Rusty PC Builder here, looking for advise on my first beast build in 10 years

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Hi there! I’m looking for some help with my build.

I’ve not built a PC for almost 10 years due to various reasons, but I’m finally planning to build again, I’m planning to use this monster as my main secondary computer. It will be running probably proxmox for some AI workloads and as hot storage before it goes to my main NAS.

No budget constraints, I’m worried mainly about these points:

  • Power calculation - weather or not 1 power supply will support the build or if I need 2 power supplies. I’m hoping I can get away with 1 power supply
  • If I need 2 power supplies, then a case that supports 2 power supplies and it will affect my motherboard choice which can support 2 power supplies
  • I prefer air cooled, and I need advice if the case and cpu cooling will be sufficient

Here’s the parts:

PSU: Leaving this blank and need help with this.

CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5975WX —> I Don’t NEED 64 cores… but If I can purchase the 64 Core part, then I MIGHT consider…
Cooler: Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 82.52 CFM CPU Cooler (I want to add a second fan to it)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 256 GB (8 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory → Any advise on this anyone with experience?

Motherboard:
Option 1 : Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI II → I really love Asus’s quality and I have had good experience with Asus and also because I’ve seen many builds online using this platform
Option 2: ASRock WRX80 Creator → Probably only If I need 2 power supplies, But any advice if this should be my primary?

GPUs - These components are fixed
2 x NVIDIA a6000 ADA
1 x NVIDIA 4090

CASE (Any first hand experience advise on my choices?)

If Single Power Supply, I’m considering:

  1. Fractal Torrent (PCI Slots : 2x2 slot cards, and 1x3 slot card… Is it a tight fit?)
  2. Define 7 XL
  3. Fractal Define XL R2
    Case: If Dual Power Supply if needed:
    I found this… and some LianLi… but not sure… only want to go here if really needed - Phanteks ENTHOO 719 BK

Any advise on the parts would be gerat, I’ll adjust it as I get more advise. I’m really hoping to keep it as 1 PSU build as well as Air cooled. Thanks!

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… What?

You are about to buy a Ferrari for grocery shopping and church trips. A much better option would probably be a Ryzen 7950X with 64 GB of RAM and a mirrored 4 TB NVMe setup here. Also add a 4090 for the AI.

PC market has changed quite a bit since 2012.

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I can’t use the 4090 on its own, I need 60+ GB vram for working on AI models.

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hahahah :smiley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbGfc-JBxlY (gamers nexus video)
i’d consider asus currently THE WORST motherboard manufacturer and that includes experience of the last 2 boards i had to buy as asus was the only manufacturer, who had the am4 specs on it that i needed.

one of those boards, that i ended up returning was the asus x570 dark hero, which had a start up issue, where it wouldn’t start up, unless you do a full psu power down first sometimes. forum about about this:

now you might think: “oh well unlucky, just get a replacement board from asus and all good”
nope :smiley:
in the forum post i linked, that has 131615 views and 638 replies, it gets VERY VERY clear, that asus has no interest in adressing the problem.
this is the biggest asus forum post ever btw by a lot.

they will rma the boards and return the same board or a different board and the issue is either still there or it will develop again in a few months usually.

remember this isn’t a small issue, the high end straight up won’t turn on.
if you don’t have a power button on the psu, you actually gotta tear the cable out and plug it back in to get the computer to work again :smiley:

asus also REFUSED to state the results of their investigation on what the actual cause of the problem is.

so and i dare to hypothesize here.
they KNOW EXACTLY what the cause is and they KNOW, that it could potentially mean lots and lots of boards to replace hardware on for customers.
so instead of adressing the problem, they will just let it run out and show a middle finger to customers.

now this was with a giant forum post and lots of light shining onto the problem.

so when you get an asus board, that very few people in comparison, do you think, that asus will adress problems, that you have with it? :wink:

now you like i did might not have that many options maybe, but if you can at all avoid asus motherboards, that may not start up at all, underperform, FRY YOUR CPU by running WAY TO HIGH soc voltage and more, i’d certainly do so.

1 x NVIDIA 4090

as this is fixed for you, i would suggest a psu or psus, that do NOT have 12 pins on the psu side at least to reduce risk of damage. one dangerous connector on one side of the graphics card is better than having it on both sides at least…
and yes they still keep on melting and nvidia and pci-sig only put out a small revision, that doesn’t even adress the insane wiggle room of the connector…

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maybe look up asrock.
they have been earning a reputation as a solid board manufacturer.
they still have a policy of delivering more bang for your buck than any competitor.
if not then gigabyte or msi would be better alternatives to asus.
(they have become the razor of motherboard manufacturers)

sure they look pretty, but there also over priced.
add in the poor quality bios updates for ddr5 and yeah you might want to try another board manufacturer. :frowning:

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Thanks @pega and @anon7678104 for the advice regarding Asus.

I’ll consider the ASRock Motherboard instead

  • ASRock WRX80 Creator
    Due to the issues I’m hearing about Asus.

I’m still trying to understand if I can pull this build off with 1 power supply,
and additionally, with these 3 cards, which case would it fit.

I was looking at Fractal Design:

  • Fractal Torrent (PCI Slots : 2x2 slot cards, and 1x3 slot card… Is it a tight fit?)
  • Fractal Define 7 XL
  • Fractal Define XL R2
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Threadripper seems to have a lot of memory issues especially once you try to populate all DIMMs so you might want to look into that more carefully. You also likely want to have ECC RAM especially when you’re dealing with “large” amounts of RAM. You need very good airflow for Threadripper boards as VRMs runs very hot and the motherboards are usually designed for racks with high airflow fans blowing across the board. This is very hard to achieve in a regular case even in good ones such as Fractal Designs R or XL series. There are multiple threads about this issue on the forums.

As far as brand “fanboy-ism” goes every manufacturer have good and bad boards so I’d highly recommend that you review it on model level rather than by brand. ASRock have released quite a few subpar models/duds too so it’s not all roses.

While I’m not familiar with your workload you might want to look into how AVX512 support affects your applications as it might substantially improve performance as the Threadripper is based on Zen 3 thus lacks this instruction set. You can of course compensate that with additional cores to some extent but better power efficiency helps a lot in many ways.

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Oh wow nice to see someone returning to PC building after 10 years what was in your rig, core 2 quad? Nehalem?

Cpus actually from 10 years ago

Screenshot_20230812-044645
Screenshot_20230812-0446451080×412 32.4 KB

Oh no I’m old, haswell is still new and recent right my fellow kids

fellowkids
fellowkids900×720 84.9 KB

Asus is t what it used to be, support is slow and sparse
It took just about a year for them to fix the issue with 1TB of RAM, and the first revision still doesn’t have PBO support on 5xxx chips

The ASRock board had PBO out of the box, some people don’t like the new revision’s Nic but other than that it’s my favorite WRX80 board

It let me pump extra watts into the chip and raise the turbo limit via PBO and let those watts go further by making it more efficient with the curve optimizer

I’m not a fan of liquid cooling but a 5975wx was really pushing the u14s and you want the full fat 64 core

If you can get a case where the motherboard is horizontal (laying down) then you can get the ice giant thermosyphon, but it only works in certain orientations

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Haha @GigaBusterEXE OMG Close! My last rig was a i7-3770K :rofl:

I’ve been doing a bit more research, and as what @diizzy also mentioned, the VRMs and as well as for the CPU, air cooling is going to be tricky.

I’m REALLY not comfortable with a custom loop for water cooling but I wouldn’t mind a all in one liquid cooling solution and I found 2 contenders:

Enermax Liqtech TR4 II 360 Addressable RGB AIO CPU Liquid Cooler
or
CORSAIR iCUE H170i ELITE CAPELLIX Liquid CPU Cooler

Anyone has experience with these 2?

Looking back my case choices, horizontal is out for me. If I add in liquid cooling, it would seem that the Fractal Define 7 XL would be a larger / safer choice, but I’m wondering if I could still squeese it all within the Fractal Torrent case… more research for me.

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If you must go TR then might be worth it to wait a couple of months, there is rumor that AMD will soon announce a Zen 4 TR which might run cooler than your current lineup.

I still think a 7950X build would suit your use case a lot better, let me show you;

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X $589.99
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-D15 $109.95
Motherboard MSI MEG X670E ACE $639.99
Memory Corsair Vengeance 2x32 GB DDR5-6600 CL32 $230.00
Memory Corsair Vengeance 2x32 GB DDR5-6600 CL32 $230.00
Storage Western Digital Black SN850X 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 $289.99
Video Card PNY RTX A-Series RTX A6000 48 GB $3995.00
Video Card PNY VERTO GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB $1789.99
Case Fractal Design Define 7 XL Light $439.10
Power Supply SeaSonic PRIME PX 1600 W $399.34
Total $8713.35

So, essentially the money you save on NOT going Threadripper could be spent on another A6000 instead of having to use the 24G 4090. The x8+x8 PCIe 5.0 split is not going to matter - it is fast enough for Hopper and it is fast enough for Hopper+3, too. Not to mention you now can upgrade to the 9950X in 2026.

Only drawback is the RAM; There are 48 GB sticks available so max theoretical limit is currently 192 GB as opposed to the 256 GB of DDR4, and it does not have registered ECC (all DDR5 is unregistered ECC error correcting on the die though ECC corrects the memory bus errors too).

Of course, as always, you do you. The above is meant as inspiration not absolute truth.

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DDR5 is not equivalent to unregistered ECC RAM, period.
AM5 does not support anywhere near 6600MT/s memory with all 4 slots populated, while the latest AGESA have improved the situation you’re going to struggle going above ~4800MT/s.

That being said, the 7950X isn’t that far behind TR and even faster in some workloads.

Asus ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI would likely be a much better choice, ECC support (officially) and also supports 8x 8x PCIe layout.
Right now it’s also much cheaper, 445$ off Asus eStore

I can confirm that these works fine in the Asus board, Micron 32GB DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMM 2Rx8 CL40 | MTC20C2085S1EC48BR | Crucial.com

You can also quite a bit on the cooler by going for the Alpenföhn® Dolomit Premium instead, there’s a 10W difference in rated cooling capacity. A really nice one for the price tbh :slight_smile:

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Hi @wertigon - thanks for putting together the Part List!

With a 7950X build, it’s ALMOST there in terms of available PCI lanes, and I’ll need to populate 3 cards in total:
2 x A6000 and 1x 4090

Pls help correct me if I’m wrong … but It seems that the 24 available PCI lanes in the 7950X won’t be able to support the config? Only if I drop the config to 2 cards (which I can’t) then I could consider the 7950X build right.

@diizzy Agreed, I’ll definitely be running Registered ECC RAM

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The Creator board I link to supports 8x 8x 2x while the MSI board is 8x 8x 4x, you can also go for the cheaper MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI which doesn’t seem like much of a downgrade compared to the other MSI board.
Looking at NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 PCI-Express Scaling | TechPowerUp it seems like you would get away using a 4x slot without much penalty at all.

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Aah, right. Well, then watercooled EPYC/TR/Xeon build is unavoidable then. I do not see how you can possibly fit three 3-slot GPUs in a single case seeing as most cases have 8 slots so at least one needs to have water cooling in either case.

An AM5 motherboard could theoretically run an x8 / x8 / x8 config, but in practice you want 4 lanes for an m.2. The B650/X670 chipsets are disappointing right now though - the X570 was extremely promising and had a x8 / x8 / x8 setup.

Now this is speculation and wishful thinking, so don’t take this as gospel, but from what I can see, a PCIe 5.0 x8 / x4 / x4 with eight x2 m.2 slots would probably be enough bandwidth to last to 2035, for all new builds. A 32 lane CPU could eliminate the need for chipsets and AM5 got 28 lanes… So close :cry:

Anyway, no use complaining over spilled milk here. As for PCIe lanes, for AI x1 lane could possibly be enough bandwidth for training, though it would make uploads and downloads of sets suffer. I have no data here though.

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relevant video by ian cutress:

because at best you confused people there at worst you get them to think, that ddr5 has some kind of ecc, that actually matters.

on-die ecc got added to increase yields. that’s it, that is what it is for.

on-die ecc is meaningless nonsense. in fact it is harmful, because there is so much wrong information about this, that even highly technically aware people think, that ddr5 added REAL ECC to all systems now.

this is nonsense of course.

so let’s live in a magical world, where the on-die ecc will always correct the errors, that happened during the data sitting on the memory.
first off we DON’T KNOW. there are no logs, there is nothing. does it error or not? does it correct the errors or not? WE DON’T KNOW.

2.: there is no protection going towards the memory and back to it.
we DON’T KNOW whether it errored or not.

real ecc protects the data on the way to the memory, while it sits on the memory and on the way back to the memory.
and it will log all errors for you to KNOW if there is an issue at all.

you might be aware of all this and might have seen this video already, but honestly everyone here should watch this video.

people will run file servers without ecc, because they think, that “on-die ecc” is real ecc and they will see file corruption and won’t even think, that it could be the memory then when trouble shooting at first.
this is all horrible.

the HORRIBLE thing is, that thanks to all of this “on-die ecc” is setting back ecc support on desktop platforms for years, maybe even a decade.

on am4 almost all motherboards had full ecc support (error correction + reporting)
on am5 ONLY asus, the WORST motherboard company officially claims support for ecc and from the testing i saw all others either don’t work, or they correct the error, but don’t report it.

reddit post from truenas subreddit on ddr5 ecc support on am5:
https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/10lqofy/ecc_support_for_am5_motherboards/

we might have to wait until ddr7 now to get REAL ECC in all desktop and laptop machines FINALLY.
something, that should have happened decades ago.

also during am4, there was 3600 mhz 16-19-19-39 real ecc memory.

so we had highspeed real ecc memory on am4.
that is gone now. there is nothing for now on am5. there is only high speed tight registered memory rightnow.

will be an exciting future when you got desktop systems with 256 GB of memory throwing out memory errors once a month, but no one notices and the tech industry still shows us the middle finger…

but yeah i’m rambling now.

PLEASE be absolutely clear when you talk about ddr5 ecc support, because we actually need to fight this i’d argue deliberately created confusion with the fake “on-die ecc” memory to protect users from data loss/corruption/stability issues and also to maybe in 5-10 years actually get to ecc being the standard for everything.

EDIT: ian cutress video mentions, that using ecc could result in slower performance as you’d have to run slower speeds. that video probably was made before docp/xmp ecc kits came out. so that problem does NOT exist. you can just run 3600 mhz cl16 ECC memory on am4 and you get the full performance with error correction.
of course the motherboard and cpu mem controller need to be able to run that speed, bla bla bla, but with error correction you can actually see when it fails or when it doesn’t in a freaking log! but that isn’t a problem for sweetspots on amd platforms usually at least…

also gamers would LOVE ecc memory, because you can run a memory overclock closer to the sun as the ecc would still correct an error popping up once a week during normal use for example. and finding errors when doing overclocking would also be vastly easier, because you can just check the logs…
so gamers would love ecc memory, the average person would love to have ecc memory everywhere. so everyone benefits.
the production cost difference is very small btw too.

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Thanks @pega for that. I’ll definitely do my reading up when dealing with DDR5, it’s a shame that DDR5 doesn’t have Real ECC, but then again if my next build after this, would be for just performance, won’t need to worry about ECC… but this build is definitely going towards the TR route.

@wertigon Yes it definitely looking like (for this build), a TR water cooled (AIO loop) is where I’m leaning towards right now.

As for the case, yes most cases only do 8 slots… but the Fractal Define 7 XL has 9 + 3 slots… so it’s looking good but I’m researching to see if the water cooling radiator will still fit:

Enermax Liqtech TR4 II 360 Addressable RGB AIO CPU Liquid Cooler
or
CORSAIR iCUE H170i ELITE CAPELLIX Liquid CPU Cooler

As for the original conundrum of PSUs, I’m still double checking and using pcpartppicker, it seems that Super Flower Leadex 2000 W 80+ Platinum has enough rails / juice to power this setup.

Here’s a PSU Testing Build I’ve made:
(Pls Ignore the CPU in the list, this list it just to check if the PSU will pose any issues)

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i would avoid all enermax liquid coolers. they had quite a lot of issues with gunk up and i wouldn’t trust a new one from them if i HAD TO get an aio.
i mean you’d have to hold a gun to this head to get me to get one over an aircooler, but gosh darn it, i wouldn’t get the enermax one :smiley:

(gn video about gunk up problem)

and don’t remember if you already have it, but if you’re considering on buying the samsung 980 pro new, i would advise against it.
samsung had a bunch of issues with their drives lately to the point where puget systems (workstation builders and stuff) dropped them almost entirely:

and sorry if i forgot that too, but if you play on buying a new 4090, that is from gigabyte, DON’T.
gigabyte is having issues with a bunch of cracked pcbs near the slot and they don’t wanna take responsibility for it. granted a bunch of them could be HORRIBLY shipped, but there appears to be a spike of cracked gigabyte pcbs.
gigabyte is also generally one of the worst graphics cards maker imo rightnow.
it could also be worth to check if you can get a 4090 with a 12v 2x6 connector, or a midway partial change at least.
the shorter sense pins on the card should at least hopefully reduce the risk of melting parts/fire a bit.
video about the revision:

and as a bunch of cards got already updated you could try to get one with the updated connector and make sure it isn’t gigabyte i guess :smiley:
that is what i would do if i had to buy a 4090 at least.

btw funny to see a 20k + pc partpicker for psu testing ideas :smiley:

no need to comment on the rest, because it is placeholder anyways right? maybe enermax cooler and gigabyte card and samsung ssd were already placeholder, but i guess worst case i gave you generally good information hopefully and didn’t waste my time :smiley:

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Thank you for bringing me up to speed; I agree ECC will probably be more and more relevant, but as long as it costs me $300-$500 extra for a platform that supports ECC (CPU + MB + RAM), I cannot in good conscience recommend ECC for home NAS use or other places where data corruption is not a catastrophic failure. It just is too much money.

Then again charging an arm and a leg for ECC capabilities is about as despicable as charging extra for ABS and seat belts in a car, IMO. At least no one dies if your NAS ate your wedding photos due to bitflips…

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actually, the price difference for a nas should be almost 0.

most people building a nas would get am4, because dirt cheap and most am4 motherboards and cpus support ecc memory.
and you can get a garbage speec 16 GB ecc 3200 mhz cl22 stick for 38 euros.
so the am4 platform cost different was 0, it was only the memory.
the issue comes in, when you want FAST ecc memory …
i probably paid around double to have ecc at that memory speed.
getting 64 GB ecc 3600 mhz 16-19-19 unbuffered memory at the time for am4.
so 500 euros vs 250 euros if it wasn’t ecc i think roughly.

but yeah on am4 for a fileserver, you can grab yourself jedec sticks for very cheap and have at maximum 50 euro difference i’d say, depending on your memory size.

we don’t have another unbuffered memory set to compare those too though in regards to price premium.

it was VERY expensive, but cheaper than you thought is my point and for any home nas the price difference is 0 or almost 0, so those should always run ecc, because well it is free or almost free in cost difference.

that was or is the beauty of am4.
i deeply hope, that they will fix support on am5 or at least with am6, if am6 comes with zen6.

depends on the marriage you’re in maybe :wink: (couldn’t help myself)

and there is a good question to ask here, how many systems caused deaths, because the systems used non ecc memory and errored out?

and as you mentioned cars. are all the computers, that influence driving in modern cars build with ecc on all connections and memory?

so there might be quite some deaths due to systems not having ecc.
just not directly maybe very often.

also damn is this comment way too long that i wrote here now lol

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I don’t really see cost being an issue these days