Buy This Man’s PC or He’ll Crush Me

The best thing about building a DIY PC is that you can spec it any way you want to get the most for your dollar. Then, when you're done, you can fine-tune that thing to your heart's content to squeeze even more out of it. The bad news is that configuring and optimizing a system can be tough when there is so much wrong information out there on the internet. Now, you can avoid some of that by just buying a pre-built PC. Any Tom, Dick, or Michael Dell can do that for you, but that's not going to help you with the tuning, will it? Well, that is where Splave comes in. He's really big. And he's also one of the most legendary overclockers of all time. He's number one on the global masters list on Hardware Bot, has held over 800 overclocking world records, and just a few years ago he launched Splave PC, a system integrator that uses his expertise to make the fastest gaming hardware even [music] faster. And today, they're announcing something next-level. It's a microfiber cloth in front of my damn unveiling. One second. It's the Splave Pro. This thing comes with hand-selected CPUs and GPUs for maximum performance, custom thermal paste for enhanced cooling, and super fast RAM. Then, every aspect of the machine is tightly tuned. The result? Yes. That is CS: GO running at over 900 frames per second. Crazy. We're going to take you guys through this system, show you what sets it apart, and because Splave is so generous with his knowledge, we're going to show you how you can make similar optimizations on your own hardware at home. For example, watch this. By changing this simple setting, you can get about [music] going quite a good deal to one of the Hey, you're that man. Can I have a picture? Of course. I I to ask, how did you get all those business apps onto one easy to use platform? So, you want to know Odoo's secret sauce. Right out of the gate, obviously, the system is gorgeous. You're using the Air 5400, which has this really unique approach to airflow with kind of ducting that really gets your fresh air exactly where it needs to go, and then keeps the hot air from being recycled. Like this front radiator is freaking awesome. It just throws all the heat out the right side, rather than crapping it out over the rest of the system. But, the Air 5400 is a Corsair product, and for that matter, so are a lot of the things in here. What sets this system apart? Basically, the tune. And we take all of the best parts from all the different companies and jam them all together, and then make it better with our tuning. Right. So, with this specific build, there was a particular inspiration for it, right? Like there was one person who needed it. Yeah, we had a pro gamer ask us, he only cares about gaming. I want my fans at 100% all the time. Yeah, I noticed that. And I'm like, who else is going to want that? Yeah. Maybe another pro gamer. Not me, but Right. But, um I'm not making every computer for myself. So, we're all about the customer service, and we can tune it to whatever anyone wants. Right. So, you guys built this one, and then basically, from my understanding, you pretty much had a line up out the door of people saying, "Oh, no, I want I want that one just like that guy has." Correct. So, you kind of went, All right, hope we can sell it that way then. In matters of taste, the customer is always right, right? Tell us then about your part selection. What makes everything in here the absolute best? Like there's one that I got to kind of challenge you on, right? You've got a 9950X 3D in here. No X3D II, no 9800. What made that the right choice? It's a gaming PC, that the right choice? have it be a daily PC. So our our Pro Gamers don't need to buy two computers. It's bad marketing for myself but the 9950x3d we found to be better binned also on the core zeros. We use the game mode to shut the other CCD off and we're we've been finding that the overclocking has been better on those than say a 9850x3d. If that sounded like double D good what Allen is saying was that while [music] there are processors out there that might be you know more marketed towards Gamers or might even be faster out of the box the 9950x3d in particular has the best balance of out of the box experience and also the ability to tweak it even higher. We don't care so much that the other eight cores do not have AMD's 3D V-Cache because when we're gaming we're going to turn them off. And for the cores that do have AMD's [music] 3D V-Cache they find that that chip tends to get the very best ones. As for the rest of this hardware it's mostly pretty obvious. I mean who wouldn't take an ROG 59 di astral if they could get their hands on it. [music] But there are some that I do still have more questions about. I mean back in the day when the Northbridge the memory controller used to be built into the motherboard you would see like a 5% performance swing from one board to the next. Nowadays now that it's pretty much all built into the CPU how do you choose a motherboard for like a to the nines tuned machine? [music] For me it's easy because the ROG motherboards are all just so biased towards overclocking and the extreme overclocking scene and I use the same ones on LN2 so I'm super comfortable with with air cooling because LN2 is easy then. You're saying that you're not large enough there's actually two of you. There's Allen two. Yes. [laughter] That's not what you said. He was referring to liquid nitrogen. I know that. I just thought it was funny. Like, can you imagine two of two of this machine? With that said, I do know that in the past, ASUS and the other big guys have marketed different boards for extreme overclocking versus like daily driver overclocking. In your experience, is [music] there anything that prevents an XOC board from just being used with an AIO liquid cooler like this? [music] On LN2, I would maybe prefer an Apex for the two DIMM slots only. The four on the Hero gives us the option to expand if someone needs more for for their tasks. But, what's the downside of having four? Do you want to explain that? Having four DIMM slots can be a disadvantage because there can be some reflection between the the channels. And also, the traces are physically longer just for path from CPU to the back of the motherboard. Right, okay. So, the shorter we can keep those and the fewer things we can have on each trace. On the subject of memory, it's pretty expensive right now. Has that been a major impediment? Like, have you have you had to to cheap out on memory? For now, we're just raising prices like everyone else. Unfortunately, I don't really want to go the route of putting something worse in there or whatever I can find. I mean, given your branding is uh the last thing you'd want to do is compromise on maximum performance. That's it. Fair enough. So, what are you using? We're using 2 by 32 GB in the system for 64. But, we are going to give the option to cut it back to 32, 16 by 2, if someone is more price conscious. That makes sense. And 6,000 is still the sweet spot just with as tight latencies as you can get. Yeah, correct. I mean, you're not going to be running at the factory speeds anyway, though, right? No. Of course not. What kind of challenges does that create for support? Because, unless I'm disclosing something I'm not, not all of your customers are gamers or even end-users. You even work with some government entities. So, like how do you provide a warranty on, "Hey, by the way, I cranked this up to 12."? Warranty-wise, we we we do a no-questions-asked replacement for everything. It's part of our high-end experience. And if I had to guess, I would say that probably the guys who partner with you, like G.Skill, just for the privilege of partnering with Slave PC, they probably just take the damn stick back, don't they? Uh yeah, basically. So, the Costco model. In most cases. Now, I could see you flexing that kind of muscle on G.Skill, but with a brand like ASUS, my understanding is you crack open these cards personally, Mhm. take off the cooler, you put your own custom thermal compound on them, then you seal them back up. Are they covering you against that? No, not currently. You got to build that into your margin, basically. Sure, yeah. [clears throat] Um and then they use PTM. Okay, I mean, that's pretty good stuff, available on LTT store. So, we scrape that off. Okay, ouch. And then uh we have our own paste coming out soon, but we use it currently. Yeah, what's it called? Uh T1000, after Terminator. Because? There's some liquid metal in it. But not all liquid metal. So, what makes it safer than a typical liquid metal, which can have problems with long-term deployments? The liquid metal is embedded in the silicon. Uh there's little balls of the gallium. And it's the application is just like thermal paste. There's no faffing around like liquid metal. What kind of a result improvement can you expect? We see, depending on the card and how the PTM was applied, uh 5 to 10° load. My last question then is with a system that's so tuned, AIO versus custom water cooling, really. Why that choice? We offer a warranty, and I'm we we just don't really want people to have to worry about algae and cleaning a loop, filling a loop, even shipping a loop. If we're having trouble with thermals, it's way easier to have them send it to us to put a new AIO or if they're one of your smart viewers, they can probably figure it out themselves, and we allow that. The cold, hard truth is that as much as I love custom water cooling, if you are the kind of person who can't build a custom water cooling loop, you shouldn't be buying a custom water cooling loop because you are not going to be able to handle the maintenance. While we sit and wait for the computer to boot, which is taking quite a while because it's retraining the memory, let's talk about a choice that I don't fully understand, which is that you've configured the system to retrain the memory all the freaking time. Is slower booting a feature? We use the run time reduction, we leave that disabled and the memory context restore disabled. Those are what make it take a long time to train, but when it does train, your system is more stable. And that's something that you need to redo frequently, even if you're not changing any settings? Correct. It just it's It's just more stable if it's always on a fresh train. Talk us through what you got set here. I'm sure Obviously, we're running Expo. Running Expo. But then we're also not cuz you've turned the frequency up a little bit, you're playing around with the F clock. Walk us through it. This system we're launching with a gaming profile and then a daily like work not fun profile. So, the gaming profile, obviously we have Expo enabled, but we're also going to enhance those timings further. Sure. For gaming, I prefer to keep it fixed core clock and gaming mode enabled so we can ramp up the frequency. I have it at 55, and I find that the fixed frequency helps with the 1% lows and just the the overall smoothness of the gaming because it's not trying to guess where it's power limit's going to be and changing frequency. That's a really important detail because while it's tempting to look at a graph of average FPS and just choose whichever one's at the top. I think we all know that the times when we really feel the speed of our hardware are in a heavy firefight or when there's a whole bunch of visual effects on screen and you've got that that stutter or that dip. By focusing on that, you might actually, which is ironic, harm your benchmark results, but you deliver a more usable daily driving experience. And then game mode is just disabling eight of your cores. All right. The non-X3D ones on this X3D and non-X3D chip. And the SMT. Oh, we're doing away with hyper, excuse me, simultaneous multi-threading as well. The primary timings, like your TCL, uh they don't matter as much. It's all these juicy secondaries and tertiary timings in the bottom. And this has just been learned over time, trial and error, what works best. You can't just set one on all of them. There's a harmony between them that you have to It's a song. The memory also we keep it synced, if you clock them and clock one to one for latency. Cuz it's nice if you can like run at higher frequencies on your memory, but if you're running at a higher frequency and it's costing you performance, are you really winning? So, tell us a little bit more about some of these sub-timings. Probably your most important one is the refresh interval. And nine times out of 10 you can just max that out as high as it'll go and you'll be fine. And that gives you what benefit? The benefit like in a benchmark or in gaming just from this, I would say is maybe like 2% 1% 1.5. Really? So, that's a huge one. And there's lots of great uh resources like overclock.net and and other websites that have entire dedicated pages of just people who love memory tuning. and often times you can figure out if you have a similar kit with the same ICs. Often times you can just copy and paste and enjoy the extra performance that they found. Is there anything else in the gaming profile that you'd say is is worth kind of [music] showing? You turn like the all the global C-states, any of the fancy AI stuff would get shut off. Yeah, okay. Virtualization, even AVX 512 we shut And why do we disable AVX 512? Essentially if you get into a scenario where your CPU is at 55 and you're running higher voltage, you're not going to have a thermal issue if it runs AVX 512. Cuz it'll just run AVX 256. Right, it'll fall back. That's obviously something [music] that you've fine-tuned. Is this something where system by system you're going in and finding the sweet [music] spot for voltage, chip by chip? But these aren't just like any random chips and then you put as much voltage as it takes. So, how many chips do you typically go through to get one for a slave pro? I'd say one in four or five are are not good enough. Oh, okay. So, most of them are good enough. Most of them are good enough. We are changing a lot of settings going from our gaming profile to our daily driver profile. We rely on a lot of PBO, which is the built-in kind of assisted AMD overclocking features. And basically that's another kind of thing you can play with. You can let the motherboard handle it all. Or you can use your own custom settings. We use custom settings because our cooler is really strong, the Corsair [music] cooler. So, we're just limiting our wattage to 275 watts. I'll even have a limit at that point. That's a lot of wattage for a modern CPU. You're getting uh I think it was a 10% increase in R23 and R24. Right. So, that's Cinebench, just kind of a a heavy creator-oriented multi-threaded workload. And it won't constantly be running as fast as it can to hit 95 C and throttle back like stock would be. Right. Which again, whether you're gaming or whether you're doing anything else, is not ideal for the consistency of the overall experience, nor is it ideal for stability. Can you talk us through like some of the changes that you have made here? You You told us like the the power limit, right? [music] But, some of this other stuff looks like it's been adjusted. Your precision boost overdrive scalar, have you changed that? Uh yes, we have that on 4x. Uh which it it'll it increases the maximum boost voltage used. Okay. Which we can also do because of our good cooling. We have the boost clock plus 200, and I believe that's the maximum that you can set. And mostly our goal for the daily is stability with speed. Whereas our gaming is pure gaming. Speed. Nothing else matters. But, also stability. What's our max CPU frequency that we might see in our daily driver mode? Daily driver mode, I believe ramps up to 5.4 on uh light load, and then 5.2 on Prime95 and like R15. So, we're getting up to another 300 MHz when we're gaming if we flip over [music] to our gaming mode. Why don't we do gaming mode? Now that we're on Windows, everything we've looked at so far is CPU, but everybody knows that for modern graphically intensive games, the CPU is just it's such a small part of the story. So, why don't you talk through some of what you're doing on this Astral [music] 5090? Because we have the Astral 5090 and the cooling is so good, we pretty much set it to a fixed clock of what is too loud or or too much for you to handle out of three wise? Um A lot of people wanted at 100 that we've had. Uh but I don't and I can't handle that. So, I put it at your favorite number. Nice. because of our cooling I don't like to use curve. I like to set a fixed boost. Oh, really? Okay, that's [music] I I gain some of the conventional wisdom these days. Want to walk us through that? People use the VF tuner. They're wanting to undervolt. Or they're worried about temperature where we aren't. We're not? Memory clock the Astros all have really great memory. So, we're we've been safe at this number on 99% of the cards. Which is a plus 7,000 overclock. So, you can imagine if you didn't have any any overclock, it would be worse. Now, Nvidia doesn't let us play around with power limits anymore. Is there anything that you do on these systems or are we just kind of stuck within their constraints? Just by keeping it cool, we're keeping the power a little lower to get that extra performance. [music] Right, okay. That but that's that's it. There's no BIOS or anything that we're using. To give you an idea of what all of the optimizations that Alan has done to his systems add up to, we built a system with near identical specs, even using the same airflow optimized case and the same cooling, but without any of his special binning [music] or his optimizations. We just picked whatever hardware met the spec and happened to be compatible, and then we enabled Expo memory overclocking in the BIOS. we're going to send it. We're going to run these two side by side. We're firing up in Forza Horizon 6. We're going to start benchmark mode, extreme plus ray tracing, 4K, no holds barred. 3 2 1. Okay, so what does that work out to? That's about 3%? Well, your CPU simulation time is obliterating mine. So, all we're really learning in here is that Nvidia does not allow really a lot of tuning on their GPUs. And that we are heavily GPU bound in this game. That's what we learned from this game. Let's move on to something a little bit more CPU bound. Holy bananas. We're looking at like an extra 200 plus FPS here. That is flipping crazy. Okay, let's go let's go somewhere else. Let's go Yeah, let's head over to bomb site A. So, I'm at like 230 lows, 600 average. You're at Oh, wait. Oh, you're all over the place, too. Yeah, we're we're both a little bit all over the place. Okay, I'm holding still. Okay, I'm at like 230 250 for lows. Very similar, actually. Both of them are all flipping over the place. See, the GPU time for both of us is pretty 37 and Yeah, our GPUs are doing like nothing right now. And this is pretty close, but I would say I don't think I ever saw it dip below 200 for you, though. Holy crap. You're cracking a thousand and I'm at like 700 600 here. Even with all the bots there and even with all the models there, he's still getting more FPS than me. Especially noticeable in the 1% lows. I'm at like 250 270 280. You're at like 290 300. Yeah, in a more CPU bound title, very clear that the optimization is giving you more FPS. Now, is the difference between 250 and 300 FPS likely to make you a better Counter-Strike player if you suck? No. But, if you're really good, is it going to give you every last edge? Yeah. Okay, should we try one more game? Once again in Cyberpunk, it's easier to run the benchmark than it is to find the exact same place on the map. So, 3 2 1, I'm getting way more FPS than you in this menu. [music] Got him. You win. I'm going to go. So, we're looking at around like 7% performance improvement, but what about our 1%? Average is 1% and maximum, it's just a little bit faster. We've already run this a couple of times and we're looking at anywhere from about 7% improvement for Slave's machine up to about 12% improvement in the most extreme difference that we got between them. But, I don't actually think the performance delta is even the biggest part of the story. I think it's the cooling. So, you can see right behind me, just like we saw before, our CPU is running way cooler on his machine in the neighborhood of around 8 or 9° right now. And the GPU, too, is running at about, man, it's like 12° cooler. Now, like Alan said, a lot of this you guys can do for yourselves using guides that we'll have linked below and information that he has freely shared. It's just a question of whether you feel like it. And I guess that's where you come in is if you don't feel like it, this man build a Yeah. He feels like it a lot. Thanks, Alan, for coming out and showing us how you build a supremely tuned system. And to the rest of you guys out there, uh buy one of these computers or he's threatened to crush me. Oh, wow, you really embraced that faster than I thought. Now, it's time for me to crush this segway to our sponsor. Game game, why does our business management software taste so much better than everyone else's? That's because I keep everything cooking in the same pot, little guy. How does that help? Oh, it's quite simple. If you want to track leads, get accurate forecasts, [music] and close more business deals, spice up the pot with a CRM app. Automate your replenishment strategies with a nice savory inventory app. And for a little subtle sweetness, add a dash of invoicing so your team can create and send invoices in record time. I can't wait to help so many people manage their entire business with one easy-to-use platform. Aw, that's sweet, sugar. Everything tastes better when brought together. Remember, all you got to do is Odoo. Are you going to take the picture? Mhm, use our link for a free 15-day trial with no credit card required or book a demo with Gam-Gam. Huh? And if you only use one app, it's free. But But now. my photo. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out one of the previous times we've hung out with Spleve. We've I mean, we've kind of done everything. We've like gotten damn near world records before. Oh, and of course, check out Spleve PC down below.