Hp Pavilion Gaming R5 1650 Super 8gb/256gb Gaming Desktop Tower Review
Introduction
I recently bought a HP Pavilion Gaming – TG01-0023w at Walmart to investigate and exam, equally I discussed here. If y'all tin find one of these HP Pavilion Gaming R5 1650 Super, 8GB/256GB Gaming Desktop Belfry machines at a brick and mortar Walmart location, y'all volition be able to get information technology for $599.99, which is actually a swell deal. In this post, I am going to cover benchmarking and modding the Walmart gaming PC.
Looking at all of the parts in this system, I estimate that they would toll about $450-$500 without the GPU. After adding in the GPU, the total parts cost would be betwixt $700-850. Be careful who you lot buy it from though. 3rd party sellers are selling it for $800-$900 on Walmart'south web site.
Update: I take a YouTube video almost this machine here:
Is This Auto Any Good For Gaming?
Depending on the resolution and graphics quality settings that you use, well-nigh games are bottlenecked by the functioning of the GPU in the arrangement. The CPU is much less important, unless it is extremely ho-hum by modern standards.
This machine is a adept match for 1080P gaming, since it has an NVIDIA GTX 1650 Super GPU. That GPU cost about $160 when information technology was introduced, but currently sells for more than than double that price. That is if/when you can find 1. The GTX 1650 Super is a big pace upward from a regular GTX 1650. A 1650 Super tin can play most games quite well at 1080P.
This system also has a 400W 80+ Platinum power supply with i eight-pin PCIe power connector for the video card. That ways that yous accept plenty power to upgrade to something similar a GTX 1660 Super, GTX 1660 Ti, or even an RTX 2060 or RTX 3060. Y'all will need to pay special attention to the concrete size of whatsoever potential replacement GPU considering of the small size of the instance.
The CPU is a 7nm Zen2 6C/6T Ryzen five 3500. That is right, in that location is no Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on this SKU. This is a special OEM SKU that you typically cannot purchase separately. Six physical cores is enough for most games, and this processor has enough performance and so that information technology is non going to be a bottleneck for gaming. It performs comparably to a 4C/8T Intel Core i7-7700K in nigh benchmarks. Lets start benchmarking and modding the Walmart gaming PC!
If that is not enough CPU for you, y'all can swap it out at a subsequently date for several other Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs. The documentation suggests a Ryzen 5 3600 or a Ryzen seven 3700X, which are both 65W TDP SKUs. I put a 95W TDP Ryzen five 3600X in my organization and it worked merely fine.
What About RAM?
The OEM motherboard simply has ii retention slots. It comes populated with one stick of DDR4-3200 CL22 RAM, so information technology is running in single-channel way. Surprisingly, it was running at XMP speed from the manufacturing plant. This is despite there non being any BIOS options regarding memory settings.
Being in single-channel mode certainly hurts your memory bandwidth performance in AIDA64. It also hurts operation in some games. Just information technology does not affair as much (or at all) in many applications.
Having "simply" 8GB of RAM tin can be problematic in some games and for daily usage though. Adding a second 8GB stick with identical speed and timings would be my starting time upgrade. Using identical RAM should let the organisation stay in XMP manner.
What is the Storage State of affairs?
Despite what storage vendors try to tell you, storage performance is ordinarily not a big effect for a gaming system. As long equally you have at least a decent SATA NAND SSD, you won't be bottlenecked past your storage functioning. Bulldoze space is usually more of a trouble for most gamers.
My machine came equpped with a 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD. Specifically, it is a Kioxia XG6 (KXG60ZNV256G) which is a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 drive. This sounded promising, but at that place is a fairly significant event equally revealed by CrystalDiskInfo. Do you see it?
The problem is shown in the Transfer Mode. It is merely PCIe 3.0 x2 instead of PCIe 3.0 x4. This means you lot only accept two PCIe 3.0 lanes instead of four lanes, which cuts your storage bandwidth in half. Having this lower throughput limit can be a big deal for some workloads (such as a database server).
This is non the fault of the Kioxia XG6 SSD, which is PCIe 3.0 x4. HP has washed something at the system level to limit the bandwidth to PCIe 3.0 x2. There is no exposed BIOS setting related to this. Believe me, I looked!
It won't really thing very much for this organization though. That is considering there is only one bachelor M.2 slot, which is occupied by this drive. In that location is as well only i PCIe 3.0 slot, occupied by the GPU. You exercise have ii SATA 3 ports that could take SATA NAND SSDs in them. Finally, y'all have a 1Gbps Ethernet port and a 802.11ac WiFi radio. What all of this means is that there is nix else in the arrangement, from an I/O perspective that will exist limited by only having nigh 1,800 MB/sec of sequential throughput.
Getting back to applied matters, a 256GB SSD is just too modest for a gaming system with many games on it. It adequate for a boot drive (although a larger capacity drive will perform a little better). Luckily, you can easily add one or two 2.five″ SATA NAND SSDs every bit storage drives. In that location are two SATA power connectors and one SATA information cable preinstalled.
You could also replace the stock M.2 drive with a larger capacity, perhaps higher performance One thousand.2 drive. You will notwithstanding be limited to PCIe three.0 x2 thoughput.
The Cinebench R20 score beats a Core i7-7700K by near viii%, which is similar to the margin in CPU-Z multi-thread.
Having the memory in single-channel manner hurts the GB Multi-Cadre score quite a flake.
Here is the Geekbench CUDA score with the stock organisation.
What Do I Think of the Stock System?
The stock arrangement is a adept value for the money. Yous are getting $800-$900 worth of components in an entry-level gaming system for simply $600.00. You should be able to do 1080P gaming at adequate quality settings and decent frame rates in most games with the stock organization. This organization has a nice array of USB ports on the front console and it has 802.11ac (WiFi 5) built in.
You also have a pretty good upgrade path for an OEM system. The very first thing I would do would be to add a second 8GB stick of RAM. This volition put yous in dual-aqueduct way and get you up to 16GB, which is the sugariness spot for many games. You could cease there if you only play one or two games.
If you offset running low on disk space, I would grab a low cost, loftier capacity 2.5″ SATA SSD to store more games on. At that place is no reason to get a high-stop Samsung 860 PRO for a storage drive. Most people can stop here and be quite happy.
If you practise find yourself limited past low FPS rates in some games, upgrading to a better GPU would be the next pace. Of course this assumes that GPU prices ever come dorsum downward to normal. The 400W lxxx+ Platinum ability supply with a standard eight-pin PCIe power connector gives you much more flexibility than almost OEM systems.
Finally, you lot could upgrade the CPU to a college core count Ryzen 3000 serial model. The motherboard has an AMD B550A OEM chipset which should technically support a Ryzen 5000 series CPU, but you would need a newer AGESA version from HP, which is not very likely.
To be honest, a faster CPU (such equally a Ryzen 5 3600 or Ryzen 7 3700X) is non going to brand much difference for most games. The GPU is your main bottleneck for gaming.
Benchmarking and Modding the Walmart Gaming PC
Just for testing purposes, I tried to upgrade everything I possibly could, merely to run into if it would work and how much divergence it fabricated for functioning. I simply used parts that I had on paw.
RAM Upgrade
The start matter was RAM. I replaced the stock RAM with 2 8GB M.SKILL Ripjaws 5 DDR4-3200 CL16 (F4-3200C16D-16GVKB), giving me 16GB of RAM in dual-channel mode. This worked, just the memory speed fell dorsum to the standard JEDEC speed rather than the XMP speed that it used with the higher latency CL22 stock memory. Yet, the retentiveness read speed went upward from 22,642 MB/due south to 31,475 MB/s, which was a 39% improvement.
The RAM upgrade increased the Geekbench 5 Multi-cadre score from 3,998 to five,399, which was a 35% improvement.
Storage Upgrade
I installed a 500GB Samsung 970 EVO One thousand.2 drive and installed a fresh re-create of Windows 10 20H2 on it from a USB three.0 wink drive. For a storage drive, I put in a 2.5″ 512GB Samsung 950 PRO SATA SSD that I had on hand. Both of these worked simply fine with no issues.
The 970 EVO gives marginally ameliorate performance than the stock Kioxia drive, but it is still limited by the x2 style from the system. HP probably did this to conserve PCIe three.0 lanes. The principal reason for any storage upgrades in this system is just to accept more bachelor space to store installed games. The small differences in criterion performance between entry-level drives and high-end drives don't really matter here.
GPU Upgrade
I had a GTX 1660 Ti card on hand, so I installed it. You lot need to be very careful about the concrete size of a replacement GPU since the organisation example is quite small-scale. The height of the card is more critical, merely the length of the bill of fare tin also be an issue. The 400W ability supply but has one eight-pivot PCIe power connector, so y'all won't be able to use a card that needs more than that.
The Geekbench CUDA score went from 57,575 to 70,186 with the GPU upgrade, which is about a 22% improvement. According to this review from TechPowerUp, you should see about a 27% increase in 1080P gaming going from a 1650 Super to a 1660 Ti.
CPU Upgrade
Finally, I installed an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X CPU. This is a 95W TDP 6C/12T CPU with a base of operations clock of three.8 GHz, a boost clock of 4.four GHz, and a 32MB L3 cache. Micro Heart is currently selling this CPU for $249.99. I don't actually recommend this CPU over the less expensive Ryzen 5 3600. If I was upgrading the CPU in real life, I would become to the 8C/16T Ryzen 7 3700X, which Micro Heart is selling for $279.99.
Going from a 6C/6T Ryzen v 3500 to a 6C/12T Ryzen 5 3600X simply gives you a 2.four% ST increase in CPU-Z. Y'all are not going to notice that difference in real life. The MT score goes up by 42.3%, which volition be quite noticeable in productivity applications.
Geekbench had a larger ST improvement after the CPU upgrade to the Ryzen v 3600X. The Single-Core score went from 1,180 to 1,264 which is an seven.1% improvement. The Multi-Core score went from 5,399 to 6,848, which is an 26.8% comeback.
Surprisingly, the stock CPU libation has a pretty large and heavy heatsink. Information technology is more like an AMD Wraith Spire CPU libation rather than the tiny AMD Wraith Stealth. The motherboard has non-standard CPU cooler mounting holes, so you lot are stuck with the stock cooler.
Folding@Home
Just for kicks, I installed Folding@Dwelling in my fully modified system to see how information technology ran and how hot it would go. I would NOT recommend you practise this on this organization! Running Folding@Home pushed the arrangement power consumption from 42 watts at idle to 237 watts. That is no problem for that 400W fourscore+ Platinum power supply.
The existent problem is the temperatures I saw in GPU-Z. The CPU temperature went up to 90C, which is much too hot for my liking. At that place was definitely thermal throttling going on.
Keep in mind, I was using a 95W TDP CPU (which exceeds the design specifications of the system). The stock CPU cooler cannot handle this thermal load, especially in this small-scale system instance. The example only has one 92mm exhaust fan at the rear and a big group (four.v″ x six″) of inlet ventilation holes on the correct side. This is fine for normal usage, merely not for Folding.
The BIOS does not expose whatever fan curve or speed controls. You could get a PWM fan splitter and and so rig a 120mm case fan to push air into those inlet holes, but it would accept to be on the outside of the instance. Another cooling improvement would be to utilize Silverstone AEROSLOT PCIe slot covers to ameliorate the exhaust flow out the back of the example.
Final Words
So what is the final verdict? Well, I still call back this is a squeamish entry-level gaming system, even completely stock. If all yous desire to do is 1080P gaming, it will work quite well with no upgrades. If you desire more operation and flexibility, hither are the next steps, in order.
- Go a second 8GB stick of RAM
- This should cost $twoscore-$fifty
- Get an inexpensive 1TB ii.v″ SATA SSD for a storage bulldoze
- This should cost $80-$100
- Most people can finish here
- Upgrade to a meliorate GPU
- Anything modest that can run on an eight-pin PCIe power cable
- Upgrade to an AMD Ryzen vii 3700X
- This won't help for gaming
- Information technology would requite you a lot more than compute capacity for productivity tasks.
I had a lot of fun Benchmarking and Modding the Walmart Gaming PC!
If you have whatever thoughts or questions about this post, please ask me here in the comments or on Twitter. You can as well follow me on Twitter, where I am @GlennAlanBerry.Thank you lot for reading!
Source: https://glennsqlperformance.com/2021/05/10/benchmarking-and-modding-the-walmart-gaming-pc/
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