Need advice on planned 5700G build

Hardware Build a PC
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Budget - Keep under 1,201.00 USD

Location - Appalachia (America)

Preferred Retailer - Amazon & B&H, no recent (last 10 or so years) experiance with Newegg

Peripherals - Already have what I want

PC Purpose - General purpose (aka Power-user/ Tab-Hoarder) & Low/Mid-level Gaming

Over-clocking - Maybe, how much performance do I stand to gain (%)

Water-cooling - Never (Air-cooling ONLY)

Operating System - Linux w/Windows virtualized

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor $319.00 @ Newegg
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12A 60.09 CFM CPU Cooler $109.95 @ Amazon
Motherboard MSI MPG B550I GAMING EDGE WIFI Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard $209.00 @ B&H
Memory G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory $149.99 @ Newegg
Case Cooler Master MasterBox NR200 Mini ITX Desktop Case $79.99 @ B&H
Power Supply Cooler Master V SFX Gold 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply $124.99 @ Amazon
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total (before mail-in rebates) $1002.92
Mail-in rebates -$10.00
Total $992.92
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-10-17 22:43 EDT-0400

Hi,

I need a new main computer, the only parts Iā€™m kind of married to are a CPU with plenty of cores & decent integrated graphics(5700G?), that can later be married to a decent GPU( 6800 XT?), intergrated WiFi 6, 32 GB or 64 GB of system RAM (PCPP link for a good (duel rank, 3600) 2x32GB kit would be appreciated) and a small, easy to work-in case(NR200?).

I will be buying/building 4 of these for my use-case, so rebates and such are not applicable.

I already have a good 2TB PCIe.3 SSD that I got on sale, so iā€™m not including it in the list/cost.

I may want to upgrade this to a Ryzen 5800X & Radeon 6800 XT when/if prices normalize, what provisions would I need in anticipation of that?

2

Good parts list. Excellent case; has room for expansion.
I recently did a build in that case with 5950X and 6800XT.

64GB is better. Especially if you intend to run multiple VMs.

Good plan. No other changes necessary.

The sad truth for anyone updating from an older PC to a new build this year is that the NVMe drive is likely to be the largest performance improvement. CPUs are simply not much faster than they were eight years ago (Haswell).

More cores help reduce lag, of course.

More RAM helps everything.

Nawā€¦ from this engineerā€™s POV, overclocking is silly unless you donā€™t care about money and are just doing it for fun. If you do care, then the chip engineers have already told you the performance envelope that will give your components long life. You can trust them; they are not the marketing department.

(Tip: Under-volting may actually be a better plan: Less heat with only modest performance cost.)

OK, I mostly agree with that. I see only two use cases where the argument in favor of liquid cooling is stronger:

  1. Portability. Hanging a heavy cooler off the motherboard puts a lot of stress on the board, which is exacerbated by vibration from frequent movement. This is not a problem for moving your case around home or office, but could add up if you carry the case frequently.

(An ITX mobo will be stronger than a larger board, so you might get away with a large air cooler. I donā€™t know anyone who has tried this, and I donā€™t know a good way to test it. That said, I went for a liquid cooler in my NR200 build specifically because of the weight thing. Iā€™ll let you know in 5-10 years if it leaks.)

  1. When you need more than one radiator. In this case, a custom loop liquid cooling system offers more cooling capacity than you can ever get from an air cooler. Wendell did a cool vid on this use case recently.

If you can wait a year or so for any of those four PCs, you might get substantially more bang-for-your-buck with the next generation. Both Intel and AMD will support DDR5 and PCIe5, along with faster processors.

This was not on PCPartPicker when I built mine, but it is a good 64GB kit that is low profile (so should fit under your air cooler). (American manufacturer):

Other thoughts

  1. A GearGrip carry handle allows you to carry your NR200 with one hand. I wish that more ITX cases had built-in handles.
  1. I needed a single 15mm-thin (120mm) fan for the top of the case above my sfx PSU. The 25mm-thick fan that came with the case was just a couple of mm too thick.
  1. I also used a fan splitter cable:

Overall, youā€™re on a good path.

3

More is better, obviously, but youā€™ll be sacrificing timing to go to 2x32gb if you want to maintain that 3600mhz.

Click on my username and have a look at my featured thread, its a build thatā€™s incredibly similar to what youā€™re looking to do. I can answer any questions you have. And tight timings show more when using an APU than just a traditional CPU.

AMD doesnā€™t really leave a whole lot on the table. You might be able to eek a bit out of the GPU with the 5700g, but the CPUs usually boost damn near their limits without user intervention.

Just make sure the power supply is beefy and the case will support the GPU, physically.

I have a corsair 750w on my 5700g/6900xt itx build and it works fine. Max power is about 550 from the plug according to my ups.

This memory is 3200mhz not 3600mhz. That will make a noticeable difference with the APU.

While this is true, a unified hardware approach can provide a much easier time maintaining the systems. A hodgepodge can be difficult.

Iā€™m getting the feeling these systems will be used in some manner of internet cafe type thing?

Liquid cooling should only be used when noise and thermal performance cannot be achieved with air cooling. My ITX is nearly silent while playing vr games in the living room, thanks to the water cooled components.

Yes, storage is benchmarking much faster, but my windows VM plays games off a sata ssd, and it performs just as well as when it was on a pcie3 nvme. Iā€™m not convinced of the necessity of 5 digit random read speeds.

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Ok, mITX and NR200 with no water cooling - why? That is a 20 liter case built to support huge radiators and a few SATA drives, and I think I have seen mATX cases smaller than that.

That Noctua cooler is utter overkill, the 5700G can easily be cooled with the NH-L12S as can the 5800X, and that saves you $60.

If space is your main reason for going small, then I recommend the Sliger Conswole. It costs $179 but has free shipping within the U.S. Sold separately, yes slightly more expensive, but for the space savings, very worth it.

Here is the PCPP I would pick for this:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5700G $319.00
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-L12S $54.95
Motherboard Gigabyte B550I AORUS PRO AX $209.99
Memory G.Skill Ripjaws V 2x16 GB DDR4-3600 CL19 $116.99
Storage Western Digital Blue 2 TB M.2-2280 $179.99
Power Supply Cooler Master V SFX Gold 750W $124.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total $1005.91
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-10-18 04:47 EDT-0400
5

Take note: I think someone complained recently here in the forums that the 5700G CPU does not support PCIe 4.0 - the SOC Radeon graphics is only only compatible with the PCIe 3.0 standard so the whole pipeline is forced at the 3.0 standard.

Keep that in mind if you plan to get a PCIe 4.0 SSD. It cant run PCIe any 4.0 components despite it being a B550.

6

Yes, this is very true - however, it is also only really relevant if you want to upgrade the machine significantly down the line.

Realistically this is only a problem if you plan on installing an 8x PCIe card like the 6600 XT - and then that will only bottleneck you like 5% in some specific titles. For 16x 3.0 there are still no bottlenecks.

As for drives, currently PCIe 4.0 gen 4 drives add pretty much nothing over a 3.0 drive, gen 4 saves maybe 3-5 seconds per day over a 3.0 drive on a daily workload. This is significant if you run an Exabyte storage datacenter, but not for your average consumer / workstation.

Not saying 4.0 is worthless, just that itā€™s a very minor concern for now in the consumer market. If you can get a 4.0 cheaper than a 3.0, or at like $10 difference, go for it, but otherwise most people should save on the 4.0 premium for now.

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I am just concerned with @Zedrick buying a PCIe 4.0 SSD expecting a 4.0 speed benchmark but getting a PCIe 3.0 speed.

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I know, AM5 socket, DDR5, PCIe5 & 3D V-Cache etc. These 4 machines are to replace 4 Penryn based machines currently in use by several users, with the current shortages and uncertainty of how long these current machines will hold on (the youngest one was made in 2011), I was waiting a generation or two into Ryzen before committing and might as well grab some of the best that the AM4 platform will offer presumably.

9

what would the performance difference be between a 32GB w/16-19-19-39 & 64GB w/16-22-22-42?

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I want to future-proof this as much as possible, within reason

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I was aware of this

fyi the SSDā€™s in question are 4 ā€˜SK hynix Gold P31 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen3 M.2 2280ā€™ that I got on sale on August 23rd

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My main concerns are the RAM and the mother board. I want to go with 32GB kits for 3 of the unites and a 64GB kit for my personal PC, I canā€™t find out if the 64GB kit is Duel Rank or not, but I presume it is

The mother boardā€¦

Mini-ITX
WiFi6

But then do I go with B550 or X570?

Which brand? Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte or MSI?

Which one one is more reliable? which ones can have the bios update with a USB drive (I have no old Ryzen CPUs lying around for possible necessary bios updates)

13

Just a heads-up, if you plan on having a Windows VM and you want to do PCI-E passthrough (pass a GPU to the VM), then you should look at x570 motherboards. Someone on the forum pointed out in another thread that B550 doesnā€™t have great IOMMU splitting. Canā€™t confirm, nor deny, thatā€™s just what I heard read.

If passthrough is not an issue, ignore this comment.

14

Yes, that is a safe bet for any large memory these days.

I wouldnā€™t worry about the timings on the 64GB kit. I highly doubt that you could tell the difference without benchmarking even if the kits were the same size. Doubling memory will increase performance regardless of the timings.

You CAN get 64GB memory in 3600 kits, but I could not find any that were low profile.

If you do not use low profile memory, then check the height compared to the clearance of your cooler. The memory sticks will be directly beneath a large cooler.

Choices in ITX mobos were limited when I looked. I went by reviews, which led me to ASUS, a brand that has always worked for me. Spec-wise, I recall that Gigabyte looked good as well, but the reviews were less favorable.

The B550 boards are newer than most x570s, so you may actually find features that you want on the B550 boards. The main reason for x570 is full support for PCIe 4.0, which isnā€™t terribly important at the current state of the art. It might make a difference for NVMe drives sometime in the futureā€¦ maybe.

(Bikyā€™s comment about VMs might be relevant if you add a GPU in the future. On the other hand, motherboards are inexpensive compared to GPUs (currently), so it might be feasible to upgrade both in the future. IF, in fact, the IOMMU splitting thing becomes an issue.)

15

The QVL of the RAM you specified claims that they are supported with the MSI B550I but the reverse isnt true. Soā€¦ You are probably fine?

Woah there, cowboy! few months ago, I wouldnt blink at this but the AMD made a retarded decision to call their new line of mobos X570S. I saw the lower case that you typed, but these days, IMHO, you have to rephrase stuff because of the stupid model name.

16

How else would you like me to rephrase the plural of x570?

But, okā€¦ I get your point. I meant, ā€œplural of x570ā€.

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I understand. But the NH-L12S is enough to cool even the 5950X, and if rumors are to be believed there will be one last Huzzah for the AM4 platform this winter, with a Zen 3+ refresh - and those should have a lower TDP than their Zen 3 counterparts, if history is to tell anything. So it is highly unlikely you will be needing a new cooler until you buy an AM5 motherboard regardless.

It is your money, but even the low profile coolers are now good enough for top end AM4 CPUs. The L12S should provide plenty of cooling, as for AM5, who knows?

[Edit]After finding some solid evidence that the L12S is too weak for stock, I go back on my previous statement. The L12S is not enough for the 5950x, unless you want to run it in eco mode. You can still find an adequate cooler for 50 bucks or less though.[/edit]

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I think he was being facetious.

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Source? I would love to believe it, if itā€™s true. But Noctua rates NH-L12S as 88 ā€œNSPRā€, while NH-U12S is 129. (NSPR roughly means ā€œwatts TDPā€).

https://noctua.at/en/noctua-standardised-performance-rating

20

Other than the above amazing tips and ideas. Here are my 2 cents.

I would switch the CPU to a 5600X. Ditch the Noctua fan for 90$ Bequiet AIO (combination cpu and cooler I use). The CPU downgrade so you have a little money for a dedicated graphics card. Yes these are quite expensive and all right now but in the end it will pay off, like really. The graphics card can be second or first hand something 1050 or maybe a RX460.

I run the pc way quieter than with air cooling and I donā€™t have to be scared of overheating when Undervolting the CPU. Yes undervolting. That way I get more performance overhead so the CPU can clock higher. Mine runs about at 4,2Ghz. VCORE set to 1.16, if I remember correctly.

Do you want to go ITX? Because if you donā€™t you can get an X570 or X470 board with that kind of price so your CPU can properly OC and such. And more features and better support.

It doesnā€™t really matter which PSU you run. Iā€™m still running a 400W Coolmax(or something) PSU from my first PC(2011). Works buttery smooth. And I even used in my server 2015-17.
So, something quite good, silver certification probably is good, mine was bronze And then about 500-600W as you donā€™t draw more than that. You wont be playing with a 3090 in it but games with a 1050 will run.

I hope I could enlighten you.

Hope you have a great endavour!