Here is what will be my new workstation for college! Will order the parts soon, I was just wondering what yall's opinions on the build are. As you can see there is no graphics card. I was gifted a beastly laptop with a full sized GTX 1060 in it, so I'm just going to migrate my old 960 into this build. Thoughts/opinions?
PC Part Picker link: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/n7JrCy
I would say the system is somewhat lopsided with 300$ worth of solid state drives that are only 750gb and 244$ worth of ram in a system that only uses a ryzen 1700.
If it's a work station , I'd sacrifice ram speed in favor of a larger amount of it.
Sacrifice the 500gb ssd in favor of an actual storage drive as the system already has an ssd in it.
Use the money saved to speed up the processor.
I'd favor air cooling over a cheap liquid cooler any day for sheer safety sakes but that's personal p[reference.
I'd do pretty much the same things @emosun said.
I will also put on my "responsible parent" hat and say 80$ for fans is too much.
Even cheapo generic 120mm fans are pretty decent these days. That 60 sum dollars you save could go toward a better power supply.
I would say it is a good build. To address some comments though.
Ryzen likes faster RAM cause of the infinity fabric, and he may only need 32GBs
Eh having all SSDs is cool, and he may only need this much storage, or maybe he has a NAS, if not he can always up[grade once he fills this up.
To what exactly? An 1800x? It is almost the same once you OC them. He might as well pocket any extra money if he changes this build.
Ok I actually agree with this, I would either go 280mm rad, or I would drop to air cooliong.
I know a lot of people who would disagree.
I do agree with this from a performance stand point, but I think the idea is more with the RGB part of this, so to each his own.
For RGB I think a basic RGB strip would probably work well and would allow the lighting to be placed wherever desired. Would probably still save like $20 too, even getting nice non-RGB fans.
As for NVMe, I bought one and use one and I think it was a complete waste of money. I haven't noticed in probably 90%+ of situations compared to a SATA SSD. OS boots faster and games load faster, but in Inventor, EAGLE, Excel, et cetera I haven't noticed a difference. I guess it would depend on OP's specific workload. If they were cheaper I'd be all for them since they are fast and are very small.
People who do video editing love them.
Scrap fans (rgBS) and the case (no airflow at all), go with a noctua air cooler, get a better board (power because OC), ditch the internal wifi for a router in bridge mode because wifi drivers....
Personally I needed to have the option of adding PCIe cards, so I went X370 ATX with three full size slots.
You might want to throw in an RX 570 at least unless you do all your gaming on your laptop
The gaming K3 is probably the minimum you want for your budget, has External BCLK for better OC tuning
Do you actually need NVME speeds?
Also a 120mm AIO isn't worth it in a tower usually, the $25 Gammax 400 should cool Ryzen just fine, I've a similar cooler and it has no issues with my R7 1700, Ryzen is pretty efficient
Gammax 400 > Hyper T4
What is the air flow situation on that INWIN case? it looks like it would run hot
You're also probably going to want a single kit of memory, This one is supposed to be Ryzen Optimized, whatever that means, I don't know if 4x8 or 2x16 is better for performance, I think 4 sticks is having issues getting to higher speeds, but otherwise it makes expansion easier
PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/L4Cxm8
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/L4Cxm8/by_merchant/
CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 1700 3.0GHz 8-Core Processor ($312.41 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper T4 70.0 CFM Rifle Bearing CPU Cooler ($23.50 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AX370-Gaming K3 ATX AM4 Motherboard ($143.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill - Flare X 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($217.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital - Blue 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($139.99 @ B&H)
Video Card: Sapphire - Radeon RX 570 4GB PULSE Video Card ($182.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: Cooler Master - MasterBox 5 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($59.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: EVGA - 650W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($72.79 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $1153.64
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-05-12 02:52 EDT-0400
Are you really gonna notice the difference between m.2 and ssd performance? Lose m.2, unless, it's a NVME drive 'cuz that's faster. You can get a SSHD instead. I would say keep the 3000mhz memory, at productivity workloads, the memory speeds makes a bigger impact in performance. If this was a gaming rig, though, 4x8gb is bit of an overkill. The 3 fan bundle isn't a big deal with me, it's actually a decent discount considering how much an individual cost, but if you can afford a bit luxury of vanity, go for it. Otherwise, you can always go for the tried and through Noctua NF-F12 which is $19 in Newegg, the brown shouldn't come off as garish behind the black tempered glass, unless, you're really strict about color coordination in which case get "be quiet! SILENTWINGS" for also $19.
Going for 100% Air Cooling starting with my new Ryzen build. The performance of these newer Air Coolers is close to a custom loop:
I agree with what you're saying. I was torn with the NVMe drive, I may end up just getting 1 TB of total SSD storage for the same price, in addition to the fact that I reserved about $150 for lightly used HDD storage I'm buying from a local vendor I know. To address the fans, I'll say that they're the only luxury I wanted to invest in, specifically for the looks and quality, and even then I may not keep them in the build. I also don't need more than 32Gig of ram, the most ram taxing thing I will probably do is running VM's. And I kept the 1700 instead of getting a 1700x or even an 1800x because after OC'ing they're almost the same. I'll look into he performance difference between a cheap AIO vs a good air cooler though after seeing yall's opinions though.
Ditch the motherboard because its a B350 and not an x370 or because its just that particular motherboard itself? If you're referring to the chipset, I was under the impression that the x370 was not that much better in terms of overclocking, and since I'm not doing SLI, CrossFire or anything else that is quite abnormal, is it really worth changing?
Go for lower tier X370. You'll get much better VRM to OC the 1700.
Aside from what everyone else has been saying (i.e., X370 for OC'ing, no RGB fans, 1xSSD+1xHDD, compatible RAM, etc.) I'd say sell the 960 and go for a RX 580. There's a night and day difference.