Background
I have a story to tell. In 2017, I wanted a new PC. My parents always wanted me to earn my electronic devices, so I saved up for years to buy a new PC. The money came from birthday presents, doing others’ homeworks and sympathetic grandparents. I researched which parts to buy for months, making spreadsheets and comparisons and upgrade plans – all to get the most out of my limited budget. The optimization completely consumed me and made me learn everything there is about building PCs. I made a perfect parts list and got my dad to drive me to the PC parts store. I walked inside confidently and handed my parts list to the man at the counter. I was about to have the best PC ever!
Yet, the man at the counter looked at my list, laughed at it, and gave me a completely different PC for a slightly higher price, just worse. My perfect Ryzen 5 1600 was now merely an Intel i5-7400. My perfect SSD was now a slow, clunky HDD. My power supply had no name, and since I could not afford a new monitor, I had to settle for an ancient, damaged 19-inch office monitor. Not even full HD. Since I was a shy 13-year-old, I didn’t contest the man’s choices and accepted my fate.
Regardless, I quickly grew fond of my silly PC. It could’ve been better, but for me it was good enough and got me through thousands of homeworks, personal projects, programming and even some short circuits of the USB port when I was messing around with some electronics (which I still do). As of writing this, the HDD which has been with the PC since the beginning has been powered on for 13613 hours – an average of 6 hours per day over 6 years. I have neither had it crash nor have strange issues – likely due to my obsession (as part of my research) on ensuring proper airflow and maintenance. Also, the comparatively bad power supply is heavily offset by the fact that the graphics card, a GTX 1050 Ti, is very power efficient, and even under the heaviest loads, the power usage never goes above 150W with the monitors included. With regular workloads (e.g. office apps), the total power usage is only ~80W. Of course, I have a power monitor attached to the extension cord that powers the whole system – what am I, an amateur?
The need for an upgrade
However, as I went into university, I realized that I needed an upgrade. I’m now using Solidworks, cross-compiling complex programs and running virtual machines. Later on, I’d need to do fluid simulations and other physics stuff. Surprisingly, the i5-7400 has been handling these tasks admirably, however it completely gives up when trying to run even basic virtual machines, and compilations have been slower and slower. So, when Cyber Monday came, I decided that this is the perfect time. I was going to get something new.
This time I didn’t care that much about getting the perfect build. I had a few specifications and wanted those met:
- A large cache (at least 32MB)
- A bunch of cores (at least 8 physical cores)
- Decent single core performance
Naturally, my only choice was AMD – as a belated apology. I looked into the AM5 ecosystem, but I then realized I would spend more on RAM and a motherboard than I would on the whole system. So, alright, AM4 it was. I looked up prices and CPU benchmark results. I made a spreadsheet. I did some math. I chose the Ryzen 9 5900X. It’s relatively cheap, meets the silly requirements and it’s stupidly fast. I could also reuse my old RAM (until I get new, fast RAM), reuse my case and my 3 SSDs and 1 HDD.
Finding the motherboard was also easy – parametric search for AM4 and Bluetooth, sort by lowest price, done. Power supply was 80+ Gold with at least 750W – I want a new graphics card someday. Cooler was big. Too big. For 500 euros, I ordered half of a premium workstation which could probably embarrass most of my university’s number crunching servers with power to spare.
My plan with the old CPU, motherboard and power supply was to keep it all as a backup and potentially as some kind of server. Luckily, it decided to die in the middle of me buying a new PC. That gave me a few days of issues, but in a way, the old threw itself out. The funniest part of the build is the combination of a Ryzen 9 5900X with a GTX 1050 Ti. For my non-gaming use case, this is excellent, as most of my workloads are very heavily CPU-weighted, so a fancy display adapter that can play older games is exactly what I want.
The build itself
Building the PC was a relatively boring process of putting cables into connectors and checking for wrong connections multiple times in order to not destroy anything – a few minutes of checking costs a lot less than a 500 euro mistake. Since I kept my PC case, which had survived almost seven years of constant work, there was more dust than case inside. Immediately, all the dust got a thorough cleaning.
I removed the old parts with little care, except for a moment where I looked at my old motherboard, CPU and cooler included, and paid some respects to the tool that got me to where I am, helped me study, helped me work and helped me have fun. It looked so small and unremarkable – nobody but me would ever give this piece of silicon, copper and plastic the same respect. The power supply, which came with the case and was a fire hazard for the whole duration of its life, too, looked so unremarkable. A simple black box with some legal information and an “80 Plus” sticker had provided – according to my calculations – almost 1.5 MWh of energy over its lifetime. All components which were to be replaced were then put into my box of old electronics, to be recycled for their inductors and coolers some day.
The build of the new PC was straightforward. The CPU had a hole for the CPU, the cooler had holes for mounting brackets, the motherboard had holes for mounting screws, and the power supply had specific connectors for all the specific power cables that went into everything. I then reconnected all of my old SSDs and HDD, then the case’s front panel – all of which had specialized cables. PC building has come a long way from the past, so I only managed to make one mistake – I forgot the motherboard’s IO shield.
After fixing that quickly, came the dreaded first boot. Like with most PC builds in the world, I had the worst possible outcome in the beginning – no POST screen. It didn’t boot. The case fans spun up, my power meter showed that 150W were being used, but I saw nothing. Luckily, I knew not to panic this time, as a result of a lot of experience. I went through some possible issues and fixed them one by one. My first hunch was a fact that every person who has built an AM4 5000-series PC knows – you need to upgrade the motherboard. Unluckily for me, I had no other CPU to upgrade the motherboard with. I saw that my motherboard had a BIOS recovery port, and read something about that in its manual, so I loaded a new BIOS on a USB, placed it in the BIOS slot, clicked the button and waited for the recommended 8 or more minutes. Then, I rebooted it to see… nothing. It didn’t work.
I went back to the motherboard only to see that the issue was much simpler than the BIOS – one of my RAM sticks was partially pushed down and only made halfway contact. After completely removing both sticks and pushing them down again, then booting up the PC, I saw that it worked! Well, not really.
I have dual booting on my PC because I used Ubuntu as a distraction-free environment for studying. This helped me a lot for my high school exams, so I kept Ubuntu for university too. On my old CPU, Windows 10 and Ubuntu lived in harmony for years, except for one small fact that I remembered – I had enabled legacy BIOS and disabled UEFI for some reason. I really can’t remember why, except that I needed it for some software. Now, however, since my motherboard defaulted to UEFI (because it was made in this century), I had to go and enable legacy BIOS again, which felt really silly. Quickly after, however, I set it back to UEFI and changed Windows 10 so that it worked.
Everything now feels so much faster, especially compiling, CAD and video editing. The 5900X is insanely fast at multi-core applications, but is also a strong single-core contender. I’m elated with the performance of my new PC, with the only drawback being that it uses quite a lot more power now – it went from 80W to 140W. Under load (rendering with Adobe Premiere Pro) I’ve seen it go to 250W. However, rendering the same video that took 60+ minutes with my old CPU now takes exactly 6 minutes, which is a 10x increase for around double the power draw, which I find acceptable.
Overall, I’m satisfied and for my specific type of workloads (simulations, 3D modeling, PCB design, compiling, video rendering and virtual machines) I would recommend this CPU as a strong workstation CPU that doesn’t break the bank.
