New G464 questions

rhtx

Hello, I recently purchased a G464 from my local store, and although I'm happy with it so far, I had a couple comments/questions:

The first is just a comment - like I've read in several places, my case came with the glass panel misaligned. I'm guessing that the adhesive used on the metal mounting strip/bracket to adhere it to the glass is melting or whatever, I doubt the system is being built that way. I just pulled it off and reapplied it correctly, but it seems like something you shouldn't have to do on a nearly $2K machine. Perhaps some feedback could be sent to Lian Li since this seems to be such a prevalent issue?

Second, the specs on the webpage say it should come with "32GB DDR4-3200 RAM", however, I checked in the BIOS and in HWiNFO, and mine is running at 2400 (screenshot attached). Am I missing something? I'm not looking to overclock and potentially destabilize the computer. However the stickers on the modules do say 3200, so I think I have the correct hardware, but am just not sure why they are running at 2400.

The last is just a more general question - I did a CPU stress test and the temp spiked to around 84C, but settled out around 80/81C. I'm new to AMD and from searching it seemed like people recommend trying not to stay at 80C+ for extended periods of time. My daily workload does not have the CPU pegged for long periods of time, but I do game on the weekends for several hours at a time and I noticed it does stay maxed out pretty much the whole time. Are these temps acceptable for longevity? Would adding a rear exhaust fan help at all? It seems there is room for a 280mm AIO, but I didn't want to start trying to upgrade a brand new computer...

Thanks!

rhtx

By the way, on the memory issue, I have tried going in to the BIOS > Advanced > Ai Tweaker and changing the memory frequency from "Auto" to 3200 and then in the BIOS main screen it does show 3200, but checking in HWiNFO after restarting still shows 2400.

rhtx

I did some more searching on the memory issue and found I needed to enable DOCP in the BIOS and that seems to be working now. Hopefully it's stable, we'll see. I'm a little confused why it wasn't enabled out of the box...

HWiNFO still shows 2400, but Task Manager Performance tab and after running UserBenchmark, the results reported that the memory is running at 3200, so that may just be an issue with HWiNFO.

PowerSpec_MichaelB

Welcome to the forum, @rhtx, my apologies for the late response. Thank you for the feedback on the ATX 205's side panel adhesives. I'll be sure to pass that along, especially given how easy it is for tempered glass to shatter on corners due to the increased pressure. The last thing we want is side panels falling off and shattering. 

For the memory DOCP profile not being loaded, that is certainly not normal. I'll pass your systems serial over to the build team so they can track down how that system got boxed up without the memory profile loaded. At the very least, it can help us improve our process to see to it that it doesn't happen again. As for your stability concerns, the memory controller of the Ryzen 9 3900X officially supports 3200mhz, so you should be perfectly fine: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-3900x

As for HWiNFO, it reports the base SPD or Serial Presence Detect profile stored on the DIMM. This is the speed that your memory will load at prior to enabling any of the pre-defined overclocking profiles. You can use software such as CPU-Z, AIDA64 or if you still prefer HWiNFO, you can open the Sensors summary and scroll down to "Memory Timings" category and look for Memory Clock.

This should accurately report the real-time clock speed of your memory. Remember that due to the Double Data Rate nature of memory, you'll need to double that value to get your "effective" clock speed.

Hopefully this helps clarify some things, and again, thank you for bringing the situation to our attention. Should you have any further questions about your system, please do not hesitate to reach out.

rhtx

Awesome, thanks for the confirmation that turning on DOCP is ok and the detailed information about HWiNFO.
Do those CPU temps look ok while under full load? Do you think adding a rear exhaust would help?
Sorry one more question, just to confirm that my computer was built as expected, it appears that the included case fans have been moved to the front as intakes and the CPU AIO cooler is top mounted with the fans pushing/exhausting out the top. Is this normal? The front of the case doesn't have a magnetic dust filter and the top of the case does. It seems strange to me to be taking in unfiltered air and exhausting filtered air. I tried to fit the included magnetic filter on the front (behind the bezel, obviously) and it's not long enough to cover the whole thing. In the meantime I've ordered 3x140mm magnetic fan filters to try to put on the front, but like DOCP not being enabled out of the box, is this configuration normal?

PowerSpec_MichaelB

rhtx said:

Awesome, thanks for the confirmation that turning on DOCP is ok and the detailed information about HWiNFO.
Do those CPU temps look ok while under full load? Do you think adding a rear exhaust would help?
Sorry one more question, just to confirm that my computer was built as expected, it appears that the included case fans have been moved to the front as intakes and the CPU AIO cooler is top mounted with the fans pushing/exhausting out the top. Is this normal? The front of the case doesn't have a magnetic dust filter and the top of the case does. It seems strange to me to be taking in unfiltered air and exhausting filtered air. I tried to fit the included magnetic filter on the front (behind the bezel, obviously) and it's not long enough to cover the whole thing. In the meantime I've ordered 3x140mm magnetic fan filters to try to put on the front, but like DOCP not being enabled out of the box, is this configuration normal?

For the CPU temps, it would depend entirely on what you are doing. For example: 80C temps while gaming is absolutely not normal, while 80C temps under synthetic stress tests using instruction sets like AVX/AVX2 (Prime95, AIDA64, Intel XTU, Linpack MKL, ASUS Realbench, etc) would be quite normal just from a physics perspective. The integrated heatspreader is only so large on a processor, so you ultimately end up producing more heat than what the limited surface area can carry away. With that being said, thermal junction on the 3900X is 95C and you still have quite a bit of headroom left. As long as you are not thermal throttling or dealing with excessive fan noise at those temps, I wouldn't be too concerned unless you saw those temps under sustained gaming loads.

As for the fan configuration, it's configured to achieve neutral/slight positive pressure with two fans set to exhaust through the top rad and two to intake through the front of the chassis. I can't imagine a rear fan helping too much with CPU temperatures as the pump/block is already moving the heat away from the surface of the CPU to the radiator and cooling the outside of the pump won't really help that. Having a rear fan as an extra intake (more positive pressure at the cost of more dust) would be beneficial if you found your VRM or memory overheating, but for CPU thermals it wouldn't make much of a difference at all.

You do bring up a very interesting point about the front intakes lack of dust filters. The current design of the chassis has the air coming through the perforated sides of the front panel as well as through the bottom lip. With my testing of the chassis, I found that the dust typically gathered in this front panel, which served as this "dust chamber", but I didn't see much dust coming through the actual fans themselves, though I imagine this would absolutely occur if given enough time without cleaning the front ventilation. I'd like to test this myself and see how well a filter would work. If you don't mind letting us know how your filters perform after you get them, I'd love to know the results.

As for whether or not DOCP being disabled out of the box is normal, I'd say no. This should be enabled after we flash our BIOS as XMP/DOCP is automatically reset once a BIOS is flashed. If DOCP was not enabled and your system is brand new, then this was an oversight on our part and we will be looking to improve our processes to avoid this mistake going forward. 

rhtx

Ok, I'll check temps while gaming and hold off on an additional fan for now. Thanks again!

PowerSpec_MichaelB

You're very welcome! As always, let us know if you have any questions whatsoever.