Micro Center's AMD 7000 Series In-Store Builds

To celebrate the launch of AMD's 7000 Series processors (which we covered in-depth yesterday, with overviews, benchmarks, and a build guide!), each of our stores put together a build to show off the power of the brand-new CPUs - with some personal flair added! Two of our Champions got in touch with the builders and talked about their process, why they chose their parts, and what's new with the AMD 7000 Series.

Marietta, GA - Writing and photos by @Shoan041

Anyone who frequents the Marietta Micro Center for build parts has most likely run into our AMD Champion at this location. I had the pleasure of speaking with John to get his list for the AMD computer he built and get his thoughts on the parts he chose!

Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Raphael AM5 4.7GHz 12-Core Boxed Processor

We’re all excited to see the new Ryzen 7000 in action, so of course, we chose the Ryzen 9 to show off their best gaming processor. With 12 cores, 24 threads, and a max boost clock of up to 5.6GHz, the Ryzen 9 7900X is an absolutely killer gaming processor. Plus, the new AM5 socket supports blazing fast DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0, and keeps builders on the cutting edge.

Graphics Card: AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT

This new generation of Radeon Graphics Cards are powerhouses, able to push out consistently high frames for your games, and the RX 6950 XT sits at the absolute top, making it a perfect pairing for the Ryzen 9 7900X

Motherboard: ASUS X670E ROG CROSSHAIR Hero AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard

John can’t get enough of Asus boards, especially with all the cooling and durability features of the Strix E lineup! The new X670E is absolutely no exception and is ready for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 right out of the box. It even has support for WiFi 6E, so say goodbye to the ethernet cable running along the floor of your house!

Storage: Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB 3D TLC NAND PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe M.2

John chose this PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD as it has some of the fastest Sequential Read and Write speeds. Why put all this power and speed in your new build, just to bottleneck with a less-than-stellar SSD or - even worse - an HDD as your main drive?

Case: Lian Li O11 Air Mini Tempered Glass ATX Mini Tower Computer Case

When you've got this much power in a single system, you're going to be generating a lot of heat. You need something with stellar airflow, and the Lian Li 011 Air Mini delivers with some market-leading airflow, without a large or garish footprint. It even has room for a full watercooling system, something thats tricky to do will in mini cases.

RAM: Trident Z5 RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Dual Channel Memory

The Trident Z5 was primarily chosen because of its high speed and low latency. But we can't ignore that its subtle RGB looks absolutely great in builds going for that low-key powerhouse aesthetic.

Power Supply: PowerSpec 850W Gold Plus ATX Power Supply

A great choice for its value, the PowerSpec 850W delivers more than enough power to get everything in the build running smoothly. Plus, as a fully-modular PSU, it helps to keep the build looking nice, clean, and minimal without a bunch of extra cables floating around.

Cooling: EK-Furious Vardar EVO Black fans

In any build that prides itself on airflow, the EK-Furious Vardar fans should absolutely be involved. Our AMD build is no exception.

CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X53 RGB 240mm RGB Water Cooling Kit

NZXT has always made a good cooler and this 240mm all-in-one water cooler will help keep the processor as cool as possible and look stellar while doing it, thanks to a sleek black aesthetic with clean, low-key RGB highlights.

Mayfield Heights, OH - Interview and photos by @ronwoodson

 Ron Woodson: Jon, tell us about the new 7900x processor by AMD and your decision-making process for this custom build that showcases it.

Jon Percy: So, the new 7000 series AMD chips just launched, and we'll be using the Ryzen 9 7900X in our build. It’s 12 core, 24 thread and it does work very well with high-speed RAM, so I ended up going with the DDR5 Dominator Platinum 5600 kit from Corsair; They are designed for overclocking.

 I have a pretty decent water cooler installed - the Hydro X Series XC5 RGB CPU Water Block. While it does operate efficiently, it does require a decent amount of power so I installed a 1000-watt platinum power supply from Maingear which includes a 10-year warranty from Micro Center.

I chose to stay with as many Corsair components as possible to make sure they all kind of mesh together within one ecosystem because having one RGB control software makes things a little bit lighter on the Windows side of things.

RW: Tell me about your choice of cooling solutions.

JP: The front of the case has a 120mm quadruple fan radiator. It's particularly good at dissipating heat and is an especially good complement to water cooling systems. Most of the time it is quieter than a regular air cooler, even though I’m pushing it really hard, with fans operating at 100 percent nearly all the time.

RW: How fast are the cores running currently?

JP: Right now, of the twelve cores that are on it; six of them are running at 5.6 GHz and the other six are running at 5.4. It is significantly faster than the current gen and while I don't know what the final results will be, over clocking is looking promising.

 RW: Would you say that this is groundbreaking technology?

 JP: It's a lot of all-new stuff for AMD. It's their first platform that supports PCIe Gen 5 and DDR 5. It has many new power settings for overclocking things are a lot more adjustable... and I am a fan.

 RW: John Percy's seal of approval. That's pretty awesome! Do you find that this is a processor that you would do a personal build with?

 JP: Absolutely!!! This is a major leap in AMD processors and is one of the best on the market at its price point. It'll definitely go in a personal build at some point.