AMD Ryzen 9 5950x Workstation-Game Station

We love putting together custom systems, including custom gaming rigs! This one is outfitted with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950x processor and includes the latest components from Corsair, ASUS, and Gigabyte. In this case, we are placing that AMD Ryzen 9 ultra-processor on an ASUS X570 PRO Prime motherboard along with a Gigabyte 3080 GPU. All of that is going in Corsair’s iCUE 7000X RGB case. 

So, the same processor we used last time, and I think the same GPU. So, what’s different? Corsair’s new iCUE 7000X RGB Tempered Glass Full-Tower ATX PC Case, which allows us to mount that Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB GAMING OC Video Card vertically, for maximum exposure! We also have a cool new cooler from Corsair that matches the arctic white exterior of the chassis! It has three fans with plenty of RGB LED lighting effects so you can be bathed in pulsating colors as you crush your pixel generated adversaries. 

In the world of gaming, some like to go small. This build, on the other hand, goes big with a full-sized 70-liter case with not one but three tempered glass panels on the front, left side panel, and the top.

There’s also room for up to 3x 360mm or 2x 420mm radiators for CPU coolers, plus the 3x 140 mm fans pulling fresh air over those cooling fins. We only need one for our AMD processor! It will also fit those little 120mm to 240mm radiators but why go small when you can go BIG! You could even squeeze in a 480mm radiator in there, but only one of those. The case is also compatible with all of Corsair’s other liquid coolers but that’s not really a surprise because Corsair supports their offspring.

The case will also fit up to 6x 3.5-inch drives and 3x 2.5-inch drives. Are you concerned you won’t get any M.2 drives? Don’t worry, we haven’t even begun talking about the ASUS PRIME X570 Pro motherboard! 

With this case, Corsair gives you the opportunity to use your imagination with your setup and create something truly unique with lots of options for mounting your hardware. The iCUE 7000x does a great job of hiding the cabling for the components behind the motherboard with tie-backs ensuring it looks as good from the back as well as from the front. Clear tempered glass panels, front, top, and side help project all those RGB lighting effects throughout your gaming space. It has a few dust filters on the front, top, and bottom so no infiltration by dust bunnies. 

The case comes with 4x 1200 RPM fans with integrated programable RGB LED lights controlled by the iCUE Commander Core. You can purchase more fans if need be. 120mm fans can be installed behind the left side panel which has no tempered glass panel but does have an extra panel under the panel. Kind of like a donut hole within a donut hole.

Clearly there is a lot of room in this case, and it will fit a standard sized power source like the Seasonic FOCUS GX-1000, delivering 1000W of 80+ Gold subatomic charged particles. It also delivers nearly silent operation and a fan-less mode with the push of a button. Standard operation will reduce fan speed if the power draw is less than 30% so you might not even want to activate silent mode. There are also plenty of connections for cables, and different cable types on that PSU. 

Cutouts in the rear panel allow you to run the cables behind the motherboard, so all the cabling is hidden from view. The control module for the fans and RGB lighting effects is also located in back just above those 3x 2.5-inch drive cages. The iCUE Commander Core includes a few extra ports for connecting more fans or RGB lighting strips. 

Another iCUE Commander Core is included with the iCUE H150i ELITE CAPELLIX Liquid CPU Cooler, also providing more ports to connect additional fans or lighting strips. We have the arctic white version to match the case but you can get it in black too. The Capillix liquid CPU cooler has high-density cooling fins, plus up to 33 ultra-bright LEDs. Not only will it work with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950x processor but Intel CPUs too. It also produces more light, less heat, and uses less power! Each of the three fans included with the kit has 8x RGB LEDs and magnetic levitation bearings for silent operation. The centrifugal pump is whisper quiet producing less than 20 decibels with a flow rate of close to a liter per minute. The iCUE software allows you to control all those RGB LEDs, plus the fan and pump speed for maximum control and visual effects. Not to mention, enabling you to synchronize the lighting with other Corsair products like the iCUE 7000x case. For this implementation we have a 360mm radiator with three ML120 fans. Best of all, this system is modular and easy to install without any tools. 

The iCUE software for controlling all the elements you plug into the Commander Core has a very pleasing graphic interface providing a colorful rendition of fan and pump speeds plus options for the RGB lighting effects. Just that will provide hours of fun changing the lighting to suit your mood or the action in your game experience.

And now we get to the Crucial Ballistix RGB DDR4 3200MHz gaming memory. We are installing white modules, again to match our case but these are available in Red and Black too. The white blocks on the sides are actually anodized aluminum to help with heat dissipation. These are UDIMM modules or in other words unbuffered. You get more speed than what you might experience, but would probably never know you’re experiencing, with ECC memory modules, which offer error correcting code. I mean 3200MHz is fast! We’re good here with 2x sets of modules totaling 32GB of memory but the ASUS board will support up to 128GB. 

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950x offers hexadeca-cores, and if you don’t speak Greek or Latin it means 16 physical cores but also 32 threads and only sipping a maximum of 105W from that 1000W PSU. This processor operates at a base frequency of 3.4 GHz and a maximum boost clock speed of up to 4.9 GHz. With these specs, the processor is truly overkill for a gaming system and would be an exceptional option for developers and creative professionals. The AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU supports DDR4 memory modules, but only up to 3200MHz while our ASUS Prime X-570 Pro motherboard is future ready for DDR4 modules of up to 4400MHz. 

Asus X570 PRO supports PCIe 4.0 but some of our components are really not using those lanes to their full capacity in order to keep costs down. The Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 10G Rev.20 GPU does support PCIe 4.0!

The Corsair MP600 PRO 1TB M.2 however, is NVMe PCIe 4.0 compatible and provides a sequential read of 7,000 MB/s and a sequential write of 6,850MB/s. It also comes with its own heat sink! There are two M.2 mounts on the system board, one with a heat sink, and one without. A number of VR headsets are supported on this motherboard including Windows Mixed-Reality premium head mounted displays like the Samsung HMD Odyssey+, and HP Reverb and then of course Oculus Rift and HTC Vibe.

Ports on the back of the ASUS Prime X-570-Pro board include 2xUSB 3.2 Gen1 ports, 4x 3.2 Gen 2 ports, with a display port and HDMI port squeezed in between. Then you have a 1Gb/s LAN port, more USB ports, and 8-Channel audio. Depending on what processor you install and how you configure the system, only certain PCIe slots are available—and again PCIe 4.0. With the AMD Ryzen 5950x Series we have 2 PCIe 4.0 x16 slots. Four more PCIe slots are powered by the chipset and include a X16 slot with a x4 electrical lane and a trio of X4 slots with a x1 electrical lane. This board will also support Nvidia’s NVlink and AMD’s crossfire technology for combining GPUS for enhanced performance, but this technology seems to be going the way of the Dodo bird. 

There are quite a few utilities that come with the ASUS Prime X-570-Pro to ensure you get the most out of your system, including Armory Crate for centralized account management plus management of the Lighting effects. We don’t think Corsair and ASUS like each other though so you may have to do separate configurations for each. It also offers an easy-to-use UEFI BIOS for more granular control over critical settings with an EZ Mode for beginners and an Advanced Mode depending on your skill set.

The Gigabyte RTX 3080 OC for overclocking 10G gaming card is a fatty, just like the iCUE case. If you were to mount this baby right into the PCIe slots, it would be not just double wide, but triple wide, potentially blocking another one of the limited PCIe slots. We have a PCIe extender so that won’t be a problem in this case. It comes with a 3-year warranty which you can upgrade to a 4-year manufacturer warranty just by registering the product on the Gigabyte site. There are 3x fans on this card which will go idle if system resources are not under load. How many monitors can we add to this GPU? Well, it comes with 2x HDMI 2.1 ports, 3x Display Port 1.4a, and will support up to 4x monitors running simultaneously.

Yes, it has an integrated RGB LED light right at the logo where the power cord connectors are located.  That RGB light can be controlled by RGB Fusion software. At 1800MHz overclock, it has a small dual BIOS switch to disable overclock on the card to transition to silent mode and shut off the fans. Default mode is overclocking, and why wouldn’t it be? At 4K you will notice a significant difference and benefit from the Deep Learning Super Sampling or DLSS. With those three large fans, this card does run cool and will crank out a few more frames per second compared to the Founders edition, but not anything you would actually notice. Still, this card looks SICK and is a worthy addition to any gaming platform. We are going to run some benchmarks for both the AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU and Gigabyte GPU but to be honest there are plenty of sites on the Internet that go deep.

Here are a few glamor shots of our build, which we threw together with some Samsung monitors and a cool Gaming mouse from Aorus. This is where you get to play with the RGB controls and settings through the various applications to ensure you get not only the most out of all this super hardware from AMD, Corsair, Gigabyte, ASUS, Aorus, and Crucial, but also the cool lighting effects. 

IT Creations is a partner with Nvidia, AMD, Corsair, Gigabyte and a bunch of other manufacturers so we can get some deals and pass that goodness on to you! If you’re interested in purchasing this system, click here! Or, if you’re interested in other servers or components, click here for IT Creations’ homepage.