Building a New LGR Gaming PC! Ryzen 9800X3D
[custom-built jazz music plays] [computer buzzes, beeps] - Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing where I'm gonna be building a new modern gaming PC! Because in case you haven't seen before, I had a bit of an incident with a hurricane and my old PC for gaming is not in the best shape. Yeah six months ago, to the day as I'm recording this, an unprecedented 100-year hurricane or whatever you wanna call it, a really big stupid tropical storm came through the Western North Carolina area and destroyed billions of dollars worth of stuff in the Asheville and WNC region. And some little part of that was unfortunately my house. Not one, but two gigantic, almost 100 foot tall oak trees, like 15,000 pounds worth of tree just cleaved my home in twain.
And as a result, a lot of my stuff was destroyed upstairs, pretty much all of my modern gaming things, including the gaming computer that I had in there. And it was something that I've had for years and it was still actually serving me pretty well. It has an Intel 8086K, I think 16 gigs of RAM, an Nvidia 2080. And you know, I mean it was older, I've been wanting to build a new one, but well. This just kind of exacerbated plans... Exacerbated? Accelerated, whatever.
I need to build a new computer is what I'm saying, because, you know? [fumbles with broken bits] As much as I want to put this back together, I've just been wanting to upgrade for a good while. And I do like to cover newer games on LGR on occasion and I just haven't really been able to do that. And then right towards the end of last year, AMD announced the 9800X3D CPU, and that thing released and it was just an incredibly awesome looking upgrade.
I'd been curious about the newer Ryzen stuff for a good while, seemed like a great upgrade, but of course I was dealing with the hurricane stuff. And as the months went on, especially earlier on in this year, as it seems like maybe imports and computer parts from other countries may be getting more expensive here for a bit it seemed like, on the one hand, a really good time to just go ahead and build a new computer. But at the same time, it's like the worst possible moment for me to do that. Because seriously, all of my extra cash right now, it's going to rebuilding the house or doing upgrades on there while I can and getting the property back together and a bunch of stuff that insurance doesn't cover. And it's just really expensive.
I'm already spending thousands on that. I don't wanna spend thousands on a gaming computer right now. So, on that note... This episode of LGR is sponsored by Jawa.gg! The number one gaming marketplace online to buy and sell enthusiast-built custom PCs, new and used PC parts, and all kinds of awesome gaming gear at excellent prices.
Each day there's fresh gaming hardware and custom builds being posted with verified sellers and listings vetted for quality by the folks at Jawa. And transactions are secured with customer policies, ensuring a safe and reliable experience for all. Something I was really glad to see actually, since good grief, can it be a pain, especially trying to buy newer parts, hard to find stuff when dealing with auction flippers and random third-party sellers on other sites. So when Jawa reached out and offered to pay for my gaming build, but also letting me put their services to the test, I was like, heck yeah, let's do it.
And the process for this was super straightforward. It was simply a matter of looking for compatible components using their handy searching and tagging filters. And I quickly found everything I needed, all from vetted sellers with detailed listings and helpful photos, showing important stuff like serial numbers and the packaging. I was also pleased to see that Jawa was interested in vintage items as well, with a recently added retro category just being added to the site. And in particular throughout this month, April 2025, they are kicking things off by giving away $1,000 cash to one lucky random lister who posts a retro item on Jawa this month. The more retro items you list, the more your odds increase.
See their website for details. But unusually for me, it's all about the modern stuff for this video. So I got my pile of parts and within a few days, everything arrived on my doorstep exactly as described.
So if you wanna skip the hassle of researching and building a gaming PC yourself, or like me, you're buying specific components for a new rig, then buy from one of Jawa's verified sellers. Visit jawa.link/LGR to get started. And yeah, everything I ordered anonymously through Jawa arrived quickly and looking great, though I didn't buy everything through them. I already had a few bits and pieces that I'd bought beforehand since I was planning this build before they ever contacted me. So let's dive into what I got, why I chose it, and then put it all together and play some dang games.
And the first component that kicked all of this off to begin with is the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. An octa-core processor, which is, or kind of still is, the best gaming CPU that you can get at the time of recording. Now, back when I first heard about this at the very beginning of November 2024, I saw the results of all the benchmarks and it was just insane in terms of what you can get with games compared to what I had, and the price was right, so I immediately put in a reservation on a website to try and get one for the normal retail price and avoid any stupid scalpers.
Well, it finally came through in the beginning of February. And then of course, it wasn't long after and the 9950X3D was announced. And yeah, in some performance tests it is better in certain games by a few percentage points, and it's definitely better for doing creative work. And if I was building a workstation/gaming computer, I would definitely swap it for that.
But I already have a great workstation. All I wanna do here is game. So an additional ~$220 seems like a bit much for just a handful more frames here and there. And another item I already had on hand is the GPU, and that is the RTX 4080 from the previous Nvidia generation of GPUs. Something I bought a couple of years ago as an upgrade for my video workstation. And you know, for the longest time, I've bought EVGA-branded GPUs, but they stopped doing that.
So despite it sounding like a cough medicine, I decided to give the Zotac brand a try, mainly because it was the only one available when I happened to stumble across it in a store. And yeah, it's a couple and a half years old, but it still does everything I want it to. And even if I didn't skip a generation, typically, the 50 series? Ehh. I don't know about you, but it just doesn't seem terribly worthwhile for somebody that already has a slightly overclocked 4080. Yes the 5080 has faster memory, but it's still 16 gigs. There's more CUDA cores, and it's clocked a little higher and all that stuff.
But the all-around performance gains on stuff that's *not* frame generation aren't enough for me to justify another $1,000 to $1,200. And the 5090? I don't care even if a sponsor is paying for it, $2,000+ is ridiculous when I already have a really good GPU on hand from my previous workstation. Now, if I didn't have a GPU already, I would be extremely tempted by the new RDNA 4 cards from AMD. I think I'd be quite happy with a 9070 XT, but I already have the 4080, I'm gonna use it for now.
And finally, for the items I already had picked out before going to Jawa, there's the PC case. And I've gone with one of these that I've had so very many of you tell me about, the Fractal Design North XL in chalk white with that delightful wood paneling on the front. The kind of aesthetic that was not a thing last time I was building a gaming PC. And in fact, my last gaming PC had to be customized just to get a wood look, but now there's so many cases that offer wood accents. It's awesome! And while there were multiple wood-clad brands I was looking at, I've always enjoyed Fractal Designs, fractically speaking, even if you gotta do without any kind of drive bay.
Which is fine, I'll use USB optical whenever I need it. And because of some of the other things I'm gonna be putting in here, I decided to go with a glass side panel, something I've referred to as "tacky" especially when you start adding tons of RGB, which I mostly don't care for, but I don't know. It's a new year. I've got a new-ish house being rebuilt.
It's a new computer, I'm feeling new, so let's do new things! All right, that's all the stuff I already had. So here are the things that I ordered through Jawa, and the first of those is the motherboard. And this, the ASRock X870E Taichi whatever-the-heck, is one beefy board.
Certainly the most costly I've ever grabbed for something that's not a workstation. The fact that it was like $500 and is still somewhat in the middle for these X870 series boards feels ridiculous to me. But it also ticked every single box for what I was after, with of course great support for the 9800X3D, in theory. After I bought this, I started seeing stories about failures with ASRock boards, and this CPU. Fingers crossed I'm not affected.
And you know, it still has the RAM support I was after, with DDR5 up to 8200, dual PCI Express 5.0 X16, without any of that stuff you have to worry about with GPU lane sharing with your other slots. Not an issue here. Plus a couple of onboard USB4 ports, seven USB 3.2s, some really pretty good onboard audio and capacitors and a DAC and all that, and four M.2 slots, one of which is actually Gen 5 with the others being Gen 4.
Plus 5 gig ethernet and WiFi 7 I can use until I can move back to my house with wired Ethernet, and all that kind of other stuff, which is just nice. Also, this thing is ridiculously heavy, like by far the heaviest motherboard I've ever held that doesn't have anything installed on it. I keep expecting a bloodsucking lawyer to tell me to stop playing with it.
- Are they heavy? - Yeah. - Then they're expensive, put them back. - And then for the RAM situation, I went with Corsair as I usually do. And this is a 32 GB kit with dual 16 GB modules with DDR5-6000 being what it is, which seemed to be kind of the sweet spot at the moment in terms of stability, bang for your buck and all that.
Yeah, you can go for 64 gigs and I was tempted to do so, but I've never seen a game need more than 32 gigs. Oh, it's also the Dominator Platinum RGB whatever the balls variant, for whatever that's worth. I don't know. It's got colors and heat sinks. Now for the storage I've got a couple of NVMe M.2 SSDs
and one of them is a Gen 5, the other a Gen 4. So the Gen 4 is what I'm gonna be using for my operating system, programs, all that kind of stuff. It's plenty fast for that. It's one of these Samsung 990 Pro's, which I've used before in my workstations and it's a 2 terabyte, which is enough.
And for the Gen 5, this is just gonna be only for games. I've never had one of these before, so I'm looking forward to testing the speed. This is a Crucial T700 Pro, also two terabytes. I really wanted four but I couldn't find one in stock in time for this video. And if it weren't for Java I would not have been able to find one of these either.
This is the all-in-one cooling solution that I'm gonna be using for the 9800X3D and that is one of these Corsair iCUE things, the H170i Elite LCD in particular, which this is gonna be interesting for me to try on multiple levels. For one, I have never done liquid cooling, water cooling, anything like that ever on any of my builds before. And this being an all in one thing, you don't have to worry about adding fluids or whatever, seems awesome.
But really the biggest reason I got this is because of this stupid LCD that's on there. The fact that you can change this to just show whatever the heck you want... Oh that is the silliest most wonderful thing. I'm gonna be doing really immature stuff with this and that's a big reason that I needed the glass side panel. Yeah, I don't know, it just seemed fun and I was happy to find one new at all as it seemed to have been discontinued...
And even the updated XT model, I couldn't find one of those either. Then last but absolutely not least, we got a power supply and I went with a kilowatt from be quiet! this time around 'cause I like their other stuff. So I figured I'd give one of their power supplies a try. It's 80 PLUS Titanium rated, fully modular of course, and importantly to me, it comes with one of these PCI Express 5.0 connectors. My previous 1000-watt power supply I had, I had to use one of those adapter dongles to work with my RTX 4080.
And you know what? There's enough melting problems that I'd rather not deal with extra doohickeys in the way, so I'm glad I don't have to here. And there we go. It is quite a stack of stuff. Lots of technology to play with. And yeah, we've talked about all of it long enough.
Let's get to building this sucker and trying out a whole bunch of games. [light music] Ah, starting a new build is always so exciting and that first step, plopping in the new CPU into its nifty little socket. Mm. Super satisfying every single time I do it.
And with that snugly in its place, I'm gonna go ahead and get the RAM in its places. Set up in slots A2 and B2 for dual channel. And it's also nice I don't have to worry about any clearance issues with a big, giant CPU cooler, what with the liquid cooling situation we got going on. I dunno, it's just exciting to me to do something different.
Speaking of different, these M.2 slots have this interesting, easy release thing to just pull aside, and the heat sink comes off quite easily like that. And you actually don't even have any screws to worry about. It didn't come with any screws in the box, so at first I thought they were just missing, but now you kinda just slot the thing in the slot and then this twists around and holds it in place.
And if you know anything about this particular board, you may notice a mistake I'm making right here, installing these, because, you know, we have Gen 5 and Gen 4, which is completely different in terms of the speed capabilities of these two SSDs. And we'll get to that later when I realize my mistake. And you know, let's just keep the silly mistakes coming because I was getting the liquid cooler mounts going, which begin with these standoffs, and these screw into the motherboard in place of the normal mounts for the AM5, like if you're putting on a fan, but here it's for mounting the liquid cooling block.
Again, if you know the process here, this is laughably amateur what I'm screwing up here. Do not treat this video as an exact how-to walkthrough, more of a, well, this guy totally screwed this up, not paying close enough attention and perhaps was daydreaming about building another 486 or something instead. Somehow I just missed one of the steps and we'll get to that once we turn it on. Thankfully, getting the AMD mount onto the actual cooling block was very straightforward. It just pops right off.
There's two metal pieces that slide back in place and there you go, it is ready to mount to your motherboard. Assuming you haven't screwed up the motherboard mount. And before I could even mess up installing that, I had to figure out the radiator situation, which is a gigantic 420 millimeter slab meant to attach to three 140 millimeter fans in this particular model.
And this is another reason that I chose this exact case, because I knew that the front of it could support a radiator that large. And I definitely had to do some double checking in the manual before I even bought it, because it's not the most obvious that 420 mm will fit. It definitely wouldn't at the top of the case, but if you remove the front fans that it came with, then it should fit in there, providing that the tubes between the radiator and the cooling block are long enough. And with both side panels removed, there was plenty of access to get to everything that I needed.
Another reason that I really like these Fractal cases. I don't know, I just like the design and the layout inside. And there's so much more room left over now too, that I don't use any 2.5 inch
or 3.5 inch drives internally, leaving that much extra room for cable management, AKA stuffing wires into hidden holes. Now I could have just used the existing fans, it actually would have worked with this radiator, but it came with those nice iCUE ones. And yeah, I don't know, it's got that eight-way RGB, and I figured I may as well see what it looks like.
Plus I needed to take the fans out to get the radiator in there at all. Then with those three fans, it was time to get them all plugged into the iCUE RGB router controller box thing. Just such a wonderfully tidy solution for all your fan wiring, or tidy looking by squid standards perhaps. Anyway, it's power supply time.
And yeah, this is one of those where it has a little back bracket that you just screw into the power supply first. And then it slides neatly into place and mounts in there with only a couple of thumb screws. And now we're ready to mount the motherboard.
And after checking the standoffs in the case, I noticed this other nice little detail. Fractal's actually marked where the different styles or sizes, shapes of motherboards are going to go in terms of where you need the standoffs. Neat. And now with the motherboard fully screwed in and secured, it was time to get that cooling block in place, sort of secured. At least there was an attempt made.
In the documentation, it did say it would be a bit loose. Well, it wasn't supposed to be this loose, I would soon find out. And with that, the computer is pretty much ready to test.
I'm not gonna install the GPU yet. I just wanna see if the thing powers on as sort of a sanity check, and it's a good thing I did. And I'll do more cable management later, but at this point I really just wanna run power through it. So I'm gonna take it downstairs, plug it into a TV and see what happens. And welp, if you've been paying attention, you can kinda guess what's gonna happen.
But until then, I got some pretty lights! [computer quietly powers on] - Mm! [laughs] Okay. Well, that's a good sign! ...Uhh. Or... or not. Hm! - Yeah, after about 20 seconds, it just turns off.
And then when you try to turn it back on, it immediately turns back off again until you let it cool down a bit and then try it later and it just sort of repeats. Yeah, it's almost like there's no cooling connected to the CPU. Hmm... Yeah, somehow I knew I'd get thrown off with my first experience with liquid cooling. So after a round of liquid troubleshooting, I quickly figured out the problem, which is so stupidly obvious in hindsight, but isn't it always? So those motherboard mounts? Yeah, you're supposed to take those off entirely, obviously.
And not just thread the standoffs through them because otherwise the cooler is not going to fully connect to the CPU itself. And of course, it's just gonna thermal shut down very quickly. So yeah, it was a dumb mistake, but thankfully I didn't do any damage other than to my own ego or what's left of it. Oh, well, moving on to the GPU, which as you'd hope installed perfectly fine, including its saggy bottom lifter, whatever the heck this thing is called.
Yeah, GPUs, man, they're just too big and stupid these days. You gotta put one of these in there. Otherwise it just sags and is terrible.
I don't like this solution, I wish they would just figure something else out, but whatever, this works. And yes, I made sure that power connector sucker was way in there, all tight and clicked in place. And that's everything sorted, almost. So, you know, I mentioned I also did something wrong with the M.2 drives, yeah.
Well, I put them in backwards. When looking in the manual, I saw the first M.2 slot was the Gen 5 and then the others were Gen 4. So I put my Gen 5 one in the first slot, or what I thought was the first slot, you know, top to bottom. But no, the one at the top is actually a Gen 4 and the quote-unquote first slot is actually the second one down from the top below the CPU. So anyway, I just swapped those and it was all good.
And now everything is set and ready to go for installing [sighs] Windows 11. Which I do not like for so many reasons. I don't use it for my work at all, and for Windows PC games I'm actually really happy with Proton, especially through SteamOS these days. But until Valve releases a full SteamOS release you can officially and easily install on anything, and I don't have to mess around with Bazzite or whatever, which is a cool project, it's just not something I wanna do on my main gaming PC, so Windows 11 it is for now. And thankfully everything got set up and installed with only a few things needed from the ASRock website in terms of drivers, with one notable exception. I had an annoying problem with the wireless drivers supplied on the ASRock website, they constantly crashed, even making the entire interface deactivate or even disappear, with the computer saying it didn't exist.
And plus it also affected Bluetooth which killed game controller support. Well, it turns out there is a better driver, but it's not listed on the motherboard website. I actually found it on the ASUSROG subreddit, which I guess some of those boards have the same annoyingly broken WiFi drivers supplied. Whatever, the ones I found on Reddit work perfectly fine, it's been no problem ever since. But yeah, everything else was working straight away, including that goofy RGB and LCD stuff from the Corsair cooler. Oh my goodness, it's so dumb.
I mean, you can just put anything on there, you can make your own GIFs or just download things online and as long as they fit, then you can put them on your CPU cooler for no reason at all. I mean sure there's useful things you can put on there too, like temperatures and speeds. But you can also put footage from the LGR Birds livestream on there of the squirrels going nuts.
Or laughing Gandalf, or crazy Willem Dafoe, or Duke Nukem, or LGR things, or very much inappropriate things. You can do all kinds of stuff, I want everything now to be covered in an LCD panel that I can customize. And you know, the RGB is actually kind of cool too, I gotta admit. Less so, all the glowing stuff inside, I don't really care about that. But the front panel fans, I actually kind of like that they're so customizable.
You know, they have eight addressable areas on each fan, so some of the animations that it allows are actually pretty appealing... In limited amounts. I definitely don't like having this on all the time, but I do enjoy having it as sort of a VU meter, volume activated dancing lights thing, bumping along to music or gameplay or whatever is something I like on my stereos and hi-fi, so why not on a computer? And also working well is that Gen 5 SSD. I was really curious to see what kind of transfer speeds we would get in the Crystal Disk Mark test, and look at these results, holy balls.
Yeah I thought the Gen 4 speeds were insane when I got those five years ago or whatever. This stuff now pushing 12 gigs per second is ridiculous, and I've definitely noticed it in games. Things load like that. And that is the next thing we're gonna be testing, a whole crapload of games. A mixture of older personal favorites and newer things that I've barely tried and yeah, just benchmarky stuff. Yeah, whatever seems like it really pushed the limits or be fun to try.
And you know, not just Balatro, even though that runs at like 600-700 FPS, that's pretty good. It's a good game. Can't stop playing it. [sighs] What's going on? The first game we're testing is the Half-Life 2 RTX Demo, which released right as I was finishing up this build. So with this and all other games being tested for that matter, I'm running at 4K resolution, 3840x2160. And unless stated otherwise, all graphics options will be cranked as high as they'll go, including all path tracing and ray-traced effects, with visual schlock like film grain and motion blur turned off. And if DLSS resolution scaling and frame generation is available and enabled, then the mode used will be noted up in the top right.
I prefer to play without any kind of AI frame gen or upscaling if I can help it, but it can also be a better experience if it's done right and if it doesn't degrade visual clarity to the point of being distractingly ugly. Things like DLSS4 and its Transformer model Ray Reconstruction have helped the visual noise and smearing factor quite a bit lately, and Half-Life 2 RTX here is one title taking advantage of this. And it looks great.
And for being quite a demanding tech demo, it plays pretty well for me here, mostly between 70 and 80 FPS with every one of its ray-traced bells and whistles going at full blast. More than good enough performance for me. This is also the first time I'm playing with something made with that crazy Nvidia RTX Remix platform, and, man, is it fascinating to see how much it can enhance geometry, textures, and lighting while also sticking to the look and feel of the original. Like, it feels faithful but new. I'm really looking forward to seeing more games modded like this.
[zombies screaming] Next up is another one that dropped as I was putting this together, Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced! Which brings all kinds of modern graphical niceties to the 37-year-old GTA V, including ray-traced shadows and reflections, ambient occlusion, global illumination, support for DLSS and more. Far as I can tell this doesn't offer frame generation, but even if it did, I wouldn't bother. Since even with every graphical setting and ray-traced knickknack maxed out, I'm still getting over 130 FPS more often than not. And I mean, the game is 94 years old and is playable on a jar of pickles, so even with the fancy new RT features, it's not that surprising it runs this well. Not to take anything away from those features, they look excellent, especially global illumination which is probably my single favorite feature ray-tracing can provide.
Well done GI alone can fully transform a game from looking flat and dated to modern as it does with GTA V. Now release GTA VI so we can move on, for Pete's sake! We're moving on to the next game at least, which is Wreckfest 2. Really the early access version as it was on March 20th, 2025. I loved the first Wreckfest from Bugbear, and in case you're not familiar, they're the developers of the awesome FlatOut series of racing games from the 2000s.
And the Wreckfest titles are the spiritual successors, just with even more advanced physics. And Wreckfest 2 seems to have a softer softbody physics model this time around, meaning even more dynamic car crunching, crushing, and smashing than before. And considering the first game ran well for me even on my older rig, I was pleased to see this new one sticks to between 90 and 110 FPS for the most part.
Even when things are going delightfully insane with 24 cars all being wrecked at once, like it's some kind of wreck festival. I highly look forward to the final game for this one. [metal smashing] Another one that I guess technically is still in early access but is so fully featured by this point that it feels like a full-dag-on game is the venerable BeamNG Drive.
One of my favorite chaos sandboxes for the last, ah geez, 12 years almost. It's ridiculous how far it's come since then, and, man, can it be an absolute beast to run at 4K on the Ultra preset for graphics, as we're doing here. And once you do things like enable traffic vehicles and start slamming into multiple cars at a time, yeah, my last gaming PC had a heck of a workout running this, even at lower resolutions. There's also no DLSS or anything like that to rely on, so you take what you can get, it's all or nothing.
And thankfully I can now say all. I'm getting 90 to 100 FPS most of the time while playing, and even at its worst I haven't seen a drop below 80. Which to me is incredible, honestly. This is BeamNG running as smoothly at 4K as I have ever experienced it. This is so damn fun to play without any major slowdowns or hiccups getting in the way of a good crunchy time, even with the silly forcefield mode tossing cars every which way, and I have to imagine a good chunk of this is due to the 9800 X3D CPU, since so much of what's going on here relies directly on your processor.
And these results are superb. [explosion booming] Cyberpunk 2077 is next, which is always an interesting one. I never really know what to expect anymore, seeing as they've added all kinds of stuff to it over the years graphically, and sometimes what I assume will work well seemingly doesn't.
But yeah, just running the built-in benchmark at the Ray Tracing Overdrive preset with DLSS resolution scaling set to Performance we get a paltry 53 FPS average, yeesh. Even with frame generation enabled. Er, wait, it says it was disabled? Huh. Yeah, it's enabled in the options at least. Let's run that again, frame gen enabled, and this time with DLSS set to Ultra Performance. And I mean, that's better, but still not what I'd assume with frame gen.
We get 85 FPS average, dipping down to 76 at one point, and yet again, it says that's with frame generation disabled. So yeah, I don't know what's up with that. It won't seem to enable no matter what combination of settings I've tried.
It is still more than playable with resolution scaling, and of course I could drop down the native resolution to 1440, something I have no problem doing at all, but I still wish I knew why frame gen isn't working. Whatever, it's fine either way. [V's bones crunch] Ooh, now here's one I've been seriously wondering about. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Since the performance of 2020 was always a bit eh, at least on my last rig...
And, you know, they've changed so much about the way that this one grabs data from the cloud and renders things, that I really didn't know what to expect. But I was happy to see that even at the ultra preset for the graphics, with DLSS set to Performance, the performance was consistently good. With frame rates over 100 most of the time. And then when you get into much more densely populated areas with a ton of buildings close by and geometry and all that, it may dip down into the 90s or 80s.
But otherwise, not really a problem at all. Whether I'm flying around somewhere as relatively simple-looking as the Asheville region, or going through the extreme population and geometric density of downtown Manhattan, New York City, or whatever else I've tried, this has been a significantly smoother and more predictably performant and less laggy experience for me than it ever was with 2020. And I can't speak for a lot of the rest of the game, but at least the performance is great. [helicopter whirring perilously] Speaking of simulator sequels with slightly concerning attributes, Cities Skylines 2. Which is something that has never run consistently well for me, no matter what system I've played it on.
And that really kinda continues here. I mean, it's still better than what I was experiencing before, that's not up for debate. However, also not up for debate is the fact that I still cannot, no matter what setting I use, get a consistent 60fps or higher experience at 4K with this game, even on Ultra Performance mode for DLSS.
It just isn't gonna happen. And you'd think surely if you crank it all the way down to 1080p it'd fix that, well no, it's still not able to consistently stay at 60 or higher. Even with a 4080, even with a Gen 5 SSD, even with what is basically the fastest gaming CPU that you can get right now, it's just not a game that is satisfied completely with any configuration I've thrown at it.
And yes, I know, it's a big complicated city builder, but you should at least be able to get a steady 60, I say. And at this point I dunno if you ever will. [cartoonish farting] And hey, and since we're apparently bringing this system to its knees, Indiana Jones and the fate of the circle of the Indiana Jones or what is it called? Great Circle, yeah. This is something I've just started playing because I could not play it at all before. I did not have any hardware that could run it, and my word. Not only is this game phenomenally fun to play and absolutely gorgeous, but the ray tracing features here and just everything else completely brings this build to a crawl.
If you choose the maximum graphics settings. I had to crank it down from Supreme to Ultra, ooh, yeah, big deal. But seriously, it wanted to go way over the 16GB memory of the graphics card and would completely just crash to desktop or freeze up the entire system if everything was activated all at once at 4K. So I ended up doing a mixture of high and ultra settings, turning things down like the pool size and shadow quality. And yeah, eventually I got down to a playable state. Still with full path tracing and everything else enabled, but using the only sunlight option for ray traced shadows...
And it was mostly over 100 FPS, dipping down into the 80s and even the 70s in certain sections when there's a lot of characters on screen. But otherwise, fully acceptable in my opinion. I don't even need all this stuff turned on, but dang is it pretty and it sure is nice to be able to do so.
Taking out fascists never looks so good. [gratuitous punching, gunfire] Another I missed out on last year and I've been wanting to try is Squirrel with a Gun. And I gotta say, I was really surprised with this one. Not only is it way more enjoyable than I thought it would be, kind of an open map sandbox of squirrelly shenanigans, solving puzzles through physics and problem-solving interactions.
But I was also caught off guard by the graphics and actually kind of how hard it can be to run at full speed at 4K. Which, it's an Unreal Engine 5 game, so I guess that answers why. Like I just picked this up for the squirrels, I didn't know it had all these UE5 things like Lumen and advanced fur, strand shading, and whatever else. As a result I cranked things down just a little bit from the highest epic setting, with strand shading set to high and resolution set to high, which is kind of vague? This is DLSS as far as I can tell, and it seems to be the equivalent of the Balanced setting, but I'm not entirely sure about that. But whatever it is, the results are that most of the time it achieves around the mid-70s, just out in the open areas of the world doing whatever the heck you want, launching yourself around with gunshots and riding a remote-controlled car, stealing people's acorns...
It's just a fun little game and a surprisingly effective benchmark. Kinda nuts. [squirrel dies by lava] And nearing the end here, this is another that I just had to pick up.
This is Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. I was really interested in this because while I enjoyed the first one, I've heard nothing but exceedingly positive stuff about the second one, and my word does it not disappoint. This is some of the meatiest, crunchiest, big-space-dick combat I've ever experienced. It is awesome so far and I'm barely into the game, this is just the intro I'm showing. But yeah, it's also one of those that is extremely satisfying in terms of performance. I didn't even really have to think about it, I just maxed out everything, set the render resolution to quality and that did turn on frame generation, although I don't really need it.
But it's nice to have I guess because it doesn't seem to detract from the visual experience at all and I'm getting around 120 FPS for the most part here. And it might dip down to around 100 but, you know, that's kind of understandable when you've got hundreds of Tyranid freaks descending upon you just begging for a holy cleansing by gunfire and chain swords. Dude, this is such a good game so far and an absolute feast for the eyes.
Really looks a lot better in person rendering real time in front of you. [Bolt Rifle firing] And last but not least, I did wanna mention just a little bit of the emulation side of things, because of course, this is gonna be a fantastic setup for any generation of emulation that's out there. Just depends on the completeness and optimization of the emulator itself, like PCSX2 here, you can run your PlayStation 2 games at an upscaled internal 4K resolution all day long. Every game that I've tried is just perfection. This is truly game-changing stuff for a lot of these titles on that platform. And I haven't even started trying like fan-made mods and patches and things for widescreen or even higher frame rates and textures or whatever else.
And then on the flip side you have emulators like Xenia, which is for the Xbox 360. And you know what, it does that extremely well too, you know, as well as it can do. But it's still an emulator that is maturing so not every title is going to be fantastic.
In fact, most of them are still a little bit iffy. But the fact that we can do this at all these days is so cool! The original Forza Horizon playing on a PC, at its original resolution and 30 FPS frame rate, but still. On a PC! It's just a wonderful thing. This is such a good time to be into emulation. [V10 revving, music blaring] And that's about it for this video on the 2025 LGR Gaming PC. And yup, I'm highly satisfied!
The parts are all great, the buying experience with Jawa was top notch, and other than a couple ignorant mistakes and some driver problems, I have no place to complain whatsoever. And it's been running nonstop for about a month now with no sign of any problems with the CPU and motherboard combo yet. Thank goodness, 'cause I really like this build. Compared to the Intel i7 build with an RTX 2080 I had before, this is a huge step forward in performance. I'm grateful to have something that'll let me get back to covering current PC stuff here and there on LGR this year and beyond. Not just The Sims 4 or whatever, but also Doom The Dark Ages, inZOI, Flight Simulator, Cities Skylines 2 if they ever fix it up enough to do expansions. And who knows,
really just whatever strikes me as interesting enough to cover. And of course it's just personally been great to get back into higher-end gaming after six months and starting to catch up on all the stuff I've missed. Maybe it seems silly to some, but building this was an important step towards returning to a sense of normalcy after the hurricane, in my mind.
It's kinda wild how much you take for granted right up until the moment an unprecedented storm wrecks your entire town and splits your house in two. Anyway, on the topic of changes or upgrades to this thing, well, I've already decided to make one, and that is adding more of those iCUE-compatible fans to the case, both on top and around back. Not only cuz I'd planned to add additional fans for airflow, but also because, dang it, I enjoy the lightshow sometimes! Not all the time, not all at once. I don't want it to look like a vape shop on LSD.
But the more subtle animations are nice, and the mode where it reacts to sound is fun. Otherwise the only thing I could see changing in the foreseeable future is the OS, because Windows 11 hurts my soul. And if official SteamOS happens and it's good with this hardware, I'm gonna give it a shot.
And yeah, maybe a GPU upgrade someday, if and when Nvidia or AMD release something that's both notably faster and not insanely priced. But I plan on this being my configuration for a good few years at least, even if there probably is too much RGB and not enough wood grain. [laid-back jazz music] [grenades blasting, guns firing] Well, I know this is a little bit different than my normal fare on multiple levels. Thanks again to Jawa by the way
for being the sponsor for this one! But I hope you enjoyed anyway, we'll be back to retro stuff here soon, so stick around. And as always, thanks for watching! [Skif exlodes himself]
2025-04-07 02:58
