This is the ROG RTX5090 Astral, one of,
if not the fastest graphics cards on the
planet. You could fit so much FPS in
this bad girl. But even gaming on topofthe-line hardware like this, and
ignoring that you basically need to be the Sultan of Brunai to get one, feels
like every new game that comes out has terrible performance. So to get the
frames we want, we had to find another way. Hi. Oh jeez, I didn't see you
there. Just kidding. You're huge. For
the uninitiated, Splave holds the number one all-time spot on the hardwarebot
overclocking leaderboard, holds countless overclocking world records,
and build some of the world's fastest computers over at Splave PC. And he's
going to show us how to take this pile of parts and make it even faster than it
would otherwise be pretty much step by step. So, if you happen to have an
$8,000 computer at home, you can follow right
along. But seriously, you might want to because the same principles we're using
today should apply to pretty much any modern build. And when we're done, not
only will our machine be faster, it will also probably draw less power. I mean,
probably, right? Like, do we know that for sure? 890 W. Holy. In case it
doesn't though, our friends at CSIC sponsored this video and sent over their
very best power supply unit, the Prime Titanium 1600 watt, which literally can
handle two RTX 5090s. Looks so small
when he holds it. That's what she said.
It's going to be that kind of video. All
right, we have kind of an order of operations for our builds, but I'm going
to play follow the leader today. So, what do you want to start with? Uh, I
usually start with the motherboard. Okay, everyone has the same order of operations. The ASRock X870E Taichi was
your choice. Can you walk us through why this is your preferred motherboard for
tuning? The BIOS is very in-depth and
there's lots of options that we can play with. I couldn't help noticing none of
what you said really over overlapped with the main selling points that motherboard manufacturers focus on.
Like, oh, we have lightning gaming USB and a fancy thing for releasing your
PCIe cards. You're just more of a nuts
and bolt kind of guy. I do like this thing. Oh, that's a really quick M.2
heat sink release. Yeah. Other than that, no. I like the overclocking stuff.
So really, you chose this motherboard the same way that other influencers
choose their motherboards, the most expensive one. Man knows what he likes.
Let's explain our choice of CPU. We went with the 9800 X3D because they're all 3D
cores and there's no games we have to play with clocking. The 3D core is
different than the regular cores. Just to be clear, when he says there's no games we'll have to play to do that, he
doesn't mean video games that don't require that thing. Yeah, we don't have
to fool around with it. I forgot we're installing a contact frame. And I could
explain why we're doing that, but I'll let Alan do it. So, I like the contact frame because we've seen better memory
overclocking with using the contact frame over the stock one. Hey, has
anyone actually set you up with one of these yet? No. Seriously, you came out
and collabed with us before and we never got you a screwdriver? Look at the
backpack on the floor, silly. You can't you can't give this man the commuter
bag. Like, look at this. He's like a little uh school girl. Yeah. What the
what the We got to get him the fulls size bag, Jake. Coming back to memory, I
was a little surprised to see that you really don't with higher speed memory.
This is still DDR56000. It just runs at extremely
tight latencies. So, is this the ideal?
Yeah, because you want to keep the memory controller in like a 1 one sync
for latency on AMD currently. And that's around maybe 6,800 on a really, really
good sample. And a highly binned kit like this, realistically you can play
around with it a little bit. If you want a little bit higher latencies and higher
clock speeds, you can do that because these are just golden dies essentially.
Now, Techbot did a piece recently and they found that DDR5 8000 could actually
outperform DDR5 6000. And that's in spite of the fact that the memory
controller runs at half the speed once you go above 6,000. But with Allen's
help, we should be able to take that memory controller and boost it above
6,000, getting overall better performance. So, you're thinking sweet
spot 6400 CL28. Yeah, around there.
Let's put in an SSD. We chose this because it holds data. It's a Rocket 5.
Those are fast. Yeah, it's fast. It's a rocket. Look at it go. Oh god. For our
case, we went for the fractal torrent, which is built for torrents of air
running through it. Okay, there's all your fresh air for the GPU right there.
Honeycomb mesh at the back, top-mounted power supply, and nothing but airflow at
the front. I'm just disappointed we didn't get to use one of the coolest
features of this case, these 180x 38 mm
fans that would normally be in the front, but we're going to have an AIO
liquid cooler. So, they go over there. For our good enough AIO cooler, we've
gone with the Lumen S36 RGB. And we chose it because Fractal's nice. Fractal
is nice. All right, Jake knows why we chose it. It's because it is a
nonasitech design, so you're not bound to their sort of patented how everyone
else does it design. The pump is actually embedded in the radiator, which
detracts from cooling less than you would probably think because that's
right where the fan hub is, right? You weren't getting any air flow there
anyway. It also looks nice, just like Fractal is. Oh, and we scratched it.
Let's have you talk about your thermal paste while I mount this stupid radiator. We're using Splave's own
thermal paste. Splave one is my thermal paste and it's very metallic, so it can
be difficult to spread. You can either heat it up a little bit with like a
haird dryer or you can just He-Man it,
push really hard with your thumb on the spatula and get a nice thin layer.
Right. Yeah. See, for some people that's an option. I usually use that option. I
think your forearms are probably about twice as big around as my biceps. For my
effort, how much performance benefit do I get? You're going to see significant
improvement in temperature, which will lead, if you use, say, PBO
um on AMD, you'll gain performance just
from using better thermal paste. But we're not using that today, are we?
We're using this, a thermal paste that
apparently costs tens of dollars per
gram. Correct. And what the hell is this? So, this is
our hybrid paste. It looks like normal thermal paste. Sure does, but we have a
special blend of gallium and other
ingredients that I will not disclose. Sounds like you're trying to sell me
fried chicken. We have our special blend of spices. There's salt and some other
we're not going to tell you. So, basically, it has liquid metal in it.
And we're trying to give you the benefits of liquid metal without the
negatives of say shooting liquid metal
across your motherboard and killing it. It being impossible to clean up. Yes.
Liquid metal drying out and leaving you with no cooling. We have a backup layer
of regular thermal paste. So, it's kind of giving you the best of both worlds.
Let's see how challenging this one is to spread. I'll try not to use too much.
Okay. It's expensive. We're going to really target where the compute dies are
here. Put a little bit up there for the IO die. There you go. Oh. Oh, wow. That
spread super easy. This is the part where we break the traditional order a
little bit. I want to put this GPU in. But why don't you explain why we chose
the ROG Astral other than because you think it's funny that you can lift it
and I can't. I got I got to put this down. Can you hold this? Thank you.
Obviously, just from your what you were just saying is is beefcake of a cooler
here. Asus is all about overclocking.
So, they support with GPU tweak software and stuff. They make it real easy for us
to get all the performance out of these cards. We have a bit of an
unconventional cooling setup for this build. Fresh intake right here, all for
the GPU. And we're pulling fresh air into this radiator for the CPU. And if
our RAM gets a little bit warmer, then the PSU suck all the hot air out.
Sure. Hey, speaking of power supply, now is a great time to talk about our
sponsor for this build, CIC. Naturally, a build of this caliber deserves the
very best from CSI's lineup, and that's why we went with the
TX600 watt prime unit. This thing is 80
plus titanium efficient. It's ATX 3.1, meaning it has the newer 12volt 2x6
power connector. In fact, it has two of them in case you're building an AI PC or
something like that. And as always, it comes with CIC's acclaimed lengthy
warranty. It reaches 94% peak efficiency
according to Cybernetics and has very low ripple. It basically doesn't get any
better than this except for the version of this that has like a better fan in it
from Noctua, but we don't need that today because apparently this is not going to be a quiet build. No, we're not
worried about that right now. Neat. All right, let's get a monitor. Something
for you to note is we are going to be running at 1080p for all of our testing
today because when you are extreme overclocking or whatever, you are going
to want to run into situations where you could be CPU bottlenecked so that as you
increase the speed of your CPU, you can really see the differences and measure them. Oh my god, I'm dead again. Oh, I
missed. How did I miss that? He's right there. Come on, buddy. So, we're getting
like anywhere from 450 to 600 FPS. Once
you get into really high frame rates, things start to get a little variable.
So, you can beat that, right? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Why don't you walk us
through what you're doing? Sure. Uh, right now, just going to raise the CPU
clocks. Fixed clock. No boost. No boost.
No boost. Oh. So, well, that's not the meta I was quite expecting, but sure.
We'll just be conservative at first and then sure. A conservative 5.4 GHz. We
also increased the voltage a little bit. That made more of a difference than I
was necessarily expecting.
Maybe 6 to 700 now. Damn, we're getting
6 to 700 FPS. And you haven't really even pushed it yet. No, we could go
further. Okay, well, we should do that. If all this seems too easy for us to
bother flying a professional out here, that's because everything we've been
doing so far is the easy stuff that you don't really have to know anything to do. Accurate. I'm trying to say that the
stuff that he knows is stuff we're going to get to in a minute. Like, I could
have done that. Can you give me the dumb dumb version of what exactly it is you
just changed? So, memory timings.
Okay. Less dumb. Basically, lower number good for the
most part. Mhm. Except for when it's not. But some of them we tune a little
bit. Yeah. And some of them we're literally setting to less than half.
Biggest one probably is refresh interval. Almost always the max value
here is is going to be stable and okay. it will raise the temperature of your
memory which can kind of show you too that it's working harder. And for the
people out there, you know, who wanted to kind of learn this, how do they learn
that 403 is an optimal
TRFCSB refresh cycle time? Some literature will tell you your TRA should
be like twice your TRCD divided by the
square root of pi * 4, right? But if you
just test it yourself and and lower it and see a gain in a benchmark or a game,
then that is a good value for you,
right? So, literature be damned. Try it
and if it it works for you, then then go with that. What are the odds if someone
had a 9800 X3D and they bought a really nice kit of memory that they could just
plop these numbers in? These numbers in uh pretty high. Okay. Yeah. If you had
the good memory, decent IMC. Oh, here we go. We're
in. We got 100 more megahertz. We're
out. Hopefully I don't get backbanned for just like popping into matches and
exiting them after I get killed a bunch. Oh, see, here's the thing. Sometimes you
can have too much of a good thing. That was too much clock speeds. Feel like not
all of this is going to make it into the final cut. So, if you want the extras,
LMG.gg/flowplane. This is a rocket.
Look at it go. Oh god. Oh no. Katy Perry, you told your wife you'd be
leaving by now? If she wanted someone who's punctual, she could have married
someone punctual. There are a lot of religious types in the overclocking community. No. What the kind of question
is that? Are you okay in there, Lauren Sanchez? Ow.
Realistically, I'm sure we could squeeze a few more mehz out of it, but the idea
was that you legitimately would be able to follow along at home. And these are
pretty attainable settings if you have decent hardware. So, let's go ahead and
do our after benchmark. It's a little bit better. How we doing? 780 average
and 300 on the 1% lows. Okay, that's not
that much. I mean, it's better. It's better. Yes. I mean, we're getting into
very high frame rate territory. We might be getting limited by more than just the
clock speed here. Should we do like a overclocking dude benchmark for a second
here? like like a Port Royal. Man, I
remember when 3D Marks benchmarks were like cutting edge. Like you couldn't get a game that had graphics that good. And
now it seems like they uh pretty good graphics.
Did good. We're a little above average for this hardware. We've got a good score. Okay, why don't we see what we
can do with a faster GPU? Just an idea. Some fans going. Okay,
this better go faster otherwise I think you might be out of a job.
Whoa. Okay, hold on a second. Now we're Ted and Billy. Ted and
Bill. We're excellent. I'm calling it here. 900 FPS. Really? I'm going to
guess 778. 795. Okay, that is less more than I was
expecting. What was it like? And our minimums are actually worse. Well, that
might just be margin of error. So, now we're running Stellaris, which is like a
top down kind of real-time strategy game. This benchmark simulates one year
of in-game time. And we have kind of our pre-made map here. Um, it's very much a
CPU benchmark. So, we'll see what it
does. But we should We're getting only 51 FPS. It does. This is a very
intensive game. Hey, that's like 10% improvement. Okay.
Oh, lower number better. Yeah. On this one, this is the time it took to
process. Heck yeah. Okay. So, then they're Well, that's awesome. All you
have to do is get a master's degree in around with RAM timings or buy a PC for
me. And the this guy the sales pitch
always be selling. All right, let's put monkeying around and flash the BIOS.
Okay, enough monkeying. Let's flash this thing. Okay. Woo. Sorry.
This is on the big boy power BIOS. Okay.
So, do Oh, we've got a we've got more slider now. But 120% of what? That is
not as relevant anymore. I see. So the
So is 100% a thousand? Technically, I don't know that. Okay. So I should turn
it all the way up. We can try, but we
can also here. Why don't you draw? Just
give him the give him the remote, please. I can show you kind of in a non-
3D benchmark would be cool. So we can see our amp amperage on the Uh-huh.
Oh, yeah. Bad. Red is bad. Okay. And we
we're all red. Oh, 12 volts times 10 amp. So, we're at like 120 watts per per
pen. Do you want me to go higher or no? If we can go a little higher, I think.
Yeah, we should. We should try. We're doing up to 11 amps now per pin. Should
we try Port Royal? Sure. So, I think this should put us
around a little better than where we were, but we'll go higher after this.
We'll go higher. No fail.
Rats, is your card worse than mine? Realistically, if all you want is power
consumption be damned, the highest clock speed you can get, a lot of this is
going to come less down to your particular skill at entering the numbers
and more down to how lucky you get in the silicon lottery, but only for
certain things. You know, for the RAM, for instance, okay, you're actually
going to need to educate yourself somewhat in terms of what all the timings mean. But that netted us a
couple percent of the performance increase we saw
today. But then a couple percent of a few percent is I guess a
lot. Oh, hamburgers. Hamburgers. Our
power in this building sucks. We've had all kinds of issues overclocking in this
corner in the past. So part of his stability woes may just be that we don't
have a particularly clean power source. And you can have a great PSU in your
computer all you want, but if it has dirty input power, that is going to work
against it. It feels more stable already. Does. Does it actually?
Actually, a little. Yeah. Glitchy before. Yeah. Are you joking? No. No. It
was being a little We're so close. Legendary. We're legendary. Let's go. We
found what's after. Excellent. Let's go, dude. We are at like 3150.
Dude, we're at the point where the performance curve, the bell curve is
basically flat. What's after legendary? I don't There can't be something after
legendary. Okay, you must know, right? Like, is there something after legendary? I really don't. I I never
have even read that it's at legendary. Literally, this man only sees the
number. Dude, we got this. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we
go. Here we go. Here we go. Let's go. 3
2 1. There's like four systems that are above this number. Can I see the
hardware GPU Z thing? What does it say? It was drawing. 890 watts. Holy. You're
telling me these 5090s ain't got no headroom? I feel like you can do more.
Not today. Just need more temps. And we
need to tell you about our sponsor. No, it's Cic. Oh, yeah. CIC, right? CIC.
Good power. I mean, legendary power. Legendary even, you might say. We were
able to drive a freaking 900 watt GPU off of this thing. Like, do you really
need to know more than that? We're going to have CIC linked down below. We're
also going to have Slav's thermal compound down there, as well as his uh
PC system integration business. Thank you. If you guys enjoy these kinds of
shenanigans, though, maybe you'll enjoy the last time that Alex and I tried using a modified BIOS to push a 1000
watts through a GPU.