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It’s a good feeling when you build a PC and two of the top PC benchmarks, companies that account for several million comparison tests worldwide, both place you in the 99th percentile of all systems ever tested for certain benchmarks, as well as in the 96% mark over all.
To say that I haven’t jumped up, punched my fists into the air, and yelled some rather uncharacteristic obscenity would be an understatement. To do this as your average builder who hasn’t the experience in tweaking CPUs and one who doesn’t game just makes that all that much greater. Anyone can do this, given the right gear and patience.
And it all started with a Christmas PC disaster where we watched two PC Test Bench systems go down, one AMD and one Intel, in the midst of trying to build a new AMD system for another…and I still haven’t a clue what occurred. This was a December 24th 3am shot of the disaster…
That disaster, at its lowest point, saw a motherboard, Intel and three Ryzen 3700X CPUs trashed. That last CPU met the better end of a hammer (see desk right side) through my frustration, followed by an unexpected old friend reaching out for a bit of assistance which we had never had the good fortune of previously. Thank you Intel.
Through all of this, we have built one racehorse of a Test bench PC which, by any standards, qualifies as the most stunning PC we have ever built…and it has restored our ‘quan’ in PC building. It has returned the Feng Shui back to the offices of The SSD Review and that came with some absolutely great help from ASRock, Corsair, Zotac, Sabrent and Intel…right when we needed it most. Let’s walk through exactly what we did and speak frankly about the gear used and reason we chose each piece specifically. First though… here is a very clean shot of what we have built…
This Corsair 5000x Test Bench contains an ASRock Z490 Taichi which houses the Intel i9-10900k CPU set at 5GHz, 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4-3200 memory, Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity OC Graphics card, Sabrent 4TB Rocket 4 Plus Gen 4 NVMe SSD, along with several other components that we will show and describe throughout this report. Yes, someone is wondering why we just put a Gen 4 SSD into a Gen 3 system. 1. It provides full Gen 3 speeds. 2. We will be transitioning this to a 11th Gen Intel bench very soon and this is a great head start for what may simply be a motherboard/CPU swap. Here is a quick overview with benchmarks to be included as we go along:
As we work through the components, clicking on the title of each will bring you directly to its Amazon sale link in order to do a price check. Turn the page and let’s get started right off with our PassMark Overall rating. It’s us versus the world!
