If what is listed on these shop sites is true Ryzen 3000 will be an incredible release. But first the links:

• http://www.novabilgisayar.com/bilgi.asp?ID=12150
• http://www.novabilgisayar.com/bilgi.asp?ID=12151
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-3-3300-soket-am4-32ghz-12mb-cache-islemci-pmu361377
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-3-3300x-soket-am4-35ghz-12mb-cache-islemci-pmu361376
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-5-3600-soket-am4-36ghz-16mb-cache-islemci-pmu361375
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-5-3600x-soket-am4-40ghz-16mb-cache-islemci-pmu361374
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-7-3700-soket-am4-38ghz-24mb-cache-islemci-pmu361373
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-7-3700x-soket-am4-42ghz-24mb-cache-islemci-pmu361372
• https://www.ebrarbilgisayar.com/amd-ryzen-9-3800x-soket-am4-39ghz-32mb-cache-islemci-pmu361371

This would result in these specifications:

Name	Cores	Base clock (GHz)	Turbo Clock (GHz)	TDP
Ryzen 3 3300	6	3.2	4.0	?
Ryzen 3 3300X	6	3.5	4.3	?
Ryzen 5 3600	8	3.6	4.4	?
Ryzen 5 3600X	8	4.0	4.8	?
Ryzen 7 3700	12	3.8	4.6	?
Ryzen 7 3700X	12	4.2	5.0	105
Ryzen 9 3800X	16	3.9	4.7	125
leaked specs
might be wrong

If the data is correct this would be huge. Two reasons:

1) The core clock is a jump up. So far, Ryzen 3 had 4 cores, Ryzen 5 had 6 and Ryzen 7 had 8. Now Ryzen 3 would have 6, Ryzen 5 would have 8, Ryzen 7 would even move to 12 and the Ryzen 9 3800X would move into Threadripper territory with 16 cores. It can be safely assumed that all these processors would feature double the threads. This means that if AMD manages to keep the prices close to the prices of the current generation, already because of the jump in core count these offers would be very attractive.

But 2), AMD also raised the core clock significantly. With new turbo clocks of up to 5GHz Intel’s i5-9600K, i7-9700K and i9-9900K would no longer be the only ideal option for high FPS gaming. And also many regular applications would profit a lot from the higher clocks.

I would not believe these numbers if it were a regular leak. But specs on shop sites tend to be correct, and it would be not the first time specifications of a new product get published like this by accident. Let’s hope it’s true.

Nvidia released the GTX 1650 today and it turned out to be a bad release. The $150 card performs worse than the cheaper RX 570, it is only a small step up from a GTX 1050 Ti, as evident in the direct benchmark comparison. But it’s in our system now and you can add it to your build if you want.

Cases and cpu cooler got a bunch new filter option, both when creating builds and when browsing the parts lists. Cases can now be filtered for their fan mounting and radiator support, how many 140mm fans can be added for example. And cpu coolers, which had almost no filter option so far, can now be filtered for height, socket support, and even radiator length and cooling type.

Those last few filters might be surprising because AIO coolers were missing so far. Since air coolers were till recently always the best option for budget optimized build, AIO coolers were just not interesting for us. But with the i7-9700K and i9-9900K there are now consumer processors on the market that get hot enough to make AIO coolers relevant, they are basically being needed to allow overclocking of these processors. That’s why AIOs got added, with full compatibility checks.

Assume you need a new case for an mATX motherboard and you want a case specifically for that board size, not a regular mid tower. You have lots of options. But then you also want to use your old AIO with a 140mm radiator. Suddenly you only have a few options, but known good ones like the Fractal Design Meshify C Mini or the Fractal Design Define Mini C. But if you then also want a 5.25” slot — and be it for storing your HDD with a hard disk silencer and cooler like the Alpenföhn Alptunnel — then suddenly you are almost out of options. All the well reviewed cases fall away. One remaining choice and actually a nice case is the Antec P5 Mini, one I will review here today.

The main features

The Antec P5 Mini is a modern mATX case. With modern I mean the style and the layout: It has the slick black box style popular with the Fractal Design cases and an interior layout without a hard disk cage. The psu gets installed at the bottom with the fan being able to point down, there is a cut out (with dust filter) to let it pull in air. The power and the reset button sit at the top of the case, together with two USB slots and the audio output. Prominent is the white power LED encircling the power button, the other design element are the feet being metallic instead of black. Though the front is also not just black, it has some structure that makes it seem wood-like at first glance.

Thanks to not having a hdd cage it supports gpus with a length up to 360mm, the cpu cooler can be 155mm high.

Main differentiator to other mATX cases is the radiator support, while still having a 5.25” slot above. At the front there is space for two 120mm fans or even a 240mm radiator, with fan holes to install one 140mm fan with out without radiator instead. The small hard disk cage at the bottom is placed appropriately far away to let space for radiator and fans. The only other fan that can be installed is a 120mm fan at the back of the case.

The P5 Mini has noise isolation foam already installed. That noise isolation actually works, there is an audible difference for example when opening the hinged front panel. But the bitumen foam installed here seems to me less effective than the aftermarket noise isolation foam sold by the german vendor caseking I use in a different case. Still, it’s a nice addition and the P5 Mini is not noisy, I had no issues with vibrations and I can not hear the AIO pump or coil whine from psu or gpu when sitting next to it.

It helps that the two pre-installed fans are not bad. They are not great either and only have three pins, but they will work for you if silence is not the absolute top priority. If it is you want to install more expensive silent case fans instead.

Air flow was my big concern. After all it supports way less fans than the typical mid-ATX tower. To make matters worse, the air holes at the side of the front panel are mostly just decoration: Only the lower area is perforated completely, the upper part covered by plastic. This will help reduce the noise that can pass at the front, but it lowers air flow. Because of this I wouldn’t recommend running a 300W gpu and an overclocked Threadripper in this case, but for regular consumer hardware the thermal performance was surprisingly decent, with no overheating issues whatsoever.

It might be that the noise isolation foam helps here and its subjective, but the P5 feels sturdy. The way the side panels don’t flex too much, how the feet are installed, how the front panel moves and how well the mechanism to remove the front dust filter works: There is some quality here that makes me like the case. It’s also not flashy at all, there is no window and there are no RGB LEDs, characteristics I quite like. That the case is not a premium case is evident mainly because of its flaws we will cover now.

The Flaws

I already mentioned the fans not being PWM models, which would be a prerequisite for a higher price point (or the integration of a fan hub, like Phantek does). But also apart from that not everything is perfect: The dust filter at the front can easily be removed, the one at the bottom is less easy to reach. The two upper PCI-E slots are installed with a screw, as they should be, but the other two would have to be removed with force. Proper replacements come with the box, but they should be pre-installed. The power button at the top had two small flaws in the coating — not something you’d return the case for, but it should be mentioned here, as it point to quality control issues.

Two 3.5” HDDs fit into the hard disk cage, there are also two 2.5” slots at the motherboard side of the cage and two at the back side. That’s nice and that way it supports more disk most people will ever need. But the two SSDs at the back need to be screwed in, a toolless installation mechanism would have been nicer. At least the placement is good and there are rubber pads to make sure the bottom of the disks do not touch the cases directly. The placement aligns well with the cable management features the case possesses. It would be more comfortable though if the case was one cm wider, making it easier to store power supply cables at the back side to make proper use of the cable management cutouts in the mainboard tray.

Conclusion

The Antec P5 Mini is a good case. It has almost no competition if you want radiator support and a 5.25” slot in an mATX case, but even if you do not need that 5.25” slot the P5 Mini is a sound option, especially for the current price of ~50€. It looks nice, has a good layout and solid build quality, with only minor flaws like the PCI expansion slot covers and the two white spots in the coating of the power button (which might very well be specific to my model and not a common issue).

Part of the story here is that modern cases are just really good, even the basic OEM designs. As a buyer you mainly have to not buy a case with a really old layout, which is easy to spot: If the psu is at the top and the interior metallic, stay away. The modern standard instead features a lot of strengths: It supports long GPUs, intelligent HDD and SSD placement, cable management options and in general makes it easy to build in. The P5 Mini feels like a shrunk and partly improved version of that. It shares the strength of the modern default design, but also the flaws of the non-high-end price segment, including the design trend of the last ~2 years of closing the front; which looks nice and can minimize noise if it does not kill air flow completely. The P5 Mini seems to have succeeded in finding a valid compromise here. I’ll keep it.

As welcome as some healthy competition on the gpu market would be, sadly the newly launched Radeon VII is not the card to challenge Nvidia at the high end. It is a loud and expensive 300W card with 16GB very fast HBM2 VRAM that still gets beaten by the RTX 2080:

Please check the comparison page to see exactly which benchmarks were used for this rating.

There is a silver lining: AMD almost reaching the GeForce RTX 2080 is a good thing. AMD’s fastest card so far was the Vega 64, which was also loud and energy hungry but only at the performance level of a GeForce GTX 1080. The Radeon VII delivers at least a respectable performance improvement compared to that predecessor card, even if it is not enough to win in the FPS arena. That means AMD has the potential to release good consumer gpus at the high end, which could lower graphics card prices for all of us.

But missing gaming performance is not even what hampers the Radeon VII the most. It is just a bit slower than the RTX 2080, a price correction could make up for the FPS difference. The real issue is that it is loud and energy hungry. Computerbase reports that the gpu runs on a much higher voltage than needed, undervolting it costs no performance, the card still runs stable, it just reduces energy usage by a lot and makes the card much quieter. That’s not a first for AMD: Both Vega cards run on voltage outside the peak efficiency of their chip, also Polaris can profit from being undervolted.

AMD needs to step up its game: It is not enough to just come close performance wise. If it wants to grab market share the company needs to beat Nvidia with cards that run faster than Nvidia’s products in the same price bracket; at the very least it needs to stop releasing cards that are obviously not ready for release, that miss the crucial fine tuning with regards to default voltage and cooler quality.

The GeForce RTX 2060 is a good release, beating its low expectations. It was rumored that the 2060 might be a slightly bigger jump compared to its next bigger GTX variant, the 1070, than the RTX 2070 was to the GTX 1080. Remember, the RTX 2070 was only able to match the performance of the GTX 1080, it was not really faster. A slight advantage over the 1070 would have been enough for the new RTX 2060 to fulfill this mission. Instead, the new Nvidia card not only beats the GTX 1070, it also beats the Vega 56. It even comes close to the performance of the next tier, with the performance level of the GTX 1080 and RTX 2070 firmly in reach of a reasonable overclock.

To see exactly which benchmarks were used, check the comparison page.

Performance wise this is an excellent result for a new middle class graphics card. Which leads to the drawbacks. The first one is its price.

With $349 the card costs a lot more than what the GTX 1060 did. Price wise this new card is not a xx60, it is a xx70. Given the performance that’s not unjustified: It is after all faster than the GTX 1070, and faster than the even more expensive Radeon Vega 56. But $349 - or 369€ for the Founder’s Edition in Europe - are just outside the target price of a middle class graphics card, which was traditionally 200 to 300 bucks.

There is more. Energy usage is up, it sits at the level of a GTX 1070, not a 1060. Bad for systems with a weak power supply, which happens often when making an office PC gaming ready via a gpu upgrade. And finally: The RTX 2060 still has only 6GB Vram. Which is enough for a lot of games, but is less than AMD offers with the cheaper Radeon RX 580, and the Vram difference will likely cause stutters on higher settings in coming AAA games.

Ignoring the price this would have been an excellent release. Jumping one tier, catapulting the middle class from the level of the GTX 1060 to almost a GTX 1080 would have been a dream come true for many gaming PC builder out there. But the RTX 2060 isn’t simply a new and improved GTX 1060. For that it is just too expensive. It is closer to a GTX 1070 and a Vega 56; It is more attractive than both, as such it will play a role in the market. But that makes it more a card for those who want a cheaper RTX 2070, maybe overclock it to that level, than the right card for someone who just wants a new mid class graphics card for 1080p gaming. For those a cheap Radeon RX 590 or Radeon RX 580 is the more reasonable choice.