I am finally going to replace my electrical spiked Desktop with AMD Ryzen or a Theardripper by the end of the second quarter. I am finally fed up with having only a laptop available and there are a lot of projects I would like to do but I can’t because of the limited memory and cores that are available on my laptop, So I have set a time limit for my self, I am waiting to see if the rumors are true about Zen 2. I hope they are. Enough chit chatting down to business.
My top limit on my budget is $8,000 USA dollars, I don’t see how I can justify spending any more than that to my self. I live in the eastern part of USA. I don’t have any particular retailer In mind except for two parts that are on my list, monitor and UPS, I will only purchase those locally from Microcenter. I don’t have a gaming keyboard or mouse. I always wanted one but I never purchased one. I need new desktop speakers and a new Monitor to replace the monitor I had ( It was destroyed by an experiment with Linux). I guess now would be the perfect time to mention what I am going to do with my new desktop, once I get it together.
What I am trying to accomplish is really three different computers into one. I have very limited space so anything tasks that I what to accomplish with my new computer has to be done on one desktop.
I am a big gaming hobbyist, I like to play games, my favorite is MMO’s like SWTOR, Guild Wars (In fact I had almost finished that one before they closed down the server to make room for Guild Wars 2), and Star Wars Galaxies. There are a few others I would like to try but they don’t run very well on my laptop and require several gigabytes of storage space. another reason I haven’t tried them is I already have the maximum size SSD my laptop can support. I guess I had better get back to explaining what I task I would like to try that I can’t currently because either the tasks required more corses or memory that I don’t have.
I would be in pig haven if I could afford an AMD EPYC system, but since I can’t, I need to find some other way to make a great virtualization server and have the ability to run as may virtualize servers I want, within reason, at the same time. Well because it is late and this post is already really long I will answer the rest of the question in very brief answers.
I have at times thought of getting into overclocking, it isn’t something I would try unless I had another desktop to fall back on, just in case, I destroyed something and didn’t have a backup. I learned my lesson in that front after I destroyed my monitor after I was messing around with Linux and set some setting in Linux which caused one of the backlights in my monitor to stop functioning. At least I think that is the problem. I am planning to create a custom water system, but I am willing to put that plan on hold if that would be a better use of my money to get me closer to my other goals. The reason my build has to SSD and two different manufacturers is at first I plan on dual booting Windows and Linux and then when I feel comfortable I will be using KVM to turn this desktop into a Window virtual machine. If you have any more questions I didn’t cover or just want to talk about this build just ask. I have enclosed a pc part picker part list below.
<a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/list/VMf6V6">PCPartPicker part list</a> / <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/list/VMf6V6/by_merchant/">Price breakdown by merchant</a>
I have two suggestions. (1) Order yourself a Smart-UPS from APC because history dictates that you really need one and… (2) think very strongly about dropping the 10Tb single drive for 5 3Tb drives in RAID-5
Difference in price is minimal (for what you are doing) and same capacity with superior redundancy
I didn’t see a power supply though. Do you have anything in mind? Seasonic Focus Plus 650W Gold 10years warranty…
That GPU have an extremely bad cooler. It is crazy hot and the fans need to run like crazy to cool it down.
Threadripper?
NVME SSD?
I guess it wasn’t just a couple of things…
There’s no such thing. But U12S could do the job just fine. I use Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240 Lite on 1700X and with silent 30% fans and 40% pump it doesn’t go over 50C with Prime95… And the AIO I bought for 50€ new…
I was thinking of getting a Smart-UPS but for the size I need they start out at about $500 USD and go up from there, I agree with you I would be better off with a Smart-UPS. Would I need a raid card to setup 5 3TB drives in Raid -5? I suppose If I lowered my ram size from 64GB to 32GB that would give me more money to spend on a Smart-UPS.
The question that I have for you is “Is 500US good insurance knowing that the potential to lose a 2000USD + PC to the electrical grid.” My bet is on yes. If you have a Gov’t DRMO or a enterprise surplus shop, you can pick up an APC SmartUPS 1500 for anywhere from 5 USD to 20 USD a piece. These are without batteries. The batteries will cost between 5-100 USD. I have two and paid 14USD for the UPS sans batteries. Bets investment ever more so than Data Backups if you ask me.
Thanks for the advice @MazeFrame, but since I need my new desktop at least in the first three years to run super stable I won’t be tempting overclocking the APU, not at least until the first three years have passed, so the stock cooler will serve my needs.
I have a 1 Terabyte cloud storage to backup my important files. And I have dropped the 10 Terabyte and add five 3 Terabyte drives to set up in Raid-5, as @ropestretcher has suggested.
Thanks for letting me know about the bad cooler on the MSI - GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Video Card, What else would you recommend at the $550 to $650 USD price range.
The reason I decided to not go with Threadripper or AMD new server CPU, is the Threadripper would add at least another $1000 to $1500 USD to the final bill, but don’t worry I have a workload in mind that will require Threadripper because of the increased PCI throughput the Treadripper give you over the Ryzen 7, so I decided to build a Ryzen 7 build to tied me over until I could afford a Threadripper build.
I had to make a choice, two 1Terabye NVME’s would stretch my budget to the breaking point, so I went with a cheaper option.
I can’t really recommend anything. This card I know of, because I was looking at black and white GPUs for my own build and MSI Armor was an option. And then I encountered like a billion issues with 1080 armor. The card is not bad, the cooler is.
It shouldn’t. I mean they slashed prices a couple days ago, the boards aren’t that crazy more expensive, and I think you can still run dual channel ram…
No dude, just get a 256 or something for the most speed sensitive things and use sata for the rest. Sata is still decently cheaper and most use scenarios still work fine even on the mechanical drives.
For your consideration:
I use 2x UPS’s. The new 1000VA has only my PSU plugged into it.
The old 650VA powers everything else - screen, network, sound, printer, etc.
Unrelated tip: Keep a lamp plugged into the UPS.
When the power went out I was the only house in my neighborhood with lighting for 12 hours.
Thanks for the advice, I am still going to stick with the regular SSD. I will be running several Virtual Machines, and a regular hard drive is so slow running virtual machines on it, would drive me crazy.
Also, I will be running Windows 10 and Linux Fedora 27 or Linux Ubuntu 17.10 in a dual booting setup. If one looks at my original spec sheet you will see I planned on buying two regular 1 Terabyte SSD’s and 1 10 Terabyte hard drive. Thanks to the advice from @ropestretcher I have since changed my mind and decided to purchase 5 3TB hard drive and set them up in a Raid -5 or Raid-10 configuration. Keep in mind my original budget was $4,000 USD it has since grown to almost $5,000 USD and I can’t justify increasing my budget any further. I agree with you NVME SSD would be nice I just can’t justify the increase in the budget for two 1TB NVME SSDs. Just for giggles, I have inserted a spec List which includes the changes @psycho_666 suggested put replacing two 256GB NVME SSD’s and replacing Ryzen 7 1700 APU with Threadripper. https://pcpartpicker.com/user/aaronkitchen/saved/#view=rwg4CJ
I have done some more research and have decided against the advice of @ropestretcher and instead of purchasing 5 3TB drives and seeing up a Raid system, instead one 10 TB devided into logical drives. If I where setting up a server or a stand alone system, I would see the advantage.
I would by another 10TiB drive just to ensure that you can backup the storage. The rule of thumb is, what ever you intend to use, you need a backup of at least the same size.
Yes, I pick to different manufacturers for the SSD, so when I finally get tired of dual booting Windows 10 Pro and Linux, I will have an easier time setting up Windows in a Virtual environment under Linux. Also, I will take the SSD that I used first for Windows and passthrough that drive to the virtualized Windows environment. I know I will need another Graphics card when I get ready to set up a virtualized Windows environment. I am kind of leaning toward Nvidia’s Quadro series or something like that to avoid all the problems with Nvidia running in a virtual environment. but I have heard if I go that route, I will be spending anywhere between $4,000 to $6,000 for one card and buying them used isn’t an option because of the special drivers’ that are needed aren’t transferable to the new owner.