Howdy howdy guys, Ponchato here, and it’s time for some benchmarks.
These are for my Tank build with an i5-7500, RX 480 4GB, and 8GB of DDR4-2400.
First up is Battlefield 1.
Compared to my Sleeper build this is… quite an improvement.
Battlefield 1 doesn’t have a built in benchmark, so to reliably test performance I use the
first section of the first campaign mission.
First up we’ll look at the average, 1%, and 0.1% low frame rates.
On low settings this PC cranks out over 180 frames per second average, with the slowest
still over 85 FPS.
As you climb up the graphics settings it reliably trends downwards until, at ultra settings,
the game averages just under 84 FPS with dips down to 56 frames per second.
This game is very well optimized, and gorgeous on ultra.
If you haven’t seen 1% and 0.1% lows before, they are the average frame rate of the slowest
1% and slowest 0.1% of frames.
It provides a similar function to the old school “minimum FPS” figures, but gives
you a much better picture of actual in-game performance.
Here are the frame times (in milliseconds) from the benchmark on ultra.
You can see there is very little variation – that translates to an extremely smooth
experience with almost no stuttering.
In fact, nearly every frame takes between 10 and 15 milliseconds to render, which translates
to between 66 and 100 FPS.
It’s just pure butter.
Next up, here’s a sample of frame times in multiplayer.
The reason I don’t include these as a “general” benchmark is because multiplayer brings in
a ton of variables that you can’t control.
Number of players, vehicles, server performance, ping…
All play a part in how smooth the game is, and because of that, you can get potentially
very different results from round to round on the same hardware with the same settings.
Just to give an idea of performance though, this is from a bit of conquest gameplay.
You can see it generally averages around 15ms per frame, or around 60FPS, but there are
a handful of spikes and rough patches.
These are where the frame rate will drop to 40 or 50FPS, but they are few and far between.
Online gameplay is, as you can see here, quite smooth.
Next is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a very demanding game.
Here are the frame rates from the built-in benchmark at every quality setting and 1080p.
For those of you who’ve seen the benchmarks for my Sleeper build, here’s that weird
phenomenon again.
At low settings, even though the average frame rate is good, the 1% and 0.1% lows are much
worse than the other graphics settings.
Basically, on low, the game stutters a lot more than at higher quality presets.
You’ll see this taken to the extreme when we look at GTA V later in this video.
This time there isn’t any hardware to blame it on; the i5-7500 is a strong mid-range processor,
the RX 480 is a strong mid-range graphics card, 8GB of memory is enough for just about
every game these days, and it’s running on an SSD.
Weird.
Anyway, the game is comfortably playable up to high settings with an average of about
54 FPS and dips into the mid 30s, but I prefer playing on medium to stay in the 60+ FPS range.
Here’s a look at the frame times on medium.
The ‘ideal’ frame time graph looks like this center portion; a tight, solid line that
doesn’t vary too much with individual spikes or drifting over time.
That indicates frames that are delivered at a near-constant speed, which keeps things feeling fluid.
At times the game can get a bit choppy, as you can see near the beginning and toward
the end of the benchmark, but these are barely noticeable in game.
Third up to bat is GTA V.
This game does a great job of doing things that just don’t make any sense.
As you’ve probably noticed by looking at this graph, low and medium settings (generally
called “normal” and “high” by the in-game menus) have absolutely atrocious stuttering.
The 0.1% lows can go as far down as 4 frames per second.
I didn’t even want to screen record it because it’s so triggering.
Regardless, the good news is you don’t need to run on low or medium because high settings
run spectacularly.
The average sits at over 90 FPS and even in the worst cases it barely drops
below 60.
In fact, these 1% and 0.1% lows are misleading because they aren’t caused by any stuttering,
as you can see on this chart.
These are the frame times.
Remember what I said about the ideal frame time graph and how a solid, tight line is
what you want?
With GTA V on this system, that’s exactly what you get.
Every frame is delivered at nearly the same rate, with only general changes in frame rate
occurring between different scenes.
That means, when you go from 90 FPS down to 60 FPS, you barely notice because it doesn’t
happen through stuttering.
The game stays extremely consistent, and that translates to a very pleasant experience.
I guess all that optimization for consoles wasn’t for nothing.
Last but certainly not least is Just Cause 3, a game well known for its totally arbitrary
performance that is pretty much randomly decided based on how the game is feeling when you
turn it on.
As you can probably guess from these graphs, this game suffers a bit of a stutter problem
on this specific mix of hardware.
It also did this on my sleeper build, which had a non-hyperthreaded dual core Intel G4400
and RX 460.
So, it could be a problem with Intel processors, it could be a problem with AMD GPUs, it could
be a problem when you combine Intel and AMD, or maybe my chakras are just not aligned and
I need to perform some spiritual cleansing.
Anyway the game averages well over 90 FPS on high settings on down, and around 77 FPS
on ultra.
The 1% and 0.1% lows are significantly worse, in some cases by more than half of the average.
For that reason I prefer playing on medium or high settings.
The lows are choppy, but still completely playable.
Now, here’s the frame time graph.
You’re probably thinking “wow that looks way worse than the others”, and you’re
right, it is way worse.
In cases where there isn’t major stuttering, like this section in the middle, frames take
between 7 and 15 milliseconds each.
That’s not super consistent, but because the average FPS there is always over 60, it
actually looks really nice.
The issue is when you get those spikes up to 25, 30, 35 milliseconds.
You’ll notice that in-game.
If you aren’t familiar with it, stuttering is pretty much exactly what it sounds like;
the game is running smooth and then it feels like it “freezes” for just a fraction
of a second.
One frame stays on the screen longer than it should, and that disrupts the flow, making
it feel choppy or inconsistent.
It’s also colloquially called “frame drops” or “lag” though those aren’t technically
the correct terms.
Now I will say two things about the performance of Just Cause 3.
First, even though it didn’t fare as well as the other games I benchmarked, it’s still
a really enjoyable experience.
Even on ultra, cruising around with the wing suit is just really fun, and this is a beautiful
game.
Second, this game is poorly coded and that’s the developer’s fault.
Stuttering and generally crappy performance has been reported by people literally across
the gamut.
From my last build with a Pentium dual core and RX 460 all the way up to people with GTX
1070s or 1080s and i7-7700Ks, some systems just do not cooperate with Just Cause 3.
As far as I know, nobody’s been able to figure out why.
Speaking of builds, if you haven’t seen my build video for this computer, I committed
a cardinal sin when installing the processor cooler.
I installed the heat sink, took it off to fix something, and then put it back on without
reapplying or redoing thermal paste.
This has always been a big no-no in computer building because air bubbles can get trapped
in the thermal paste and cause overheating.
I knew that when I put the heat sink back on, but I was just curious to see what would
happen.
I’ll also use these charts to show how well this case, the Fractal Design Core 1500, performs
with stock cooling.
First, idle temperatures.
I allowed the computer to sit idle for about 10 minutes before recording the charts.
The roughly 25% CPU usage was from screen capturing, but it only affects the processor
temperature by a degree or two.
At idle, the i5-7500 sits at right around 36 degrees Celsius.
You can also see the relatively poor performance of GPU blower coolers here as well – the
RX 480 sits at 57 degrees just idling.
Now, here’s what it looks like while gaming.
This is while playing GTA V at ultra settings.
GPU usage stays near 100% and CPU usage varies between about 40 and 60%.
After a few minutes of gaming, the RX 480 gets up to 82 degrees, though I should note
that I have the GPU fan curve set pretty lenient – it’s only running at 50% speed here,
to keep noise in check.
The i5-7500 varies a bit in temperature, but stays within a degree or two of 45 Celsius.
Nothing crazy here.
Finally, stress testing.
Using Unigine’s Valley to stress the GPU and Prime95 to stress the processor, here’s
what the temperatures look like.
After about 5 minutes, the GPU temperature stabilized at around 83 degrees and the CPU
crested at around 57.
As I expected, reusing the thermal paste didn’t really cause any problems.
Beyond that, the Core 1500 has good ventilation just with the stock cooling, and
blower coolers clearly aren’t the best for keeping graphics cards cool.
If you want to see how I put this system together, click the link in the description or the card
in the top right of this video.
All in all I have to say I’m really happy with the performance of this build.
GTA V on the highest settings looks amazing and runs extremely well, Battlefield 1 keeps
my 144Hz monitor running at full steam, and even Deus Ex runs pretty well despite it being
such a technically demanding game.
Just Cause 3 was mostly smooth and very pretty, but the lackluster 1% and 0.1% lows were a
bit disappointing.
Even with that minor issue though, gaming on this PC is a significant step up from any
other system I’ve had before.
Plus, the potential for upgrading to water cooling AIOs in the Core 1500 case could bring
it down from moderately quiet to essentially silent.
I think the best upgrade I could make right now would be another 8GB of memory to help
with Just Cause 3, but what do you guys think I should do next?
Let me know in the comments.
So guys if you liked this video hit the like button, if you want to see more hit subscribe,
and if you have any questions on the benchmarks or the build, let me know in the comments
below.
Thanks for watching, I hope I helped, and I’ll see you in the next video.