Test Setup
Case Testing, But Smaller
The FPS Review ITX Case Testing Rig has been set up to accommodate the testing challenges posed by ITX cases. A set of components has been assembled that can pull around 400W from the wall and is designed to determine the air cooling capacity of a smaller enclosure.
The Yuel Beast Motif Monument serves a dual purpose here, first for this review, but also as a benchmark for future reviews as a reference point for unrestricted system performance.
The Challenges of Downsizing
When working with the components available, particularly the i5 10600K, Shadow Rock 3 HSF, and Biostar ITX Z590 motherboard, we ran into the inescapable conundrum that sets the bar for entry for tuning performance-based systems in small form factors.
Our biggest stumbling block was the CPU. This particular i5 10600K sample just plain runs hot and once hot its memory controller gets flaky and a subsequent blue screen of death awaits the current performance run.
In a quest to set up our VCore and LLC we were able to slowly uncover a tuning regime that would eventually bring us to our final tested state.
Notes About Specific Components Used
The Intel i5 10600K, Biostar Valkyrie Z590I, ASUS RTX 2070 Twin, and Silverstone 1000W PSU have all been previously reviewed by this site. Added to this is the be quiet! Shadow Rock 3 White with a pair of Arctic P12 PWM PST ARGB 120mm fans which are both higher-performance and lower noise than the stock be quiet! fans, as well as an NVMe SSD to keep the system compact and cable runs to a minimum.
The CPU tops out at 4.7GHz all-core in this configuration, with 135W of power draw under continuous Cinebench R23 loads pushing it to over 90C. The RTX 2070 is able to pull 185W with its power limit set to 108%. Together with the motherboard and fans, the system pulls about 410W from the wall under a combined Cinebench R23 and Furmark load.
And a quick note about the Arctic P12 PWM PST ARGB fans. These fans tend to let the fan assembly, that is the part with the fins that are attached to the hub, ‘droop’. This can occur with the fans in a vertical orientation, say as intake or exhaust on a case or front-to-back air cooler, and it happens more so when the fan is oriented to blow up, such that the fan blades ‘fall’ a bit below the frame.
This results in the fan blades making contact with whatever the fan is mounted to. While likely not good for the life of the fan itself, and problematic if the fan is prevented from spinning altogether, the common result is simply a lot of racket. Typically when something is protruding into the path of a fan blade, it’s usually a loose cable. With the Arctic fans, having blades that can strike outside of the fan frame is a somewhat puzzling problem to troubleshoot, since an errant cable is not causing the noise. Luckily the problem can be addressed with the introduction of a spacer to set the fan ever so slightly further away and prevent the blades from striking.
RGB Lighting
The Yuel Beast Motif Monument has no lighting built in, however, the Corsair memory and Arctic fans do include RGB which was turned on for the review pictures. Note that the Biostar Valkyrie has an extremely limited RGB page in its BIOS which does not allow the selection of white, while Biostar’s Windows software crashed the system when launched all but once. This behavior prevented us from tuning the RGB lighting to match and resulted in the fans having a far cooler (bluer) shade of white than the memory lighting.
For this review, all lighting is set to ‘white’ as available in appropriate software suites, defined as #FFFFFF or 255 / 255 / 255.