Working on my next PC build

I am working on my next PC gaming rig. I already preordered the GPU, I will use it in my current PC. I am probably not going to be buying this before Summer 2019, probably even later than that.

Budget: I usually try to make systems with great value for the money, but this time I plan to throw a lot more money at it than I usually do, so the budget will be up to €5000.
I live in Denmark but when I end up buying all this hardware, I might order from somewhere else in Europe if it makes sense and then when I have all the parts I am thinking I will get a local computer shop to put it all together. I can probably do it myself, but it seems like a silly place to save money when the price is this high anyway.

What will I be using it for? I develop games as a hobby, I play PC and VR games, my most used OS is Windows 10, but I might also install Linux on it and have a dual boot system setup. So I will be using it to experiment with real time raytracing in Unity, experiment with deep learning AIs with TensorFlow (also in Unity), also have some assets that might benefit quite well from a multi-core CPU.
I make videos of me working on games and showing off ideas, testing assets and sometimes also videos of me playing games.

I am considering over-clocking it. Some things I prefer in a PC is for it to have a good performance per watt and be able to have a low power usage. The GPU will be 250W though and the CPU 180W so already at this point it is going to be sucking a lot of juice, They should have a much lower idle power usage though? Another factor is that I want it to be as silent as possible, if it can be done without sacrificing much else… but the GPU might already have made it a noise maker. Its a single fan blower CPU. So I am considering water cooling it, but I have no experience with that so I am wondering how much more power it will use to add water cooling? Can it all be done internally? Will it make the system loud to have water cooling?

Here is what I am looking at so far.
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Caldor/saved/#view=tjBvnQ

CPU: AMD - Threadripper 2950X 3.5GHz 16-Core Processor
Motherboard: Asus - PRIME X399-A EATX TR4 Motherboard
Memory: G.Skill - Flare X 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory
Storage: 2x Samsung - 970 Evo 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive in RAID 0
Video Card: Asus - GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB TURBO Video Card

The casing, PSU, CPU cooler and such I will not try to decide on yet, since it seems much too likely to change the next 12 months. With the rest of the hardware, I doubt it will change so much the next 12 months and if it does it should not take long to figure out what the better option at that will be.

Things I am unsure about:
The RAM seems to be Ryzen specific, so it should somehow work better with Ryzen? I have no idea what that means. Any benefit from using 4 blocks instead of 2? I have gone with 4 blocks because it should add some kind of benefit with this CPU and the motherboard maybe, using quad lanes or something? I also saw in a review that using all 8 RAM slots might be a problem. So if possible I will try to stick to 4 or less RAM slots and I would prefer 2x 16gb to leave the 64gb RAM option open.
When it comes to speed, I have watched some video reviews, hardware tests and such and there might overall not be much benefit to going above 2666, but 3200 seems to be a sweet spot pretty much where you sometimes get some benefit?

With the hard disks my plan is to use the two M.2 NVME disks in RAID 0. Some argue that it wont give any noticeable performance boost when it comes to practical use, but as I see it, there is no downside to getting two NVME disks in RAID. I want them to be 500gb disks giving me a total of 1tb SSD. I will then probably partition it into two partitions, one for Windows 10 and one for Linux… no particular Linux, I will likely even try out different Linux distros on it.
My reasoning is that I could buy 1tb SSD but the price is pretty much the same as two 500gb SSDs, the risk of one of them dying on me seems rather low. Overall I dont use my system disks much for more than my OS, so I might install a game or some applications on it, but I will mainly try to avoid that. I already got a 1tb SSD I will be putting into this system, and I will buy a 4tb HDD, maybe 5 or 6tb if it makes sense, for overall storage. The 1tb SSD is for projects I am working on and VR games.

Motherboard… unless there are good reasons not to, I want to go with ASUS and I want a motherboard based on the X399 AMD chipset. So far I am going with the ASUS Prime X399-A, Socket-TR4 motherboard. Seems to have a good price, while still having two USB 3.1 gen 2 ports. The more expensive boards do not seem to give me anything more I might need.

Eventually, maybe late 2019 or sometime in 2020, I might buy a second RTX 2080Ti card to add to this build, using NVLink to connect the two GPUs. That is not to be considered as part of the current budget though.

I don’t think that two nvme in raid 0 is going to be worth it especially for just your Operating system drives. I went from a WD blue 500gb ssd to and 960 evo nvme 500gb and did not notice a difference really anywhere. There are certain workloads that an nvme gets used to full potential. I would buy on nvme for your OS and another for your storage.

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The RTX series graphics card strikes me as odd. Why are you planning with hardware that is not even out yet?

^this
There may be some workloads where it makes sense, but for everything else, it is a waste.

As I tried to explain… not worth it how? Its going to be partitioned anyway so effectively it ends up being two drives, just with more speed. They will mainly be used for the OS, but the OS wont be using 500gb, so anything I think would benefit from the extra speed, more than it would from a regular SSD, I would put onto it as well. Maybe I will have Unity on it, and with Visual Studio I think it has to be installed on the system disk anyway.

The price is the same whether I buy 1 disk with 1tb space or two 500gb disk, so unless its somehow gives worse performance, I do not see how its not worth it.

Maybe you missed it, but the GPU is already pre-ordered. Everything else I wont be buying any sooner than Summer 2019, maybe later. Maybe some of the hardware by then wont make sense, but I dont think it will be that difficult to check up on other potential replacement hardware when the time comes, as long as I know what the goal of the system is. I am getting the RTX 2080Ti later this month.

I do not get the whole idea of planning a build 9 months in advance. You pre-ordered an RTX card and you will put it in your current system. Maybe it will be enough for your workload as you only want to explore implementing new technology into game design. You can not be sure if it’s time to upgrade, if you haven’t tested the current rig with the new card yet! Just an opinion.

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I don’t see anything you are doing OS wise will even push the nvme to its proper potential. Really you should just buy two sata ssd. I guess my earlier recommendation was two only buy the two nvme and not the 1tb ssd. Hell maybe one 512gb nvme for OS drive and make the Linux partition around 50-100gb. Not sure what all you do on linux side but I have never used past that on my Linux machines. Then 1TB ssd for mass storage.
Edit: reread your first post and yea not sure how much is needed for the tensor flow stuff.

I have Asus Prime x399-a with a firstgen Threadripper and when i got it i updated the uefi to the newest with support for secondgen Threadripper and Fedora wont boot with that update! The only thing that got my computer to boot in to Fedora was to downgrade uefi

I found a bugreport over at redhat
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1608242

Yes.

I would say skip Raid 0 and just go for a single 1TB drive, raiding two of these drives is going to hit a bottleneck in the PCH lanes anyway, meaning you won’t get the full benefit of two drives in Raid 0.

You need four sticks to take advantage of Threadrippers quad channel memory.

You should aim for 2933MHz or above, it has decent benefits.

Well, yes it is pretty much 9 months in advance. When it comes to performance gained… well its probably not really time to upgrade, the main reason I want to upgrade is that my current system, well I can get more out of having more cores, more ram and a faster SSD. Right now its a regular M.2 SATA SSD so as a minimum I want to use an NVME M.2 SSD, and if there is no downside to using two of them in RAID I might as well try that. I already now know that I would benefit from a better system when it comes to some of the things I am doing now. F.ex. when I record video of VR games, or stuff I am working on in game development, well everything lags. The CPU probably often being the bottleneck here. The new GPU is unlikely to actually give me much benefit with my current system as the RAM, CPU and hard drive is probably all going to be bottlenecks to stop me from taking full advantage of it.

My current system is an i7 6700k, 16gb DDR4 RAM, I think its 2400, and some SATA M.2 SSD hard disk for my OS. Main problem also being that its only 256gb and that is just not enough, I dont want to feel that cramped with the OS disc. Oh, and a GTX 1080.

When it comes to planning 9 months in advance, well as I mentioned I dont really think the hardware options will change that much in the next 9 months. I doubt there will be better RAM options or even better CPU options. The GPU I am set on already, there might be other GPU options within the next 9 months, but I doubt its any I feel would tempt me. So what I think might change within the next 9 months is motherboard and maybe the disc options. Probably mainly that discs should become cheaper.

Well… I am not sure what benefit there would be. The two NVME discs would be to also have room for more than the OS now and then. F.ex. Unity itself and some of my projects. They do benefit from being moved from a 7200 HDD to an SSD, but then… everything probably benefits from that. Its also that it would be annoying to find out later that I could use more storage space for the OS or more speed for… whatever I might want to experiment with later.

Hmm… interesting. The main reason I want to try out Linux is really just to see how Linux is now and what can be done with it. Especially after the news about the Steam update that makes it possible to run Windows games on Linux. Not just some of them, but all of them, even the one using DX11 and DX12. I highly suspect Windows still got a lot of overhead with random stuff you get with Windows as standard but dont actually use. So I wont to try out how much I actually have to give up if I was to switch to Linux or maybe just partially switch to it. Also generally would be nice to have an extra partition for some kind of backup OS in case you mess up the main OS. Oh yeah, even VR games can now run through Linux even if they were meant for Windows. They might not run perfectly, but all of them should be able to run.

All sounds like good advice, thanks. What do you mean by full raid-0 benefits? Because if it even gives 20% faster read and write it seems worth it? I am guessing full raid-0 benefits would be doubling the read and write speed? I am not really expecting that. But I should probably look into what alternatives I would have. How much hard disk space I could get instead, if it was a regular SATA SSD I got instead, or maybe if I spent some of the money on 64gb RAM instead of 32gb RAM so I could get that quad lane Threadripper benefit as well, without having to give up on the 64gb RAM.

I guess 3200 speed RAM is not a bad choice when it comes to RAM speed then. I think I will stick with that, just have to consider whether I will go with 32 or 64gb RAM. Either way I will get 4 sticks of RAM to begin with.

One of these drives is already close to bottlenecking the PCIe x4 lanes they use, so unless you raid them in a very specific way using add-in cards there won’t be much benefit.

And the sequential write speed on the 1TB drive is twice that of the 500GB one.

Depends on the way the slots are wired up.

One option would be something like this:


But I don´t know if that is bootable (probably is because X399 does not have that stupid raid key thing).

Well, given all of this, I guess I will just go with the 1tb drive then.

I will keep an eye on this and look into. I guess it could also work as a good upgrade later on, but I think I will mainly just use regular SSDs after getting the M.2 SSD or SSDs, and of course a 4tb or bigger HDD because I dont want to be low on storage.