Building a Gaming PC around the RTX 3070: An Update and Upgrades

It has been two years since I first built my gaming PC. What do I think of it now? And, what upgrades have I made in the interim?

Back in the height of the pandemic I built a gaming PC. It turns out I was part of a trend. As a recent article on Stratechery noted, “the pandemic led to an explosion in PC buying generally and gaming cards specifically, as customers had both the need for new computers and a huge increase in discretional income with nowhere to spend it beyond better game experiences.”

I remember fondly the experience of trying to buy a RTX 3070 graphics card as if it were hot tickets to a Harry Styles concert, refreshing the Best Buy website on multiple browser windows at that same time until I finally found one in stock.

At that time, my research had indicated that the Ryzen 5 3600 was the CPU to pair with my RTX 3070.

The machine has capably achieved my goal of being able to play Star Wars: Squadrons in VR, and running Cyberpunk 2077 and Far Cry 6. I can’t play Far Cry 6 with all the high res textures, which irritates me to no end, as I think I am short a scant 2 GB of VRAM (why can’t you buy/add more VRAM? That should be a thing…) but generally speaking the machine has performed quite capably in terms of being able to run the latest games.

But in terms of stability I have come up short. The machine has crashed quite frequently, to the point that in my head I have named it Sir Crashes-a-Lot. The error messages were usually of the “there has been a hardware error” variety on a fatal crash. Sometimes I also see cryptic warning messages that a USB device has failed to initialize.

Last month after a particularly scary crash where I couldn’t easily get back to OS I decided it was time to make a change. I performed a clean install and removed all the “overclocking” I’d done. I also replaced the Xigmatek 700 watt Power Supply with a brand new Corsair 700 watt PSU.

After the switch my computer started suddenly turning off in the middle of gameplay, which I thought was a due to the unit having better overage protection than the Xigmatek PSU I used to have, triggering when the GPU went higher than 700W.

This lead me to return the 700W PSU and buy a RM1000x 1000 Watt Gold power supply ($201.86 with shipping off Amazon), a very expensive change but one I thought would solve the problem of my computer suddenly turning off and would be pragmatic for the future, when I will presumably get a more power hungry CPU and GPU. I also power about a dozen things of the USB ports from the computer so I figured having a very large wattage power supply might help avoid the USB device error messages I sometimes received previously (perhaps an indication that I was pushing the Xigmatek beyond its limits).

Since I was already looking at upgrades, I went back to userbenchmark.com, which I found very useful in 2020, to see whether I should upgrade the CPU as I replace the motherboard. While the Ryzen 5 3600 has been perfectly fine, I was concerned that the performance of the GPU was being held-back or bottlenecked by the relatively slow CPU.

It looked like the new sexy AMD processor in my price range is the Ryzen 5 7600X, so I wanted to read a review on userbenchmark to see how much faster it would be than the 3600.

On September 25th, 2022, the description on Userbenchmark.com of the upcoming AMD Ryzen 5 7600X chip, which achieved a 107% CPU bench, read as follows:

"Within minutes of this unrealistic, pre-release, result appearing on userbenchmark, AMD’s marketing machinery declared a 20% victory over the 12900K whilst simultaneously slandering userbenchmark via hundreds of “news” outlets and thousands of supposedly disinterested twitter, reddit, forum and youtube accounts. Buying new AMD products is like buying used cars: it takes time, experience and a taste for sales hype. It’s difficult for consumers to make rational choices because AMD completely dominates “news” and social media channels. Ten years ago, when AMD was the underdog, this type of marketing was understandable. Today, with a capitalization of $150 Billion USD, it’s disrespectful to AMD’s own users. Even with Intel’s marketing department permanently asleep at the wheel, if these practices continue, Ryzen may eventually end up in the same state as Radeon. Following a series of overhyped releases, consumers have little interest in the Radeon brand. The combined market share for all AMD’s (discrete) Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 GPUs (Jun ’22 Steam stats) is just 2%. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s RTX 2060 alone accounts for 5%. If Zen 4 actually delivers anywhere near a 57% real-world single core uplift, we will bow down, call AMD king, and commit seppuku! AMD’s new architecture is, once again, optimized to shine in specific benchmarks. Realistically, even if Zen 4 only catches Intel’s 12th gen. (Alder Lake) in a handful of real-world scenarios, it will be a big step forward for AMD. A few weeks after Zen 4 (est. Sep 27), Intel’s 13th gen. (Raptor Lake) is scheduled to launch. Smart shoppers will do well to wait until then, before considering a purchase. Despite AMD’s Neanderthal marketing techniques, it’s hard not to admire the speed of their technical progress. AMD-Raptor-4 and Intel-Zen-13 would be better fitting product names. [Jul ’22 CPUPro]"

This struck me as some strong commentary for a description of a computer chip, so I did some digging. 

It turns out that userbenchmark.com is quite controversial. There are several posts which disparage the site. This put me in something of a predicament; I relied heavily on the userbenchmark.com site when I was doing my initial build, and needed to know whether I can continue to do so, so I looked into some of the criticisms of the site.

A lot of the other criticisms of the site don’t make much sense to me. Some people seem offended by reviews like the one I quoted above. While the tone does seem a bit unprofessional, I personally don’t much care if CPUPro or anyone else wants to malign AMD (or Intel for that matter), so long as their data is accurate, consistent and replicable.

Other people are upset that the site doesn’t take into account things like the video transcoding speed or the power usage of a CPU or framerates when gaming at 1440p, but I happen to be among the gamers who doesn’t care about any of that stuff.

The most substantive criticism levied at userbenchmark.com that I can discern is that their algorithm for calculating CPU performance is flawed in that in allegedly overweighs single or quad core performance for a CPU and underweighs multicore CPU performance on multicore tasks.

So, the idea would be that average bench percentage of 78 for the Ryzen 5 3600 (a six core processor) vs the average bench percentage of 93 for the Intel i3–12000F (a four core processor) is flawed, and that the numbers should be… different numbers?

I decided in the end to still rely on Userbenchmark's recommendations. When i5–13600KF was released in October 20 of 2022, userbenchmark rated it very highly. The CPU moved between the number #1 and #2 slots for a while before settling into the #1 spot where it still is as of this writing.

Going with the 13600KF was also less expensive than the 7600X given my existing components. The Ryzen 5 7600X would require a new motherboard with an AM5 socket and new DDR5 RAM; the 13600KF also requires a new motherboard, but I could get a cheaper B660M board for $100 instead of the X670 motherboard needed by the 7600x which I can't find for less than about $250. Combine that with needing new DDR5 RAM and upgrading to the 13600KF is ~$300 cheaper.

It was a bit touch and go flashing the BIOS for the GIGABYTE B660M DS3H DDR4 motherboard I went with, but once I got that figured out, I reinstalled Windows again and it has been smooth sailing. I am using the XAMPP profile for the RAM I have which is running at the correct higher speed again. The machine is noticeably more responsive with the new motherboard and CPU than it was before.

And even without overclocking, having a faster CPU seems to lead to better performance from some of my components; the benchmarks for the GPU and RAM without overclocking are noticably higher with the 13600KF and Gigabyte motherboard than they were when I was using the Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and ASROCK motherboard

I sold the old ASRock motherboard and AMD CPU on craigslist for $80, and haven't looked back.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the upgrade.  Everything I want to do on this machine runs great, and is the machine is very stable. I don't think I've had a single system crash I've upgraded.

And I've had a lot of fun building a machine that meets my needs; when the GPU isn't taxed, it runs whisper quiet. When I need it to, it can play all the games I care to play.

Below is a list of all the components for of my current build for those who are interested;