Perhaps you’ve been to Tweakers Huisfeestje, where you could admire this thick PC build from a few tweakers, or you’ve seen it at Megekko’s booth during DreamHack Rotterdam. But how fast is this water-cooled monster PC really? It’s been in the Tweakers test lab for a few days, and we obviously couldn’t resist running some benchmarks…
The challenging build was put together and crafted by four named tweakers of the occasion Venom PC: Equity1986 (pictured top left), Skyline GT-R (top right), Nilsson1234 (bottom left) e RemcoAR. Of course, they didn’t buy all of this system’s heavy hardware themselves; Gigabyte, Kingston, Cooler Master and Alphacool sponsored the project. And to round out the PC, we lent our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor test sample ourselves. If you were to buy this system yourself, you would soon exceed 5000 euros; All parts of the custom water cooling alone cost over 1250 euros!
Specifications and cooling
The Basics of Tweakers ft. VenomPC’s Thicc Jeff, as the builders have dubbed the system, is AMD’s new range of Ryzen 7000 processors. The top model in that series, the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X, sits in one of the most luxurious motherboards Gigabyte offers for the new socket AM5, the X670E Aorus Master. That motherboard packs two strips of fast DDR5-6000 memory from Kingston, totaling 32GB, and a 1TB Fury Renegade SSD from the same manufacturer.
The video card is a Gigabyte Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC, but of course it has been stripped of its standard cooler and fitted with a bespoke water cooling block. The whole is powered by a Cooler Master MWE Gold 1250W power supply and is placed in one of the most luxurious PC cases, the Cooler Master HAF 700 Evo, whose most striking features are a mirror inside and an adjustable screen on the side. front of the wardrobe.
We haven’t touched on the most over-the-top part of this build yet, because it’s undoubtedly the custom water cooling from German company Alphacool. An AIO water cooler often comes with one radiator, if you build your own barrel, sometimes you use two for the CPU and GPU, but this build contains no less than four 360mm radiators – two on top (next to each other) , one at the front and one at the bottom. Including the two extra output fans, the air is moved by eleven (!) 120mm fans and two 200mm front fans. There is also a separate pump and tank, nine meters of soft tubing and dozens of fittings used for this circuit.
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Photos during construction
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Reference points
But how fast is this PC really? In the charts we always compare the Thicc Jeff to the two systems we recommended in our BBG Desktop for September 2022. After all, we tested them exactly the same, so the results are very comparable.
To begin with, we will of course look at the CPU test of all CPU tests, the Cinebench rendering benchmark. The system scores no less than 39,093 points, a few percent more than a stock 7950X. There was only the power-hungry Core i9 13900K onze review just a little faster. In the single-thread test we remain just under 2100 points, exactly what one would expect from a 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, well over 15 percent faster than stock.
Although the new generation of Radeon will be released soon, the RX 6950 XT is still the top model of the red field for now. The 3DMark scores therefore appeal to 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.
We also ran five of the games from our GPU test protocol on this system. Even at 4k resolution with all settings set to Ultra, this system is capable of impressive performance. In racing games F1 2021 and Forza Horizon 5 we also 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
Formula 1 2021
Force Horizon 5
Total War: Warhammer III
Raytracing
A less strong point of this system is ray tracing, mainly because the RX 6950 XT video card is not very good at it. At 1440p with the rest of the settings set to Ultra, we notice 122fps in Far Cry 6 and just 29fps in Cyberpunk 2077. You can definitely forget about ray-traced 4K in that last game.
Cooling down
Meanwhile, it’s bizarre how cool the video card stays while gaming. After a good game of gaming, the maximum temperature recorded by the GPU is only 45 degrees. The Ryzen 9 7950X processor also stays at nearly 88 degrees relatively cold. This processor is simply a hothead, but with a high-end air cooler we didn’t come down much of 95 degrees.
Energy consumption
For completeness, we also measured energy consumption. In idle, the system draws 103W from the socket, while in gaming (F1 on 4k-Ultra) that is 572W.
What do you think?
Maybe this wasn’t quite the content you’re used to from us, but we still thought it was nice to show you what it looks like when you really push the envelope with the new generation of processors. And we’re curious: is such a custom water-cooled setup also the PC of your dreams, or would you rather stick to a PC that offers the best possible value for money? Let us know in the comments.
