Sometime ago I made posts about my new gaming PC in another community which shall not be named, but now I've gotten to the part where gaming performance really changes, for the better.
Recently I managed to build a PC with brand new parts for really cheap, around $250.
i5 8400, 16GBs of DDR4 RAM and a 500GB sata SSD + some random HDDs I had lying around.
I also spent another $180 on a RX 6400, which seemed like a great deal. However, a friend of mine from literally just 8 blocks down, offered me his GTX 1070 in exchange for the RX 6400.
Of course I'd have to give some money back but $80 is more than fair enough.
I was not however expecting this.
This is the ZOTAC GTX 1070 Amp Extreme. Essentially the best version of the 1070, that allows huge overclocking and also has insane 2000mhz+ boost clocks from the factory.
Right out of the gate I had a problem in my hands: my PSU was just 400w and didn't have two 8 pin power connectors, something that this insane model needs.
My friend offered me a Molex to 8 pin power connector... Which I promptly said NO NO NO.
Okay, so I bought another one, 600w... It was some Chinese crap, no two 8 pin power connectors. My old colleague from my previous job offered me an EVGA 500w, which did have the connectors I needed, good guy.
From that picture you might be able to tell that my case is a little... small.
It's way too small in fact, with a horizontal length of a measly 35cms. I was very worried, and boy, it was CLOSE.
After I was done installing the new PSU, my cable management looked like trash, but that's fine. And despite all the hard drives being so close to the GPU they never go beyond 50c, so I'm fine with that.
Another thing I noticed was the GPU was flexing. Not by much and I'm not sure how much this could actually negatively impact my motherboard, but I came up with a signature Brazilian solution: use whatever the hell works.
So I used this little brick I remember getting as a kid in a set in the town of Nova Veneza at least 13 years ago or more. Thank you grandma, this helped.
It's actually the perfect height as to not flex the the graphics card, so I was in some real good luck here.
Now, such a big and heavy and sexy card must be good at overclocking, right? Well it is... But with just 500w and not a lot of headroom for much, or maybe just losing the silicon lottery, I managed to get a small stable overclock of 95mhz+ on boost clock and 200mhz+ on mem clock.
Did it help? According to Unigine Valley:
Before
After
Absolutely yes.
Not by a lot, but since I worry a lot about mins if averages are high, this is a totally welcome improvement?
The software for overclocking provided by ZOTAC is kinda simple.
Don't mind the stock settings right now, I was testing things out and they crashed because I'm absolutely stupid
I mean, it's good enough, but it's nowhere near as good as MSi Afterburner or even AMD's built in overclocking features. But still, it works, it's fine.
The Spectra section is RGB, of course it has RGB, what did you expect?
I wish we could have more control such as setting the color based on temperature, something my Sapphire RX 580 could do, but the options here are good enough.
In fact, have a little gif of it running in "breathing mode".
We all know RGB is the most important thing in the world, but what about framerates?
Well, so far I've tested 4 games and I don't have comparisons to my previous GPU... seeing as how it's not even mine anymore, but:
Cyberpunk 2077, high settings, 1080p: 55-60FPS, more when indoors
Overwatch, epic settings, 1080p, 150% resolution scale: 130-180FPS
Call of Duty BOCW, max settings, Raid map, 1080p: 90-110FPS
Battlefield 1, ultra settings, 200% resolution scale: 80-105FPS
I'm really really impressed with the performance of this baby and I can't wait to play things that my previous 6400 struggled so badly at.
Even in Overwatch I'd get stutters at low settings. Of course I'll still use mid-high there, but it just feels soooo good man. No more graphics bottleneck.
I'm just so insanely happy, and if I ever get to record some gameplay for here, expect some good framerates and nice looking graphics, specially with such good OC capabilities, incredible out of the box performance and the NVENC encoder...
Wow, an encoder, the stupid 6400 didn't even have that.
Shoutots to @stk-g for getting a sneak peek at this post and for @igormuba for encouraging me to write about tech again.
It's not about work, but it's still something fun to write about.
Expect gameplays and even more from me!
Thanks for reading!
