pastrychef's Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (WI-FI AC) build w/ i9-9900K + AMD 6600 XT

[trs96]

After many years of running a Hack pastrychef goes:

 

[dclive]

The end of an era.

Benchmarks vs 9900k?

 

[pastrychef]

The end of an era.

Benchmarks vs 9900k?

With a bunch of apps open, I'm getting about 1760 single core and 12320 multi core scores in Geekbench 5 while consuming under 20W. On my overclocked 9900K, I get under 1400 single core and about 9700 multi core.

My monitor uses more power than this Mac. Lol

 

[dclive]

It’s now been a few days; are you happy with what you’ve got? Is it significantly faster in any of your apps that you’d really notice? What are your thoughts?

Any feedback on any games? Did you end up buying Baldur’s Gate 3?

Will you keep updating OpenCore for this motherboard?

 

[pastrychef]

It’s now been a few days; are you happy with what you’ve got? Is it significantly faster in any of your apps that you’d really notice? What are your thoughts?

Any feedback on any games? Did you end up buying Baldur’s Gate 3?

Will you keep updating OpenCore for this motherboard?

I haven't had as much time as I would've liked to play around... I have family that came to visit from Florida and he's going to be around for about another week...

So far, everything feels very snappy. The SSD on this thing is insane. Boot up time is so fast that it reminds me of the old days when operating systems were on ROM.

Performance has been pretty much what I expected a slight upgrade from my i9-9900K but nothing extremely dramatic. This is fine as I never really felt that my 9900K was severely lacking.

The apps that I run which uses Rosetta 2 have been flawless. I have not noticed any oddities or taken any performance hits. It's really amazing how seamlessly it works. So far, I have not had any problems with any of the apps that I normally use.

Unfortunately, I have not had time to try any games yet... I did, however, try playing the 3DMark Port Royal 8K 60fps video in VLC. It didn't play well and was very choppy. Pretty much the same as it did on my old Vega 56. When I played the same video on my 6600 XT, although still imperfect, it came much closer.

On my Asus Z370-G build, I had 3x3.5" HDD and 2x2.5" SSDs. All were in externally accessible via hot swap cages. This made life very easy for when I wanted to tinker without the fear of losing any data. To try and replicate this, I am using an old SansDigital 4 bay enclosure that has USB3 and eSATA connections. I first tried using the eSATA connection through a StarTech Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor. However, the drives would randomly disconnect when doing large file transfers.

So, I decided to use the USB3 connection instead and it was solid... But, I would get the dreaded "Disk Not Ejected Properly" message whenever the system went to sleep. This is, of course, extremely annoying and unacceptable. So, on a whim, I purchased a new, shorter (3' vs old 6') eSATA cable and, so far, it has worked well without any drives disconnecting. I'm still testing but it looks promising.

Other things I've noticed so far:

• Audio volume is quite a bit lower than on my Asus.
• There's no EFI partition on the internal macOS SSD.
• Built-in SD card slot is not very fast. The USB SD card reader that I've been using is much faster.
• System uses about 3.5W when sleeping. 4.6W with my Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor plugged in.
• Highest system power draw I've seen is about 50W. This was during a Cinebench r23 run.
• Normal surfing, YouTube, listening to music, etc. System draws under 20W. My Z370-G system would be approx 120W.
• Memory usage seems different from Intel systems. Even with about 40GB of RAM free, I see some Page In activity, but still no Page Outs (which is important) and no Swap Memory used.
• The fans always run at ~1330rpm except when system is asleep. Nothing I have done has caused them to ramp up and they remain silent to me unless I put my ear within 2 inches of the system.
• CPU temps have never gone beyond 50C.

 

[scottkendall]

What specs did you get? I got about 4k on stash right now been going round and round with myself about 64 or 128 gigs. I am going to wait till after the June show to buy that should give me another 1k stashed.

 

[pastrychef]

What specs did you get? I got about 4k on stash right now been going round and round with myself about 64 or 128 gigs. I am going to wait till after the June show to buy that should give me another 1k stashed.

I just went with M1 Max with 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD. I didn't want to go all out because I anticipate I will be upgrading in shorter intervals in the future.

 

[Huitzilopochtli]

Congrats on your new mac. Did you try working with davinci resolve or any other video application?

Also, I hope you will still find the time to update the hack project. This has been by far the best support one can think of.

 

[pastrychef]

Congrats on your new mac. Did you try working with davinci resolve or any other video application?

Also, I hope you will still find the time to update the hack project. This has been by far the best support one can think of.

Thanks! No, I don't do any video work...

Yes. I will still be keeping my Z370-G build around for a bit longer and I'll keep EFIs updated for the foreseeable future.

 

[dclive]

12.4 Landed ... updating...