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Want to (almost!) DOUBLE your computer’s performance? by Nicholas Vinen Upgrading to a CPU The latest desktop processors from AMD, dubbed Zen 3 but also known as the Ryzen 5000 series, offer a 20% improvement in performance compared to their predecessors, making them the fastest desktop CPUs available at the moment. They are also quite affordable, and upgrading is relatively easy if you have a Ryzen processor on a newer motherboard. I was prompted to upgrade my office PC (and write this article) by the very impressive performance numbers and reasonable prices that were revealed at AMD’s Zen 3 launch last November. At the time of writing this article, this line of CPUs (currently four strong) have taken the performance crown from Intel and are quite reasonably priced, with a choice of 6, 8, 12 or 16 cores. For most people, the 5600X CPU with six cores for $469 is more than 88 Silicon Chip adequate, and will be a significant upgrade from previous generation chips. If you have an AMD motherboard and upgrade your cooler and memory at the same time as upgrading the CPU, you can get a 30-50% increase in performance for around $600. You might even get a bigger boost if you are using an earlier processor, and if you are willing to spend a bit more (up to say $1000), the gains can be huge. I bought my previous CPU only a year ago, in January 2020, for $315 (a Australia’s electronics magazine Ryzen 3600). It had six cores, with a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.2GHz. It was already a massive upgrade over my previous (quite old) computer. I decided to upgrade to a 5800X with eight cores, a base clock of 3.7GHz and a boost clock of 4.6GHz, and I am delighted that I did since the difference is very noticeable! Even better, with the large air cooler I added, I am achieving clock speeds above AMD’s specification, with a siliconchip.com.au base clock of 3.77GHz, a boost clock of 4.84GHz and sustained boost to 4.7GHz on all eight cores under load. Or to put it in layman’s terms, what a little ripper! Upgrade requirements To upgrade to one of the new Zen 3 CPUs (Ryzen 5600X, 5800X, 5900X or 5950X), you need an AMD chipset motherboard with a three-digit code starting with a 4 or 5. That means a 450B, 470X, 550B or 570X based board. Assuming you have one of those, you need to perform a BIOS update to support the new CPUs. Then it’s just a matter of swapping over the chips, and away you go. As I mentioned earlier, unless you have a high-end air cooling or water cooling solution, it’s probably also a good time to upgrade that. With dynamic thermal throttling, the cooler you can keep the CPU, the faster it will perform under load. And also you can get silent operation at idle or moderate loads with a decently efficient cooler. Air vs water cooling The ‘stock’ heatsink/fan combination that came with my original Ryzen 3600 CPU did its job, but I immediately regretted not spending a bit more money on a custom cooler to make the computer quieter and run a bit faster under heavy load (going into thermal throttling later). Decent third-party air coolers range from about $50 up to $150 or so. Water cooling solutions start at the upper end of that range. The main advantage of water cooling a CPU is the potential for slightly better and somewhat quieter cooling under heavy load, and a much larger thermal mass which means that they cope well with ‘bursty’ loads. But they cost more, and while these days leaks are rare, they can happen. And air coolers are quieter at idle and light loads. So most people will probably stick with air cooling. We’ll cover air vs water cooling more in a future article. For my system, I bought a Deepcool Assassin III dual tower, dual-fan cooler for around $134 from Amazon as it was considerably cheaper than the other well-regarded large air coolers like the Noctua NH-D14, NH-U14S or NH-DH15. Since then, I have seen the Assassin III on sale for $20 off (about $114), which I think is an excellent deal. One thing that you should do, which I didn’t, is to compare the height specification of the cooler to the amount of space available in your case (ie, from the top of the CPU to the inside panel of the case) to make sure it will fit. This almost caused a disaster, which was narrowly averted, as you shall see. Choosing faster RAM Assuming that you have a compatible motherboard and can get your hands on a Ryzen 5000-series CPU, order a suitable cooler and then have a think about upgrading your RAM. Zen 3 CPUs can take advantage of very fast RAM, and 4000MHz DDR4 is ideal. I had 3200MHz RAM and decided to upgrade to 3600MHz, as I found that to be the best value (faster RAM than that is very expensive). You could also consider increasing your RAM capacity while you’re at it. But don’t forget to consider the column address strobe (CAS) latency, generally specified as a number following the letters “CL”. For example, you might see 2 x 8GB (16GB) 3600MHz DDR4 DIMMs for $135 and 2 x 16GB (32GB) 3600MHz DDR4 DIMMs for $239. The 2 x 16GB seems like a better option than two lots of 2 x 8GB (assuming your board has four DIMM slots) as it is $31 cheaper. But if you look closer, the first option is CL17 and the second option is CL18. That means that the 16GB DIMMs take one clock cycle longer to respond to column address changes compared to the 8GB DIMMs. How much does that matter? I am not sure. I suspect the CL17 DIMMs will give a couple of percent better performance in some tasks. I don’t think that is necessarily worth spending the extra $31 and also halving the maximum RAM you can install in your system, but it is something to keep in mind. I have seen other cases where doubling the memory per stick takes you from CL17 to CL19, or from CL16 to CL18, which is going to have a more significant impact, and often the price difference is negligible. Ultimately, you will have to do some shopping around and decide what combination of MHz rating, CL rating, Obviously (!) not to scale, here are the components which form the heart of my computer upgrade: at lower left is the ZEN 3 CPU; behind that a pair of 8GB 3600MHz DIMM sticks, while at right is the Deepcool Assassin 3 dual tower, dual-fan cooler. The first two items give dramatic improvement in performance; the latter ensures it all keeps its cool. siliconchip.com.au Australia’s electronics magazine February 2021  89 Screen1 (BEFORE!): I ran the PassMark CPU benchmark before upgrading the system. Unfortunately, as this was the first time I used the software, I forgot to click on the button to show the CPU Mark results in detail, so you can only see the final score of 18,199. capacity, number of sticks and price suits you the best. Don’t install fewer than two DIMMs, though, as you want to have dual channel operation for good performance! Doing the upgrade OK, so you have your new CPU, cooler and maybe some new RAM. While swapping them over is a bit of work, it isn’t too hard. I haven’t upgraded a CPU in probably more than a decade, and I managed to do it successfully. The steps are: 1) Upgrade your BIOS. You must do this first! Otherwise, if you swap the CPU, the system will not boot. (Some motherboards give you a way to upgrade your BIOS even if you can’t boot, but not all). First, find your motherboard model. In Windows 10, you just need to run Screen3: with the usual Windows background tasks, CPU usage is not zero, but the CPU is running at just under 1V at its ‘base clock’ of just under 3.8GHz on all cores. The CPU fan is set to silent mode, so the temperature is just under 40°C (it could be even lower if I didn’t mind a bit of fan noise). 90 Silicon Chip “System Information”, and it will be listed in the window that pops up. If you’re stuck, open up your case and find the label on the motherboard itself. Go to the manufacturer’s website and find that model. Under “Support” or “Downloads”, locate the latest BIOS and download it. It should have a date of November 2020 or newer. There are a few ways to do the actual upgrade, and they vary slightly by manufacturer. In some cases, you can download a software utility to do it from within Windows, or you can Screen4: during a relatively heavy multi-core workload, all eight cores are sitting happily at just under 4.7GHz. That’s almost 100MHz higher than AMD promises for the maximum boost clock for this processor! It can sustain this long-term with the CPU sitting at a hot, but not particularly worrying, 70°C with the fan set on silent mode. It would drop to around 60°C if I was willing to put up with some noise. Screen5: with a single-thread task active (eg, CorelDraw), one core will boost even higher, to 4.84GHz, ramping up Vcore to just under 1.4V and giving excellent performance. The temperature isn’t too bad considering, and would be lower if I was willing to put up with a little bit of fan noise. Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Screen2 (AFTER!): well, that’s certainly an improvement! The increase in the final score of over 50% to 30,013 is due to a few factors including the two extra cores and the higher clock speeds, but a lot of it is due to the approximately 20% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) moving from Zen 2 to Zen 3, faster inter-core communications and more memory bandwidth. make a DOS bootable USB drive and do it that way. But the easiest way is probably to save it to a USB flash drive (in the root directory), reboot into your BIOS configuration screen (usually entered by pressing F11 or delete during the Screen6: the CPU power reading spiked to just over 140W during an SSEintensive multi-core workload (note the slightly lower core boost frequencies with the temperature reading hovering just below the 90°C threshold). The chip has a rated thermal design power (TDP) of 105W, and will work with 105W worth of cooling. It just won’t run as fast as it does with the bigger cooler which gives it more thermal headroom. siliconchip.com.au power-on self-test [POST] process) and then select “BIOS upgrade” or a similar option. It will prompt you to locate the BIOS file you downloaded on the flash drive, then it will ask if you are sure you want to proceed. Most modern motherboards have dual BIOS, so even if the upgrade fails, you can still boot and recover it, so go ahead and upgrade. It will take a few minutes, then reboot. Assuming it is successful, we recommend that if you do have a dual BIOS, you go through the process again but select the option to overwrite both the primary and backup BIOS images. Otherwise, when you install the new CPU, if your primary BIOS fails you will not be able to boot the backup BIOS as it will be too old. 2) Power down your computer, unplug it and remove both side panels. You will need access both to the area around the CPU on top of the motherboard, and also the bracket which attaches under the CPU to hold the cooler on (unless you are reusing your existing cooler). Modern cases have a cut-out in the motherboard tray to give you access to the area under the CPU. Lay the case on its side, on a flat bench, with the CPU cooler facing up. 3) Remove the heatsink/fan combination (or if you have a water cooling solution, the water cooler block). In my case, I had the AMD Wraith Stealth which came with the Ryzen 3600 CPU. This is quite easy to remove – use a long-shaft Phillips screwdriver to loosen the four screws around the fan shroud. Once you have loosened them Screen7: somewhat confusingly, the Gigabyte tool for controlling fan speed is called “System Information Viewer”. I created this custom fan profile based off their “silent” profile which increases the idle RPM a bit (it’s still silent) while ramping up the fan more slowly at elevated temperatures. This results in virtually no noise except when the CPU is working very hard for extended periods. Australia’s electronics magazine February 2021  91 Step1: don’t forget to update your BIOS before powering down your computer and removing your old CPU. Generally, you download the new BIOS image onto a USB flash drive, reboot into the BIOS interface and flash it that way, but some manufacturers support other methods. It takes a few minutes to complete. enough, you should hear the plastic support bracket under the CPU fall onto the bench. Rotate the heatsink a few times clockwise and anti-clockwise, by say 10-20°. This helps to reduce the chance that when you pull the heatsink up, it will yank the CPU out of its socket. Then gently pull up until the heatsink comes free, and set it down upside-down, as the underside will likely be sticky with the remnants of a thermal pad or some thermal paste. 4) Gently clean the gunk off the top of the old CPU using some isopropyl alcohol and a lint-free cloth. My new cooler (the Assassin III – take that, heat!) did come with a pack containing an alcohol-soaked cloth for this purpose, but I already had the spray bottle ready. I would avoid using methylated spirits, as it could leave some residue behind. I also don’t recommend using acetone in case it dissolves something it shouldn’t. You might have to make a few passes before you get the CPU nice and clean. While you’re at it, you might as well clean up the bottom of the old heatsink, to make it less messy when you store it later. If you are upgrading your RAM, now is a good time to remove the old sticks, to give yourself more room to work. Press down on the little plastic tabs on either side, and they should pop up. You can then lift the modules out Step5(a): raise the lever and then lift the CPU out of its socket. It should come out easily. I also removed my RAM to give myself a bit more room, as I was going to upgrade it anyway. 92 Silicon Chip Step2: the mounting bracket for the stock AMD cooler. This usually needs to be removed (from the other side) to fit a third-party cooler. If you don’t have a cut-out like this in your case (and most modern cases do have one), you will have to remove the motherboard from the case to swap the bracket over. and place them somewhere safe (eg, in an anti-static bag) for future reuse. (I gave mine to a co-worker to upgrade his computer.) 5) Remove the old CPU by lifting the ZIF socket lever until it is vertical, then gently lifting the CPU out of its socket by the edges. As you do so, take note of the location of the small metal triangle in one corner. It should line up with a plastic triangle moulded into the corner of the socket. Place it upside-down on a flat surface for now, somewhere where nothing can be placed on top of it, and it can’t fall or slide. 6) Assuming you are upgrading the cooler, stand the case on its feet and put the old plastic bracket aside. Open your Step5(b): having removed the old heatsink, mounting bracket and RAM, I cleaned them up and put them away for future use. The RAM has already found a home in someone else’s office PC... Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Step3: to remove the stock heatsink and its mounting bracket, I just had to undo four screws. Make sure that you wiggle (rotate) the heatsink a few times after removing the screws and before pulling it off, to try to break the suction between the heatsink and CPU due to the thermal pad or paste in between. Said pad left a bit of a mess on both the CPU and the heatsink once I got them apart. new cooler and extract all the pieces plus the instructions. You will typically get the heatsink itself, one or two fans, some clips or other mounting hardware for the fans, various brackets and screws to attach it to the motherboard and some thermal paste. At this stage, the main job is to attach the new mounting bracket to the motherboard. In this case (and I believe this is typical), it consisted of a new plastic bracket for the underside of the motherboard, some screws that go through that bracket and the motherboard and some nuts that hold it on. Two plates then attach on top of those screws, with threaded holes for the heatsink itself to screw into. Even if you go slowly, take your time and are careful to follow the instructions, this step should only take about five minutes or so. 7) Open the new CPU packaging and gently lift it out by its edges. Take care not to bend any of the pins. Find the small metal triangle in the corner and line it up with the plastic triangle on the ZIF socket; this should give your new CPU the same orientation as the old one. Hover it over the socket, then gently drop it down on top. The pins should go into the holes, and the base of the package will rest on top of the ZIF socket. Give it a slight wiggle to make sure it has dropped down fully, then hold it down and push the ZIF socket lever all Step6: the new bracket in place on the back of the motherboard (supplied with the Assassin III heatsink). Note the alternative screw holes for older CPU sockets; if you use the wrong ones, it won’t fit through the motherboard. siliconchip.com.au Step4: I cleaned up the old CPU and heatsink using some isopropyl alcohol and a lint-free cloth. This also gets rid of any gunk left behind around the edges of the CPU socket. You want to get rid of it before removing the CPU so that it can’t fall into the holes where the pins go and foul it up. the way down so that it locks into place. At this stage, make sure it is sitting nice and flat on the socket, as you could damage it once you clamp the heatsink on top if it is wonky. You can now put your old CPU into the packaging from the new CPU to protect it until it finds a new home. 8) Apply thermal paste on top of the metal CPU IHS (integrated heat spreader). If your cooler didn’t come with some, you will have to buy a tube. Make sure to get the good stuff (eg, Arctic MX-4, available for around $10 per 4g on Amazon) as poor thermal paste will make your expensive cooler work inefficiently. There are lots of different suggestions for the best way to apply it: put Step7(a): the new CPU will drop straight into the socket if you get the orientation right. If you can’t find the metal triangle on the top corner of the CPU, check the underside; one corner of the CPU and socket will have missing pins. Australia’s electronics magazine February 2021  93 Step7(b): make sure the CPU is sitting utterly flat before lowering the lever to lock it in. With the CPU in, I popped in the new RAM modules. Press them down firmly on both sides! a blob in the centre, put five smaller blobs spaced out, draw it in an X-shape etc. I like to smear it around and then smooth it out into a thin layer using a flat piece of plastic. There’s even a credit-card shaped piece of plastic in the Assassin III box for this purpose. That way, at least I know the CPU will have full coverage. Remember that when you screw the heatsink down on top of the IHS, it will even out the distribution, and the excess will squirt out the sides. So don’t go overboard; you only need enough to just cover the IHS. 9) If upgrading your RAM, now is a good time to install the new modules, as access will be very limited with the heatsink installed. A notch in the bottom of the module lines up with a plastic separator in the socket, so it can only go in one way around. Don’t try to force the modules in the wrong way! Once you are sure they are lined up correctly, press down firmly at either end. The two plastic tabs should ‘click in’ to hold the module in place. Press at both ends again to make sure it is properly seated. We got some clicks out of modules we thought were already pushed in correctly! You can also push the plastic tabs inwards, as that sometimes pulls the module in, but it shouldn’t be necessary. If installing two modules into four slots, put one in the slot furthest from the CPU, and leave a gap, then put the other in the second-closest slot to the CPU. This ensures that each module is on a separate channel for dual channel operation, and also keeps them away from the heat of the CPU. 10) If your motherboard’s CPU fan Step11(a): attaching the heatsink is quite easy, as you just have to alternately do up the two screws a little at a time until the springs are fully compressed, and you encounter increasing resistance. 94 Silicon Chip Step8(a): applying thermal paste is a bit of a black art. I like to smear it all over the IHS, while others prefer just to place some blobs or lines and let the pressure from the heatsink redistribute it. header is close to the CPU (like mine), now is a good time to plug in the fan(s). My cooler came with two fans and a Y-splitter cable, allowing me just to plug in the Y-cable initially, then add the fans later. If you have a single fan, plug it in and put it somewhere out of the way. It might be impossible with the heatsink in place. 11) Carefully lower the heatsink (sans fans) down on top of the IHS, lining up its mounting screws with the threaded holes on the brackets you installed earlier. Rotate one screw clockwise until you feel it being pulled into the threaded hole, then do the same for the other. Alternately tighten each screw a couple of turns until you meet significant resistance on both. If you already had a water cooler, you can reinstall it now, using a similar procedure. Step11(b): once you have fully screwed down the heatsink (the screws are clearly visible between the two heatsink towers), it should have only a little play in it. That’s important given its weight, when the PC is upright. Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Step8(b): this “credit card” spreader came with the Deepcool heatsink. While you don’t really need to spread the paste out evenly (it will be redistributed when the heatsink is clamped down), I like to do it anyway. 12) Attach the fans. If there is more than one, make sure they are blowing in the same direction! The plastic surround of the fan normally has arrows to show the direction of rotation and airflow. You usually want the airflow from the front to the back of the case. In my situation, there is an exhaust fan right near the CPU, so I directed the airflow into that. Also, rotate the fans so that the wiring will be neat (you can choose which of the four sides the wires exit). Follow the instructions that came with your cooler for attaching the fans. The type of clips I got are common. These slot into two of the fan mounting holes each, and you then stretch them over the heatsinks, which have a channel cut for the clips to grab onto. If you can’t reach down to slip a clip into place, use pliers to grab the ‘handle’ in the clip and pull it until the clip clicks into place. 13) Wire up the fans. For me, this consisted of plugging the two fans into the free ends of the Y-cable, then tying all the wiring up into a neat bundle to avoid it interfering with the airflow (and looking messy). If you have a single fan and already plugged it in, you just need to bundle up the excess wiring. 14) Plug it in and boot it up! You might end up in your BIOS screen automatically as this is the first time you’re booting with a new CPU (and possibly RAM). You probably want to go into the BIOS anyway, to enable XMP, which will give you the best memory performance. This is also a good opportunity to select the “silent” profile for your CPU Step12: the last step before booting the system up is attaching the fans to the heatsink and plugging them in. With all the tricky bits out of the way, the pressure is off, and you can enjoy this last step. siliconchip.com.au Step8(c): I probably put a bit too much on, but I think that’s better than not enough (as long as you don’t put a ridiculous amount on!). The excess will be pushed out the sides when you clamp the heatsink down. fan, which will keep the fan speed low unless the CPU cores are getting especially hot. If you’ve gone for an ‘overkill’ cooling solution like I did, it will keep the CPU cool under light loads with the fan running very slowly, and probably an inaudible noise level. If your system doesn’t boot, the most likely cause is improperly seated RAM. Power the system down and push each module in firmly. If that doesn’t fix it, you might have to remove the heatsink and check the CPU mounting, although if you followed our instructions, that is unlikely to be the problem. (You did remember to update the BIOS, didn’t you?) 15) Enjoy the blistering performance! Screen1 shows the result of a CPU benchmark run with my old processor (Ryzen 3600) and RAM Step13: after clipping both fans onto the heatsink, I plugged them both into the Y-splitter power cable that I had already plugged into the motherboard. They’re both blowing towards the case’s rear exhaust fan. Australia’s electronics magazine February 2021  95 The end result: the finished system, which performs very well indeed. The new cooler dominates the inside of the case – it’s a good thing the window (right pic) is slightly raised (3200MHz), while Screen2 shows the result of the same benchmark with the Ryzen 5800X and 3600MHz RAM (XMP enabled). Wow, what a performance boost! It is very noticeable in just about every task, . . . otherwise, I would not be able to close the case. The plastic “spoilers” on top of the heatsink just touch the inside of the acrylic window! but especially CPU-heavy software like CorelDraw and Altium Designer. Here is the embarrassing bit. You can see from our photos that the only reason I was able to get the side panel back on my case is that there is a bulge just above the CPU. The Assassin III cooler actually projects out the side of the case, and just fits inside this bubble. Whew! Next time, I will check more carefully that it will fit before purchasing… SC AUSTRALIA’S OWN MICROMITE TOUCHSCREEN Since its introduction in February 2016, Geoff Graham’s mighty Micromite BackPack has proved to be one of the most versatile, most economical and easiest-to-use systems available – not only here in Australia but around the world! Now there’s the V3 BackPack – it can be plugged straight into a computer USB for easy programming or re-programming – YES, you can use the Micromite over and over again, for published projects, or for you to develop your own masterpiece! 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