I’m looking to fill up my DR ZĄBER SENTRY 2.0 case and looking at Wendell video I came up with this Pc Part picker List my budget is around £1.300 to £1.500, it will run a flavour of Linux (60% Arch, 40% Ubuntu) the main task of this PC will be web development with a couple of VM/docker/vagrant at the time and on time to time some gaming.
Is that list still the best bang for the buck?
Regards
Jaba
You’ll want to bump that up to 3600 on the RAM
You’ll want the NH-L9a, it has more fins and a bigger baseplate and mounting hardware for AMD
Your list has the NH-L9i which is for intel
Owner of 3 Sentry’s here, two 1.0 and one 2.0. I also have the 80plus gold version of that psu and I recommend getting custom cables for the psu, but at minimum I’d get a 8 pin extender for the cpu power. I have always routed mine under the motherboard and out the side by the cpu power connector (opposite side from the pcie slot on most boards). Its one less cable to try to route up and over everything. Also you may want to consider lower profile or non-RGB ram, like Corsair LPX. The 24pin connector right there next to tall memory can make it a pain to route 24 pin bundle. It has to make basically a 180 degree turn immediately after leaving the psu, chances are it will hang over top the ram a bit and make it hard to close the case lid. Also, maybe consider the 5700 non-XT. In my experience, having crammed a GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and GTX 1080ti in my sentries, I say 150W TDP is really the sweet spot, maybe 180W. After that it’s totally diminishing returns as your big powerful gpu won’t be able to boost to it’s fullest due to temperature constraints. Though if you opt for the XT, the blower card is a good choice. My GTX 1080FE stayed pretty cool after putting some premium thermal paste under the heatsink and running a pretty aggressive fan curve, along with a handy application of weatherstripping. See my many posts on it in the [H]ardforum thread for Sentry 1.0 and Sentry 2.0
Thank you both for the tips, I picked the ram almost at random because I didn’t want to to go through the mobo manual and check for compatibility at the moment, @ej24 I was already contemplating the idea of installing everything in the case measure the best/minimal cable route and then buy custom cables of the exact length.
If you already have the hardware, do a test fit and see how it goes. I don’t have any rgb ram so I have no idea how tall it is. All my sentry systems are using ultra low profile ddr3 so I had fewer issues than some with fancy, taller ddr4. Custom cables aren’t 100% necessary but if you have the budget for it, it really cleans things up and can remove clutter. Maneuvering custom, individually sleeved cables is also easier though iirc the platinum corsair psu comes with individually sleeved cables? So you may have better luck with stock cables. The gold has stiff ribbons, so custom cables were a godsend for me.
Also I have no experience with the 5700 or 5700xt, only a handful of people over at Hardforum.com have used them in Sentry afaik. Again, if you already have everything, see how it goes. Worst case scenario you can undervolt or lower power target.
just to end the thread I bought all those components and they all fitted nicely in the case.
I had only a strange problem Manjaro would work perfectly, but I could not even finish the installation of windows 2 of every 3 time I tried and the third time crashed immediately, after almost a month of trial and error I end up discovering that the default configuration of my Gigabyte motherboard is not compatible with my gigabyte graphics card to fix it I had to set:
Settings -> Miscellaneous -> PCIe Slot Configuration: Gen3
Settings -> IO Ports -> PCIEX16 Bifurcation: PCIE 4x4
Jaba
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