PC Builder Proves You Can Game Without Touching the Usual Trio of Intel, NVIDIA and AMD

When it comes to building a new gaming computer, PC enthusiasts must make a difficult decision. They often go for processors and graphics cards from the same three companies (Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD) that have dominated this market for years, but one man wanted to deviate from that tried-and-true approach. He was intrigued to see if it was possible to build a complete gaming PC capable of running recent Windows games without using any of the main three household names.

GPUSpecs walks viewers through the entire process, from the moment the parts arrive in simple boxes to the final machine booting up for the first time on a desk. The brain of this operation is a CPU from Zhaoxin, a Chinese business with x86 origins dating back to VIA and Cyrix. Moore Threads, another Chinese company renowned for manufacturing workstation cards rather than gaming beasts, is providing graphics support for this CPU. The remaining components are slotted into place, and the system boots directly into Windows 11.

The processor utilized in this project is called the KaiXian KX-7000. It has 8 cores and 8 threads and can clock up to 3.6 GHz. In addition, it supports AVX2 instructions. The motherboard that came with it is the ASUS XC-KX700M D4, a tiny MicroATX board designed exclusively for this CPU. Together, these two cost roughly $500, indicating that this endeavor was not a budget hack, but rather a purposeful experiment.

Getting the memory right proved much more difficult than imagined. The builder began with two sticks of 8GB Micron DDR4 operating at 3200MHz, but when he attempted to load up the system, it simply displayed a 2E error on the board. That’s when he realized he needed to swap out the memory and utilize a single 16GB Samsung workstation stick with the same clock speed and voltage. Making that update permitted the system to boot, but only in single channel mode, not two channel. The cooler’s simple installation was a pleasant relief; a basic Thermalright Assassin King 120 that fits right into the board’s LGA-style socket with common screws.

He utilized an old 1.92TB Patriot SSD from another rig for storage. He chose a NZXT H5 Flow case for this build because of its highly open architecture, which provided plenty of room for the long graphics card and MicroATX board. An MSI 650 watt unit powers everything, and it comes with all of the cables you’ll need, including an adapter cable for the graphics card’s eight-pin socket.

After laying out all of the parts on the bench, he only needed a few minutes to put the project together. The processor dropped into the socket, the cooling clamped down, the memory snapped in, and the drive was attached. The next step was to connect the front panel headers, power wires, and graphics card in the proper order. When he first pressed the power button, all he received was a RAM error. After a quick memory swap, the system booted and made it to the Windows setup screen after he downloaded some drivers from the Zhaoxin and Moore Threads websites; however, he needed to use a temporary USB adapter for the Ethernet, but once the drivers were loaded, everything worked perfectly.

The Moore Threads MTT S80 graphics card powers this setup, and it’s a nice piece of hardware, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, a clock speed of 1.8 gigahertz, and only an 8-pin connection for power. It has two, three DisplayPorts, and one HDMI port, which is standard for every gamer’s setup. Of course, the BIOS has DirectX 12 and the Resize BAR option on by default, which is good. Let’s be honest: the early condition of its drivers and the processor’s age are holding it back. You can see the results for yourself: Geekbench returned 789 for single-core and 3,344 for multi-core, but Cinebench R23 returned 570 for single-core and 4,432 for multi-core. Then there is 3DMark, which scores 3,682 for graphics and 3,625 for CPU. Overall, it’s about where mid-range processors were a few years ago: it’ll run Windows without issue, but don’t expect any records.
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