We were visited by a local customer who had purchased a very high-spec PC from another IT company in the same County as us. He was complaining of the PC not performing as well as he had hoped, especially when playing Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS2020).
When he brought the PC to us we had a look at the components that had been supplied, and while on the surface the components (i9-11900 and RTX 3080 Ti) are supremely good, there were some issues we immediately spotted.
As you will see in the selection of ‘before’ pictures below, a top-down style CPU cooler was used, which for an Intel 8-core performance processor like this is not really sufficient if your primary use requirement is gaming, sure the 11900 (non-K) variant has a TDP of 65w, but when when using it for gaming you are going to want to explore what this processor can really deliver.
The turbo boost frequency available is 5.2GHz, and if the cooling is not sufficient, the processor simply will not boost to these high frequencies; because in order to reach these frequencies, additional voltage has to be delivered to the processor, which in turn creates heat which has to be dissipated away, with this increase in heat you get an increase in power requirement, so with a 65W TDP processor like this designed for out-of-the-box efficiency, it will pull down the clock speed to achieve the 65W power draw.
The customer was also keen to swap out the motherboard for a more premium model, given the level of the processor and graphics card in the system.
Before Photos
As you will see from the pictures, there has been very little in the way of cable management, which for a £3k+ PC is not acceptable!
We also noticed these further issues:
- BIOS older than supply date
- RAM not in XMP mode, so running at 2400MHz instead of 3200MHz
- M.2 NVMe SSD is not in the preferred ‘slot1’ but ‘slot2’
- Graphics card was in PCI slot 2, which is not x16, only x8
- Motherboard is M-ATX, in an ATX case which doesn’t make sense (most probably why the graphics card was in slot 2 to hide this)
- Chassis and CPU Fans had not been manually tuned
After Photos
Obviously, the photos speak for themselves, a properly cable managed system, with all the major components in their correct slot positions on the motherboard, plus the addition of the impressive NZXT Z73 All-in-one liquid cooler.
We used the motherboard’s built-in tuning features to unlock the power limits of the CPU which essentially removes the 65W limit and allows the processor to draw up to around 200W instead and higher ‘all-core’ and ‘single-core’ clock speeds.
It’s safe to say when our customer collected the PC and set it up at home he was very impressed with our service and how the PC now performs. Google review below: