Perhaps you’ve been to Tweakers Huisfeestje, where you’ve been able to enjoy that thick PC with just a few tweakers, or have you seen it at Megekko’s booth during DreamHack Rotterdam. But how fast is this water-cooled monster computer really? Was in the Tweakers test lab for a few days, and of course we couldn’t resist doing some benchmarks…

The challenging design was put together and built by four sneakerheads under the name of the occasion Phenom PC: Equate 1986 (pictured above on the left), Skyline GTR (above right), Nelson 1234 (lower left) f rimquare. Obviously, they didn’t buy all the big hardware in this system themselves; Gigabyte, Kingston, Cooler Master, and Alphacool have sponsored the project. And to round out the PC, we borrowed our review sample from the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor ourselves. If you had to buy this system yourself, you would soon be over €5,000; All the custom water cooling parts alone cost over 1250 euros!

Specifications and refrigeration

Basics of Tweakers ft. Thicc Jeff from VenomPC, as the builders have dubbed the system, is AMD’s new line of Ryzen 7000 processors. The top model in this series, the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X, is housed in one of GIGABYTE’s most luxurious motherboards for the new AM5 socket, the X670E Aorus Master. This motherboard has two strips of fast DDR5-6000 memory from Kingston, totaling 32GB, and a Fury Renegade 1TB SSD from the same manufacturer.

The video card is a Gigabyte Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC, but of course it’s been stripped of its standard cooler and sported a custom-made water-cooling block. It’s all powered by Cooler Master’s MWE Gold 1250W power supply and housed in one of the most luxurious computer cases, the Cooler Master HAF 700 Evo, the highlight of which are a mirror on the inside and an adjustable display on the front of the cabinet.

We haven’t even touched the bulk of this design yet, because this is undoubtedly custom water cooling from German company Alphacool. An AIO water cooler often comes with one, if you build your own you sometimes use two for the CPU and GPU, but this chassis has at least four 360mm radiators: two on top (next to each other) One at the front and one at the bottom. Including two additional fans, the air is moved by eleven (!) 120mm fans and two front 200mm fans. There is also a separate pump and tank, nine meters of soft tubing and dozens of fittings used in this episode.

Pictures during construction

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But how fast is this computer really? In the charts, we always compare Thicc Jeff’s system to the two systems we recommended for our desktop BBG in September 2022. After all, we tested them both in exactly the same way, so the results are very similar.

First of all, we’ll of course look at the CPU test of all CPU tests, which is Cinebench’s rendering benchmark. The system scores no less than 39,093 points, a few percentage points higher than the stock 7950X. Core i9 was only 13900K in power consumption Our review Just a little faster. On the single-threaded test, we stay just under 2,100 points, which is exactly what you’d expect from the 7950X. And what can you do with all that computing power? Well, for example, compressing 15 GB of files with 7-Zip in 173 seconds is much more than that. 15% faster than stock.

Although the new generation of Radeons will be released soon, the RX 6950 XT is still the top model of the red camp for now. So the 3DMark results please the imagination: 62,000 points in Fire Strike and 22,000 points in Time Spy. That’s about 70 percent faster than the 6700 XT GPU in our 1440p PC.

Additionally, we ran five games from our GPU testing protocol on this system. Even at 4K resolution with all settings on Ultra, this system is capable of amazing performance. In racing games F1 2021 and Forza Horizon 5 we hit over 100fps, and if for some reason you stick to 1080p on medium, you’ll get no less than 517fps in F1.

far cry 6

Cyberpunk 2077 movie

F1 2021

Forza Horizon 5

Total War: Warhammer III

Ray tracing

The least strong point of this system is ray tracing, mainly because the RX 6950 XT video card isn’t very good at it. At 1440p with the rest of the settings on Ultra, we’re seeing 122fps in Far Cry 6 and just 29fps in Cyberpunk 2077. You can definitely forget about 4K with ray tracing in that last game.

cooling

Meanwhile, it’s strange how cool the video card can be while gaming. After playing a good game, it turned out that the maximum recorded GPU temperature was only 45 degrees. The Ryzen 9 7950X also remains at about 88 degrees relatively cool. This processor is simply reckless, but with a high-end air cooler, we didn’t get any let down from 95 degrees.

Energy consumption

For the sake of completeness, we have also measured power consumption. At idle, the system draws 103 watts from the socket, while gaming power (F1 on 4k-Ultra) is 572 watts.

what do you think?

This may not be the content you’re used to from us, but we still think it’s cool to show you what it’s like when you’re really working with the new generation of processors. And we’re curious: Is such a design with dedicated water-cooling also your dream PC, or would you prefer to stick to a PC that offers as much value for money as possible? Let us know in the comments.