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.