Hi!
My 1920x workstation (OC’d) is showing its age, mostly in terms of heat and power consumption. I have it built with a X399 Fatal1ty M/B and it still does its job great, with 64GB DDR4 at a stable 3000-3200 with my modest OC.
I’m honestly moving away the heaviest amount of workloads on the WS and instead using my homelab (bunch of Scalable, EPYC and D-series stuff). I would like to retain as much NVMe capacity as possible (using a quad M.2 adapter) with any potential upgrade, as I do some video and photography editing and it takes lots of space and needs fairly fast low latency I/O.
Threadripper pricing and the way AMD handles it has put me off from using it this time.
These are the M/B options I considered:
- ASRock X570 Creator
- Asus ProArt X570-CREATOR WIFI
- Pro-WS-X570-ACE
(hard to confirm bifurcation and this is absolutely not a definitive list of any sort, just the few models I am already considering)
I don’t need RGB or anything like that and plan on using either a decent AIO or a Noctua tower. The chassis will be the massive Lian Li PC-V2120X, which looks absurd with a ATX board but, as a sidenote, it has housed my HEDT builds until now (including dual Xeons with a SR-2 Classified from EVGA a decade ago).
TL;DR of requirements:
- Single GPU. Haven’t picked an upgrade, holding on to my RX580 and spare 1060.
- Not immediately in need for Thunderbolt.
- Able to handle my quad M.2 card for NVMe sticks (needs bifurcation 4x/4x/4x/4x from 16x)
- Or: sufficient onboard M.2 space (prices have gone lower for TB sized drives, so I can compromise here)
- 5950x as intended CPU
- I don’t want to run a custom loop, AIO/tower is fine. Won’t OC too much.
- Not planning to do much VFIO anymore on this desktop.
- Mostly developer/research workloads, lots of compilation and threaded work. Will game sometimes.
Good advice will be greatly appreciated! It’s been a weird year and the situation with parts and stock sucks.