Ai Crystal build log/parts list/gallery

[neurotix]

Here's my build log for the house's main rig, Ai Crystal. Usually kept on 24/7.

 

Primary use case scenario: Linux file server

 

Secondary use case scenarios, in order of importance:

- Folding rig (it costs around $40 a month to fold 24/7, and I had no clue when I got my 4090 how good it would be at folding)

- Graphic design rig using GIMP, which I can do while folding and having the file server online IF I turn my GPU OC off

- Benching rig in Windows for HWBOT

- Gaming rig, waiting on expansions for Forza Horizon 5

 

No pictures of the process here, but you can see the original build process for my rig here:

Just a moment...

WWW.OVERCLOCK.NET

Until the end of last year, the rig was running a ROG Crosshair VIII Hero, Ryzen 9 3900x, Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360mm AIO cooler, G.skill Flare X DDR4 3200 cas 14 @ 3800MHz 16-16-16-16-32-50 1T GDM on, and 2x EVGA FTW3 GTX 1080ti in HB SLI. Here is the full parts list for it now.

 

Ryzen R9 7900X3D PBO on, max boost I've seen is 5650MHz on cores 7&8 after giving it a +0.075v over voltage offset

ASUS ROG Strix X670-E Gaming

G.skill TridentZ5 DDR5 7600MHz cas 36-45-45-45 1T GDM on

MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 4090 3135/12210MHz

EK Nucleus AIO CR360 Dark w/ Prolimatech PK3-Nano

Crucial T700 1TB PCI-E Gen 5 M.2 drive. 800GB for Windows, 200GB for Linux

WD Black 2TB

WD Blue 4TB

WD Blue 6TB

Case is anidees Ai Crystal AR3 Midtower

Fan and RGB controller is the anidees one that came with the case

Fans are 7x anidees AI AUREOLA v3 RGB fans

2x anidees RGB light strips, 2x Phanteks RGB light strips

Seasonic Vertex GX 80+ Gold 1200W power supply

 

I think that's everything for the box.

 

Accessories:

Monitor Acer EI342CKR Pbmiippx Curved 3440x1440p 144Hz FreeSync HDR 400 (supposedly) Ultrawide

Logitech G332 Headset

Logitech Z2300 Circa 2007 2.1 THX certified speakers. 120w 8" subwoofer, two 40w Satellites

Cooler Master Mastermouse RGB

Utechsmart "RGB" large cloth mousepad (Amazon)

 

Keyboards:

E-Yooso Z-88 modded, stock had Outemu Blue switches. Modded to Kailh Box Whites, WASD blue o-rings, blue and white PBT keycaps, stabilizers clipped and lubed, case packed with thin crafters foam to give it more weight, has Doraemon stickers (main board) It's RGB as well.

 

Glorious GMMK v2 fullsize, Kailh Box Jades, WASD blue o-rings, custom white plastidip and plastidip pearlizer layer on top, genuine Filco Sakura keycaps, stabilizers clipped and lubed, case packed with thin crafters foam, put a small flat metal weight inside.

 

Keychron K8 Pro Aluminum Black, Kailh Box Navy Switches, Blue O-Rings, custom Classic Muscle Car Plum Crazy plastidip, Great Wave Off Kanagawa keycaps

 

I think that's everything. Now for the gallery. While doing some wire management last night, I took a lot of photos of my rig off.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 6, 2023 by neurotix

[neurotix]

 

Edited March 26, 2023 by neurotix

[damric]

I thought you had a different motherboard. Looks cool.

[neurotix]

I did, I had the Asus ROG Crosshair X670-E Hero that was like $650 but then we returned it because it had HUGE overkill VRM heatsinks as well as M.2 heatsinks, even my current H150i probably wouldn't fit with how big the heatsinks were, and the M.2 heatsinks might have made it really hard to get my very large GPU out. So we returned it and got our money back. Otherwise, there's still $129 for the RAM on a credit card that needs to be paid, but after this pay period our savings balance will be made up for and then some, so it's all done and paid for now and we replenished what we spent.

 

I have the Asus ROG Strix X670-E Gaming and it's pretty great, got full Digi+VRM control, and the Asus boards have a glitch with tREFI that if you set that timing (they call it "Refresh Interval" in the BIOS) to 65535 it vastly improves memory bandwidth and latency. It's cool having 90GB/sec read, 93GB/sec write, and 82GB/sec copy with 60.6ns latency, the last bios update I just did last week lowered my latency by quite a bit (over 1ns).

[neurotix]

Oh, only bad part of this build: POST takes like 45 seconds and it trains the memory for about 30 seconds with a "15" post code and yellow led lit.

 

Yeah, they really need to fix that. Flux has a 7700x and ROG board and also complained about this issue.

 

Since I sometimes reboot between Windows and Linux, mostly to set my LED lighting in Windows, this really sucks.

Edited March 27, 2023 by neurotix

[Sir Beregond]

Man sometimes I forget how massive the 4090's really are. Its funny to see the ratio of where the PCB ends and how massive the cooler is in both how many slots and length.

 

Anyway, looks great.

[UltraMega]

Neat lookin case, I like the color scheme of the lights too. Only suggestion would be to move the PCIe power cables so they come out of the same spot as the 24 pin. Looks a little neater that way with how huge the 4090 is, and it helps hold up the card a little bit as well. 

 

EX:

[neurotix]

 

More benches next week so I show up in the widget for the month on the front page

 

3dmark11 really likes 3d V-Cache.

[neurotix]

 

So as you can see, wife didn't listen and while cleaning and remounting the water block she thought it would be a good idea to go over the Corsair logo on the radiator with alcohol pads and now it's not Corsair, it's Corsaip

 

Ordered a new unit, I think this one is defective anyway because of the temps being so much higher than my GPU is while folding. Also some more kryonaut extreme, which we put on the other day and compared to PK-3 Nano it lowered temps by 4c folding and 10c in Cinebench r23.

[neurotix]

So I've been messing with my machine, and I have PBO turned on, but the max boost clock of my processor is 5650MHz which before today, I had not seen. The highest I'd seen was 5450MHz. This is with PBO Enabled, Scalar of 10x and +200 clock speed. What I realized is that my voltage on auto, which gives the chip around 1.049v idle according to the bios and 1.3v under load (roughly) so I added a positive voltage offset of +0.025, which caused a slight boost in clocks, and I hit 5500. So I added more voltage first trying +0.050 and then seeing it hit 5650MHz on core 8. I added more and settled on 0.075v and have seen cores 7 and 8 hit 5650MHz. I tested this in 3dmark Vantage Extreme, and with no added voltage I did 130k, with 0.050v I did 132k, and with 0.075v I did 134k. I didn't see it hit more than 5525MHz on my Afterburner OSD, but it could have been reaching it's max boost speed and Afterburner just didn't show it. I also had the system in "Ryzen High Performance" power preset as opposed to "Ryzen Balanced", which focuses the scheduler to park cores in the 2nd faster CCD for better performance from the V-Cache CCD.

 

I'm pretty happy. I also did these:

 

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s Cinebench - R20 score: 10440 cb with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

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The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 5093.2MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the Cinebench - R20 benchmark. neurotixranks #64 worldwide and #2 in...

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neurotix`s Cinebench - R23 Multi Core with BenchMate score: 27185 cb with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

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The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 5148.1MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the Cinebench - R23 Multi Core with BenchMate benchmark...

 

[neurotix]

 

Picture of my rig with my GMMK instead of my E-Yooso Z-88.

 

Also benched the processor.

 

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s y-cruncher - Pi-1b score: 19sec 196ms with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

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The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 4921.3MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the y-cruncher - Pi-1b benchmark...

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s GPUPI for CPU - 1B score: 59sec 350ms with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

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The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 4999.8MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the GPUPI for CPU - 1B benchmark...

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s HWBOT x265 Benchmark - 4k score: 33.7 fps with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

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The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 4905MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the HWBOT x265 Benchmark - 4k...

 

Unfortunately, since last week I have encountered a problem with my 7900X3D, for some reason the second CCD won't boost past 5100MHz or so on High Performance power plan, whereas last week it was sitting at 5325 all core minimum and hitting 5525 then going back down etc. Tried everything including reinstalling win10 and all my programs, nothing has worked and I don't know why.

 

The 2nd CCD boosting high is the difference between 60k 3dm11 performance, whereas last week before this started I was doing 70k which is actually worth submitting.

 

I think I will probably have to wait for a fix from Asus/AMD but basically Balanced power plan would park cores in CCD2 and focus on boosting CCD1 with the V-Cache. Changing it to high performance power plan clocked down the first CCD with V-Cache, and I'd see very high boosting on CCD2. For some reason now in high performance power plan my first CCD sits at 4950MHz and the 2nd one sits with all cores at 5100MHz and they don't boost past that.

 

Any help appreciated. @damric

[damric]

14 minutes ago, neurotix said:

 

Picture of my rig with my GMMK instead of my E-Yooso Z-88.

 

Also benched the processor.

 

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s y-cruncher - Pi-1b score: 19sec 196ms with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

---

The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 4921.3MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the y-cruncher - Pi-1b benchmark...

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s GPUPI for CPU - 1B score: 59sec 350ms with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

---

The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 4999.8MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the GPUPI for CPU - 1B benchmark...

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s HWBOT x265 Benchmark - 4k score: 33.7 fps with a Ryzen 9 7900X3D

HWBOT.ORG

---

The Ryzen 9 7900X3D @ 4905MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the HWBOT x265 Benchmark - 4k...

 

Unfortunately, since last week I have encountered a problem with my 7900X3D, for some reason the second CCD won't boost past 5100MHz or so on High Performance power plan, whereas last week it was sitting at 5325 all core minimum and hitting 5525 then going back down etc. Tried everything including reinstalling win10 and all my programs, nothing has worked and I don't know why.

 

The 2nd CCD boosting high is the difference between 60k 3dm11 performance, whereas last week before this started I was doing 70k which is actually worth submitting.

 

I think I will probably have to wait for a fix from Asus/AMD but basically Balanced power plan would park cores in CCD2 and focus on boosting CCD1 with the V-Cache. Changing it to high performance power plan clocked down the first CCD with V-Cache, and I'd see very high boosting on CCD2. For some reason now in high performance power plan my first CCD sits at 4950MHz and the 2nd one sits with all cores at 5100MHz and they don't boost past that.

 

Any help appreciated. @damric

I haven't played around with AM5. The help you seek is probably @ir_cow as he has tested quite a bit of AM5

[neurotix]

Yeah I was getting really good scores in 3dmark11 performance, 3dmark Vantage Extreme (both give globals) and was getting decent scores in 06 and 05 as well.

 

Now for some reason, probably the AMD 3D V-Cache optimizer service that gets installed by the chipset driver, my second CCD cores won't boost like they were.

 

Thanks Luke.

Edited April 7, 2023 by neurotix

[damric]

4 minutes ago, neurotix said:

Yeah I was getting really good scores in 3dmark11 performance, 3dmark Vantage Extreme (both give globals) and was getting decent scores in 06 and 05 as well.

 

Now for some reason, probably the AMD 3D V-Cache optimizer service that gets installed by the chipset driver, my second CCD cores won't boost like they were.

 

Thanks Luke.

There just isn't a huge knowledge base for those 3D AM5 CPUs yet. I really have no idea. Michele has the 5800X3D but that thing is locked down hard on her board.

[neurotix]

1 hour ago, damric said:

There just isn't a huge knowledge base for those 3D AM5 CPUs yet. I really have no idea. Michele has the 5800X3D but that thing is locked down hard on her board.

Yeah I know, I even uninstalled the 3D V-Cache services and tried and it still didn't boost the 2nd CCD high.

 

I really loved this setup and the ability to toggle the V-Cache cores for gaming (Forza Horizon 5 benefits greatly) and then toggle to the 2nd CCD and see boosts of 5.5Ghz, now its like its stuck in Balanced power plan or something.

 

This was working that way when I still had the Ryzen Balanced and Ryzen High Performance power plans on the same Win10 install that had my 3900x, which the chipset driver installed a long time ago. I've tried looking for an installer that would reinstall those power plans and found something on Google Drive but link was dead. Enabled the Ultimate Performance power plan and that didn't work either. Id you manage to dig up a link or shell script that can add the Ryzen power plans back, let me know

 

I think I'll have to wait for a new bios/AGESA and possibly newer chipset drivers to fix it. I might contact AMD support and Asus over this issue. So frustrating, I did 70k in 3dm11 performance and 134k in Vantage Extreme.

[neurotix]

So I found a bunch of different power plans. One was a custom one from OCN that someone made and it included like 5 but none of them helped. However, I found this:

 

GitHub - neon-dev/Ryzen-Optimized-Power-Plan: Further optimized version of 1usmus' great power plan (https://www.techpowerup.com/review/1usmus-power-plan-for-amd-ryzen-new-developments/)

GITHUB.COM

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Further optimized version of 1usmus' great power plan...

 

@Sir Beregond , you might want to try this out. With this one on, my cores of my 2nd CCD were boosting to 5425MHz. And that was without a PBO offset of +200. I am going to test it more during this week, but I did this:

 

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s 3DMark Vantage - Extreme score: 132362 marks with a GeForce RTX 4090

HWBOT.ORG

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The GeForce RTX 4090 @ 3105/1519MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark Vantage - Extreme benchmark. neurotixranks #47...

 

Unfortunately, the 2nd CCD cores still aren't boosting past 5000MHz in 3dmark11 Performance. I doubt they would in older benchmarks like 3dmark06 or 3dmark05. I believe the low resolution is the problem, the AMD 3d V-Cache service or the Windows scheduler is deciding because it's so low resource intensive now that it doesn't need to boost clocks. 3dmark Vantage Extreme runs at 1920x1200, which is where I was seeing boosts of 5425MHz across like 6 cores at once on the 2nd CCD.

Edited April 9, 2023 by neurotix

[neurotix]

Ignore

Edited April 9, 2023 by neurotix

[Sir Beregond]

19 hours ago, neurotix said:

So I found a bunch of different power plans. One was a custom one from OCN that someone made and it included like 5 but none of them helped. However, I found this:

 

GitHub - neon-dev/Ryzen-Optimized-Power-Plan: Further optimized version of 1usmus' great power plan (https://www.techpowerup.com/review/1usmus-power-plan-for-amd-ryzen-new-developments/)

GITHUB.COM

---

Further optimized version of 1usmus' great power plan...

 

@Sir Beregond , you might want to try this out. With this one on, my cores of my 2nd CCD were boosting to 5425MHz. And that was without a PBO offset of +200. I am going to test it more during this week, but I did this:

 

/img/logo.png

neurotix`s 3DMark Vantage - Extreme score: 132362 marks with a GeForce RTX 4090

HWBOT.ORG

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The GeForce RTX 4090 @ 3105/1519MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark Vantage - Extreme benchmark. neurotixranks #47...

 

Unfortunately, the 2nd CCD cores still aren't boosting past 5000MHz in 3dmark11 Performance. I doubt they would in older benchmarks like 3dmark06 or 3dmark05. I believe the low resolution is the problem, the AMD 3d V-Cache service or the Windows scheduler is deciding because it's so low resource intensive now that it doesn't need to boost clocks. 3dmark Vantage Extreme runs at 1920x1200, which is where I was seeing boosts of 5425MHz across like 6 cores at once on the 2nd CCD.

Interesting, will check it out for my 5900X.

[neurotix]

Bad news:

 

Yesterday night, my rig started not waking up from monitor sleep while folding. My monitor would just say no signal. I tried with folding not running, same issue. It is freezing in games in Windows.

 

I'm afraid folding has killed my beloved 4090 Gaming X Trio, but it's done 2.3 billion points for the team. We've tried a lot of things and the issue persists. This is bizarre as I once folded on an OC'ed HD 6870 for a year straight 24/7 and got the badge for it on OCN. I've folded for months at a time on a ton of other cards and never had them die, but this really is probably the only reason/explanation for it.

 

Just realized there's a rally expansion for Forza Horizon 5 and was planning on playing it this week, I guess that's not happening.

 

Anyway TL;DR: folding has appeared to kill my 4090, am getting a GT730 tomorrow to use temporarily for graphic design, MSI approved my RMA and they should have my card on Friday, we shipped it. From now on, will not be folding on my 4090 if they replace it, its just a waiting game now (2 weeks after they receive the card).

Edited April 10, 2023 by neurotix

[Sir Beregond]

2 hours ago, neurotix said:

Bad news:

 

Yesterday night, my rig started not waking up from monitor sleep while folding. My monitor would just say no signal. I tried with folding not running, same issue. It is freezing in games in Windows.

 

I'm afraid folding has killed my beloved 4090 Gaming X Trio, but it's done 2.3 billion points for the team. We've tried a lot of things and the issue persists. This is bizarre as I once folded on an OC'ed HD 6870 for a year straight 24/7 and got the badge for it on OCN. I've folded for months at a time on a ton of other cards and never had them die, but this really is probably the only reason/explanation for it.

 

Just realized there's a rally expansion for Forza Horizon 5 and was planning on playing it this week, I guess that's not happening.

 

Anyway TL;DR: folding has appeared to kill my 4090, am getting a GT730 tomorrow to use temporarily for graphic design, MSI approved my RMA and they should have my card on Friday, we shipped it. From now on, will not be folding on my 4090 if they replace it, its just a waiting game now (2 weeks after they receive the card).

Oof, very sorry to hear that.

[neurotix]

Don't have a picture, but I got a tiny little GT 1030 DDR4 as a temporary card until I get my 4090 back.

 

This thing has no idea what's waiting for it, as I am going to oc it and run Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy Extreme on it.

 

Anyone remember good idea, bad idea from Animaniacs and Mr. Skullhead?

 

Not sure if I should do it or not but I'm bored usually and not into games atm and the thing might get me cups/hwboints, especially with my CPU, so..

Edited April 12, 2023 by neurotix

[The Pook]

GT 1030 GDDR5 is pretty popular on HWBOT, not so much the DDR4 version. 1st place in Firestrike is only running a 3600X and the GPU @ 1962

 

Shunt mod and see how close you can get the a GDDR5 version 

[neurotix]

Great news to anyone still following this, concerning the issues I was having with the 2nd CCD not boosting in low res benchmarks like 3dmark11 Performance.

 

The latest BIOS for my board, BIOS 1101, for the Asus ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming Wifi, had the description:

 

"Fixes stability and performance of X3D chips".

 

So I got right to installing it.

 

Using the high performance power plan that comes with Windows didn't work too well, though it was boosting to around 5325MHz on my 2nd chiplet.

 

Using 1usmus Ryzen Optimized Power Plan, the cores jump around a lot and go down to 4500MHz but boost the entire time up high.

 

 

 

So it appears the issue is fixed. Now if I only had my 4090 Gaming X Trio I could get a fantastic score in older benchmarks.

 

The unfortunate issue with this is that adding a positive voltage offset is no longer possible, as for some reason they removed CPU Voltage control. I still have VDD_SOC, VDD_MISC and so forth available but no CPU voltage option. I'm sure X3D owners with this board will complain and they'll bring it back. I was just looking at Extreme Tweaker, I didn't check the AMD Overclocking section in Advanced.

 

EDIT: I just tried 3dmark06 and my 2nd CCD was like at a locked 5625MHz. Nice.

Edited April 15, 2023 by neurotix

[neurotix]

So, MSI has shipped me a 4090. The weird thing is, on the RMA status page, it said like

 

15:56 Repairing

15:57 Shipped

 

So either they are sending me a new card because they checked in just a minute and saw mine was fried badly enough it needed to be replaced, OR they are shipping me my old card and it will have the same issues. I won't know until I get it, I guess.

 

Also I bought a keyboard for my build: a Keychron K8 Pro TKL RGB aluminum case. It will come with Gateron blue switches which I will use for a few months, and eventually change the switches to Kailh Box Navies, probably with WASD red o-rings. It'll be here Saturday, really excited. I will also be keeping the stock keycaps as I really like how they look.

[neurotix]

A lesson on why you should listen to your wife (if she's a pc builder as good as my wife, anyway).

 

 

 

 

I have my 4090 back from MSI.

 

Since I got it, I had been daisy chaining two 8-pin pci-e power connectors to the 12VHPWR adapter that came with the card. It worked fine for months and I was confident in my power supply (Cooler Master V1000 80+ Gold) however, either over time because of 3 months folding 24/7 or because of P16XXX work units, the cable that was daisy chained melted and even ruined and melted the port it was connected to on the back of the PSU. The entire time, my wife was worried and obsessing over the daisy chained connector but even though I had another cable, I told her it would be fine...

 

Basically, we got the card back from MSI, I tried to run 3dmark11 performance, immediately got no signal on display. This was before we checked the power supply and cable. I then had her put my GT 1030 in, was pretty mad and was thinking we needed to RMA the card again.

 

We decided to put the 4090 back in, and I showed her how to take the psu out (remember my cable management situation on the back side of the case) and she immediately found the fault.

 

So long story short (sorry!) I got the one other pci-e cable I had and we plugged it into a different port, however still had to daisy chain it. Card works fine now. There should still be another connector on the back of the psu we can use (it was made for when people were doing 3x or 4x GPUs) so we ordered another cable off Ebay. However, it is coming from the Netherlands so I might be a few weeks. Until I get it, I am

 

1) not folding

2) not benching

3) not overclocking

 

Forza Horizon 5 has a rally expansion and even at 3440x1440 144Hz it isn't too demanding on the card, the card sits around 45c. So I'll play that and tear up dirt in my tuned Ford RS200.

 

However - once I have 3 separate 8 pins connected to the adapter, I will be back at it folding 24/7 for the team. And probably not using the Galaxy 666w power limit bios

 

@damric@Sir Beregond

Edited April 26, 2023 by neurotix