Knoxtane "New" DELL XPS 8920 System upgrade!

[Knoxtane]

Hey all! So as many of you know I was attempting to sell my custom gaming machine I built, well I sold it for $800. It was honestly overkill for the games I play and I don't game too much, not as heavily as I used to growing up. 

 

Here is what I ended up purchasing! 

 

DELL XPS 8920 Silver Special Edition

CPU: INTEL CORE I7-7700

RAM: 16GBs DDR4 (2x8GBs) 2400MHz (Slower ram I know)

STORAGE: 1TB SEAGATE 7200 RPM HDD+INTEL OPTANE MEMORY

PSU: 460 WATTS

Cost $300

My additions

Astro A10 Gen 2 Headset.

500GB Crucial P3 NVMe m.2 SSD 

1TB SamSung 860 EVO 2.5" SSD

MSI Radeon RX 570 ARMOR 8G OC (Ordered, on the way, not in the system yet)

TOTAL COST WITH UPGRADES $391.85

 

 

Overall this system is relatively clean, the person I bought this from only used it as a streaming PC, with an Elgato Capture Card, so the CPU was more than likely not even utilized near 100%.

I used a can of compressed air to "clean" out the dust from the system, added my 500GB Curical P3 m.2 NVMe SSD as well as my SamSung 1TB 860 EVO 2.5" SSD (Bottom Left). I know I don't have a caddy for the SSD but they don't really need one because SSD's don't have any moving mechanical parts inside them.

 

 

REMOVED THE INTEL OPTANE MEMORY AND SWAPPED FOR MY CRUCIAL P3 M.2

 

 

INSTALLED A LOW PROFILE HEATSINK ON MY M.2

 

Edited March 12 by Knoxtane

[Knoxtane]

Just conducted a CPU "burn" test on this "old" i7-7700. I used Prime95 to test and it ran for about 10 minutes or so, I figured that was plenty of time for the CPU to be brought to it's knees and show me it's max power draw, temperature and clock speeds. The program I used to monitor the system was good old HWiNFO

 

This is always a good test to run when purchasing used/older hardware. GPU Benchmarks would serve as the equivalent "burn". I also want to iterate I have only done this once before so I might not be doing this 100% right but I looked up how to conduct these stress tests to determine if your CPU has issues, whether that be the CPU itself or anything else that might contribute to it.

 

So you'll noticed I highlighted several areas and labeled each with a corresponding number. These numbers are the talking points below.

 

 

1. Clock speeds while maxed out. Seems like the CPU is operating fine from what I've seen and looked up when running a test while monitoring HWiNFO.

2. Core, Max and Total CPU Usage during this 10 minute burn resulted in the CPU being utilized at 100% Usage, which is good, we want to see where the CPU goes during this test.

3. Temperatures, now when you think of gaming or doing some sort of rendering work you most likely think about your CPU's Temperature a lot and want to monitor it, this is the most common thing to monitor among PC users. In this test we can see the MAX temperature in the 3rd column was 85c, the CPU didn't even reach it's Thermal Throttle temperature which is usually around 91c to 100c, depends on the CPU really.

4. While this CPU is designed as a 65w TDP CPU, we can see the CPU just pushes a little bit past it, trying to keep up with the task it's being asked to perform (Maximum load) and it peaks just shy of 70 Watts at 69.413 W. (Nice)

 

So if I did my testing right and figured 10 minutes was enough of a burn, then I would say I am very please with how this CPU held up on a 10 minute stress test and the fact it didn't thermal throttle is even more impressive, albeit it's bigger brother the i7-7700K would have probably kneeled at 100% usage and topped around 97c or 98c.

 

 

Feel free to let me know if I conducted my testing wrong or misunderstood something.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 13 by Knoxtane

[Knoxtane]

After replacing the thermal paste and stress testing the CPU the new Grizzly Kryonaut brought temps down 7c to 8c from 85c at max load to 77c to 78c

Edited March 13 by Knoxtane