New Lounge Computer
What’s happening, cats? This is your Uncle Downbeat, writing this article from my new desktop computer. I try to get the most out of the components I have, and last week, my 6-year-old Dell desktop finally started rebooting itself randomly several times a day. Downbeat depends on the smooth operation of the Lounge system, so it was finally time to invest too much cheese on a machine that would keep the studio humming.
Normally, I wouldn’t write a review for what I consider is a commodity working tool. One Subaru is much like another, you dig? The current scene, as we know, is that the desktop marketplace is desolate, due to crypto mining robber barons, cootie fears shutting down world chip production, and Downbeat was short on cash, as well. Usually I build my own system, using exquisitely made handcrafted parts delivered on silk pillows, but that kind of computer class is too expensive for my wallet this week… so I ground my teeth and looked for a pre-built system that I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to be seen with.
It took almost a week of shopping around. Downbeat ended up padding down to the local Microcenter. Luckily, they had just unpacked a truck with pallets of goodies, and I walked out of there in 15 minutes with a system I had low expectations for, but Necessity is a Mother.
My pouch was emptied of shekels, and I came away with a Powerspec G707 system. Before you throw rotten fruit, here’s the skinny: AMD 3700X cpu, NVIDIA GTX 3070 video card with 8gigs of ram, 32gigs system memory, 1TB NVME SSD, and all the RGB lighting I could eat. Yeah, yeah… Powerspec is not the cuban cigar of the PC world.. more like Virginia Slims. I set it up, held my nose, and gave it a spin.
There was no documentation, other than the quick start guide which says, “remove the product, plug it in, and don’t put the plastic bag over your head.” Windows takes time to set itself up, so it wasn’t incredibly snappy. The system SSD is a mid-range Western Digital stick which benchmarks at about 1800 Megabytes/sec read and write. Not great, but not worth crying over. The case has about as much style as a Russian tank, on a muddy day. The built-in ethernet is 1 gigabit. There is 1 USB C port, and several USB A ports on the back, and a couple slower older-gen USB ports on the front. Ventilation is adequate, the system is not entirely silent, but even when I am riding it like a government pony, the fans do not get excessively loud.
The first pleasant surprise was that the motherboard is the Asrock X570 Pro, not the most refined, but not the worst, either. The power supply is a gold 750 watt unit… with enough juice to handle whatever I put in there, including a CPU upgrade if I ever wanted to go that way. I haven’t had any experience using AMD cpus, so my second surprise was how solid and efficient the 8-core 3700X is. It just felt like it didn’t need to break a sweat as it shouldered whatever workload I threw at it. I am starting to sound like a teenage girl at a Beatles concert, I like the AMD cpu that much.
The third surprise is the video card. These are impossible to get if you are a builder, unless you pay 2x to 3x the normal price. The pre-built vendors are getting their allocations, having set up their quota contracts before the tsunami of demand hit…and this is my first experience with a 3070-level GPU. (I previously sported a sleek I7 with a 1660 TI… RAWR!) Game performance is good. And I am not talking about Minesweeper. The GPU never got above 76C… it is air-cooled as far as I can tell. The cpu does have a Cooler Master, which seems to have some liquid going through it, but it is hard to tell.
What got my attention though, was running DaVinci Resolve video editing on it. The system is well balanced, and I rendered a 1080P video that took 3 hours on my previous system in a mere 16 minutes, and that was while watching cat videos. Now there’s walking around money.
To sum it up, this robot is an excellently solid productivity workhorse, and a decent gaming system, if you aren’t Hyper-Twitch McTeenager. It is not as expandable as I would like, and some of the subsystems are less than optimal, but this baby is going to help keep the Lounge cool, Daddy-Oh!