264 stuff
being kind of sluggish
is a lot less so with this machine.
It's sometimes hard to, sort of, quantify how it feels to edit,
but this machine does edit those compressed codecs smoother, and
it was noticeable and did make my life a little bit easier.
The Cinebench score went way up from 3709 for multithreaded
up to 7-- almost 7100, so that'll give you a pretty
good indication of an overclocked 8700K
versus the stock 3900X.
My Cinebench score almost doubled.
Now, the single-threaded task, I wasn't sure if it would
go down comparing to the 8700K clocked higher at 4.6,
uh, but it actually, well, I guess 4.6,
this one can go up to 4.6, but it wasn't, in Cinebench,
it was only going up to, like, 4.2-4.3.
And, but it still beat it by about 10 on the Cinebench
single-threaded, so I'm not losing any
single-threaded performance, so that's a win-win there,
but then I overclocked this system in three ways.
I overclocked the graphics card,
I overclocked the CPU, and also,
with the Ryzen 9, there's this whole thing where
you have to overclock the Infinity Fabric or the SOC
and also the memory, and I have some notes about that.
Criticism on this motherboard, the B550 MASTER.
It does not have a CMOS clear switch,
which I noticed when I was having some struggles getting
a stable overclock when sometimes it wasn't booting.
I just wanted to clear it, but there's no easy way to do that.
I had to short the CMOS clear jumper
with, like, a screwdriver. So, there is,
like, a jumper for it but there's no button on the back.
That's something that I typically like to see,
and this one doesn't have it,
and I'm pretty sure the X570 does.
That's something I didn't notice when I did the overview.
Oh, by the way, before we go further in the overclocking,
I said that I would let you know if that screen,
if the actual-- what's being displayed can be
rotated in software, and you can.
You could also-- so you can mount it any way you want
with the hoses down, up, whatever because you can always
just switch the display in software, but,
the default display is with the hoses coming out to the right.
So, I didn't have to switch it or rotate it,
but you can if you want.
Don't worry about how you've installed it. Also,
even if-- there is, like, some air leakage on the side
with the way I mounted the fans, but I'm OK with the thermals,
so it seems to be working if you put this cooler in a
pull configuration, with the wobbly fans on the inside
in a vertical mount, it works.
It seems to work adequately, and it's reasonably quiet, so.
I did put a custom fan curve in the software.
You have to install two pieces of software which I don't love.
You need to install the AORUS Engine
and then RGB Fusion if you want to
customize the lights and the look and all that.
There's also a tool in AORUS Engine that allows you
to automatically overclock your GPU,
which I've used in other programs like MSI Afterburner.
I never found it really worked well, but in AORUS Engine,
it actually did successfully, you know, ramp up the
frequencies and test them against the power drawn in the
thermals and then come up with, like, an overclocking curve.
And, speaking of that overclock, so let's look at
the overclocking, uh, benchmarks now,
so this is overclocked to an all-core 4.3GHz,
and I was able to hit it at, like, 1.29 to 1.3 volts,
which I thought was actually pretty good.
We're keeping pretty good temps still, around 33 idle in here.
I think the temperature in here is, like,
23-24, so about nine to ten degrees over ambient.
The Resolve benchmark was pretty much the same.
We didn't really get a lot from overclocking on the...
Puget Synthetic Resolve Benchmark,
so keep that in mind. If you're just using Resolve,
you might not see a huge gain by overclocking,
and you can probably just run this thing on Auto,
and it'll be fine. As far as Cinebench,
we did see an improvement from 7100 up to 7700,
which I thought was pretty great. The single-threaded
was exactly the same because, like I said,
I was only boosting on Auto up to about 4.3, so now that I'm
running on all-core 4.3, it's the same score.
The OctaneBench went up just a little bit from 309 to 311,
that's with overclocking the GPU.
I don't think that overclocking the GPU that it
really made that big of a difference for OctaneBench,
but we did see a bigger result in 3DMark.
As far as the export, we did actually shave some
time off our export, though, from 3:45 down to 3:34.
So, overall, I'm actually happy with the overclock even
though it probably wasn't too necessary for Resolve,
but it, it's stable, it's reasonably quiet,
I'm still in that 40 dBA range, which I'm happy with,
and it's working well. I'll turn it off now
so that you can hear the difference between on and off.
-[clicking] -Let it power down there.
And I wanna talk about one more thing that I'm not gonna
be able to get into this video because I'm sure we're
already at the 20 minute mark or longer now, so.
So, there's a ground loop going on,
so I have a USB audio interface that I plug in here,
and when I was doing those tests,
whether it be, like, a GPU test or whatever,
I can actually hear the GPU through my studio monitors.
If I move the mouse around, I can hear, like, weird little,
you know, EMI interference through the monitor, just like,
inner computer sounds are coming through my monitor speakers,
and it's because there's a ground loop.
The monitor-- this took a really long time
that's one of the reasons why it's two weeks later.
But thanks to my Discord group
for helping me troubleshoot this.
Rhop, again, was in on it, Samoth,
nil4k, taysi, you guys are great.
We eventually got the multimeter out
and started probing things, and realized
that the motherboard isn't going to ground
the same way that the case and power supply are.
It's doing some other route for the ground,
so we end up with a ground loop. These computers,
they generate a lot of electromagnetic sounds,
but when there's a ground loop, you can get in there,
and you can hear it through your monitor speakers.
Now, in the meantime, there is a solution that
I have which I bought on Amazon, and it's, like,
80 bucks Canadian, so probably, like, 50 USD,
and it's basically a little USB dongle that you can
plug in a USB port, and then you can provide
separate power to it, plug that into the power bar,
the same one that the studio monitors and the computer and
everything are on, and then plug this in and now this USB
port will have the same ground, thus killing the ground loop.
Now, when I plug my audio interface into this,
it was fine, and the sounds went away.
So, I still have some more testing to do, but luckily,
GIGABYTE's been behind me all the way on this,
and hopefully they're gonna send me some more boards,
another B550 board and maybe an X570 board
so I can use those to determine
whether it's just my board that's defective
or whether all the B550s ground differently,
which is something that you should be aware of
if you use a USB audio interface like me.
But, if you're somebody that just uses the audio jacks
on the back of the motherboard, the little 3.5 mm,
you don't have to worry about that.
One, they're not generally subject to the ground loop
because it's not a separate power thing,
but also they seem to have extra capacitors,
and they're well-shielded, so there was no sound
coming through those jacks, only USB audio interfaces.
I'm definitely happy overall, just want to figure out that
ground loop thing, so definitely stay tuned
for that follow-up video, and hopefully,
I will get the results back on that soon.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
entertaining or at least helpful. And if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up and consider
subscribing if you haven't already. But if you did not
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try setting the playback speed to 75%.
Alright... I'm done.