I built the PS5.

Well, sorta.

(electronic music)

So this is everything we should need

to build ourselves the Xbox Scarlett or PS5.

Now to start out with, we have AMD's Ryzen 7 3700X.

Now this is the exact same Zen 2 core

as they're in both of the next generation of consoles

and based on what we know about the PlayStation 5

with an 8-Core configuration,

this is a very close match.

With a few tweaks,

I think we can get it really, really close.

Next, we have the Radeon RX 5700.

Now this is the very first of the Navi GPU's

which again, will be found in both the PS5

as well as the next generation Xbox.

This should give us a very good idea

of how these next generation consoles will perform.

Take a grain of salt

and we can see just how close we can get

to playing games at a full 4K60 or even beyond.

Technically, this does support 8K resolutions.

These are very much the building blocks

for the next generation of consoles

so let's get this thing put together in the test bench

and see just exactly how well it performs.

Now Sony and Microsoft will almost definitely

be using a proprietary SSD,

so this is not going to be an apples to apples comparison.

What it is is by far

the fastest option that we have available

and should give us a good idea of the performance,

specifically the load times that we can expect

out of these new consoles.

So with the test bench assembled,

I now have Windows installed,

all of our games and drivers and updates all ready to go.

Now there are a couple of configuration things

which will definitely be different with the consoles.

So number one is going to be memory.

So right now, I have 16 gigs and 3400 DDR4

feeding the CPU

and the GPU has eight gigs of GDDR6.

Now, because the consoles will take advantage

of an APU style like the current consoles,

the CPU and GPU will be on the same die,

so that's going to give a bunch of power savings

and of course, on top of that,

they are going to be sharing very similar memory.

So likely it will be GDDR6,

but there's a lot of sort of ifs and maybes

because there's a lot of customization they could do.

Maybe Sony decides to put 16 gigs instead of 12.

Maybe Microsoft decides to throw some DDR4 in there

to speed up the CPU.

That is all way up in the air

so to keep things as fair as possible,

I'm trying to be conservative and give it the most

amount of bandwidth and the most amount of memory

that I think it could realistically use.

So we have Horizon 7 3700X here,

as well as the RX-5700.

Now to start, I'm going to just run

a series of benchmarks and tests,

with everything stock

because obviously, this has a advantage

of being an open air test bench,

but this is sort of the best case scenario.

Plenty of power, plenty of cooling,

and then we'll start tweaking from there.

So to start out, let's have

the good old standard Geekbench.

Now this is not going to be the most demanding test

for the CPU,

but this should give us a good ball park,

specifically on how Horizon stacks up

to, well I mean now are the current consoles,

but like Core i7's and stuff.

Oh wow, that's fast, okay.

So for context, that's actually ahead

of a core I-7-9700K multi-threaded.

It's not too far behind on single threaded.

That's a big, big step up from old Ryzen.

We do know that Sony and Microsoft have opted to go

for an AMD Navi based GPU.

So because of that, I've chosen to go with the 5700,

which is the middle of the range option.

So Sony and Microsoft will definitely customize this,

so they might actually go up toward a higher spec

such as the XT version of this guy,

or because of power strain, so they might actually

go a little bit lower performance

and they're gonna customize it with extra stuff

like ray tracing that tracing that this card doesn't have

so it's a little bit of a guess,

an educated guess,

but it's sort of, I'm hoping that this middle of the range

configuration is doable for these consoles.

So first off, we have Time Spy,

so this should give us

a pretty good idea of the performance,

although again, this is just for the first testing.

We also have a bunch of games installed

that I wanna see if we can actually get to 4K60

or 144144, or whatever the case is.

Okay, so for the graphics we have our benchmark to beat,

8,154, which if I check this chart here

is pretty similar to say RTX 2070.

I actually don't think I'm going

to tweak the graphics card too much.

I think this is going to be fairly close to what we'll get,

but I do think that there's a lot of room to bring

our clocks and specifically our power down on the CPU side.

8-Cores I think is basically a lock for the PS5

and likely for the Xbox,

but they will probably be running at a little bit closer

to say, three ish gigahertz.

My next step is to underclock our processor.

So since obviously a console has much more limited

thermal as well as power constraints compared to a PC,

I'm going to not only lower the voltage

but also lower our clock speed

to get this in the same kind of realm

as something you could expect to find

in the PS5 or the Xbox Scarlett.

So for testing, I'm using AMD's Ryzen Master software,

which props to them is super useful.

I start at 160 watts and again,

that's for the entire system,

so there's probably 70ish watts

that has nothing to do with the CPU.

But I've already come from 160 down to 135.

So I think if we keep this going,

we'll probably be in the right realm

for what the consoles can handle.

This is basically the same thing as overclocking,

except it's in reverse.

So if we lower too much voltage,

it will start crashing just the way it would

if we try to push the system too far.

So we have now crossed into my magic green threshold

of that's actually roughly console spec.

I can probably get a little bit more power out of it.

Even though I'm lowering the power,

we're still running at the same clock speed, right?

So this is literally getting the exact same performance

but just undervolting the CPU.

We're down to 34 watts.

That's gotta be good.

I think a console can pretty easily sustain that.

Okay, so I think a speed like 3.2

is very, very doable on a console.

So what I'm going to do now

is I'm gonna validate it a little bit more

and make sure that we're not going to see

any additional crashing.

And from there, it's time to actually test

to see how well this games with the console spec CPU.

So let's take a couple of games that are out right now

on current generation consoles

and see what it takes to get them running at 4K60,

maybe even 120 frames per second.

All right, so Metro Exodus is actually a fairly modern game,

so I'm just gonna jump it straight to 4K, ultra.

So where we're at right now

is that this is the Ryzen 7 3700X

which is running at 3.2 gigahertz

which is, I think, pretty close to the console spec

and we have our 15 frames per second.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

Oh, are you recording right now?

Okay, so I'm in the middle of testing Metro

and I'm getting some really weird numbers

and now I'm getting some crashing.

Which makes me think maybe I was a little bit too aggressive

with my underclock.

There's definitely some weirdness with Metro Exodus

but we are able to get frame rates that are

what I would consider to be well above

what we can get on the current generation of consoles

without any real penalties.

I mean, right now, say like 1440p seems like it's probably

going to be the sweet spot here.

If we really do wanna aim for that 60FPS plus experience.

So that is actually pretty solid.

So I'm gonna put Metro Exodus aside for a second

since that's given me lots of weird errors

and the numbers just don't make any sense,

but in Shadow of War, we've actually got 4K60.

We got a 64 frame per second run.

Now mind you, that is turning the settings down

to medium, so running on full ultra settings,

it's closer to 40 frames per second.

But this is still a big step up over current consoles.

That's reassuring.

I feel better about this entire project now.

'Cause it would suck, I'm like,

"This is gonna be the PS5!"

And then I put it together, and it's like, "Oh, wait.

"This sucks."

So the next thing I'm gonna try

is hitting 120 frames per second.

So both of the consoles should

in theory support it

and some TV's such as the VIZIO that we recently

took a look at do support a full 120 hertz.

It's super smooth and I think as long as we

probably bump things down to 1080p,

we actually might be able to hit it.

Oh, look at that.

Wow.

So literally bumping down to 1080p,

we're well above 120 frames per second.

155, 160.

And this is very much CPU dependent

because generally speaking,

with the current generation of consoles,

hitting those higher frame rates

is very difficult with their weak CPU's.

With Ryzen here, even with it being underclocked,

we're having no problems going

well, well above 100 frames per second.

That is awesome, that's actually better than I thought.

And honestly, I think it's a perfectly reasonable trade off.

If you want the higher quality you can run it at 4K

and get your decent frame rates,

but if you do have a display

which can take advantage of 120 frames or more,

then actually bumping the resolution down

to something like 1080p seems totally reasonable.

You can see all the marketing stuff

of, "Oh, it supports 120 frames per second,

"or 60 or 4K, whatever, blah, blah, blah."

But this is actually real numbers.

Now obviously, all of this video

has to be taken with a big grain of salt.

But we are working with a very similar CPU,

and the graphics, as far as I'm concerned,

are probably going to be pretty similar

to what we can expect

with this next gen console.

We have the PCIe 4.0 SSD,

which, side note, all of these benchmarks

and games and stuff have been loading really fast.

But this is very much in the sort of realm

of what I think we can really expect to see

when these consoles go on sale next year.