My planned new build

[Helios451]

Time for a new box, not least as I'm stuck in the UK due to the lock-down and my last build and usual i7 4790 machine is at home in France. I have the funds and time to take care on a new build.

Uses for this are office work, including database management, video conferencing and so forth. It will also be used for some Python, Java and SQL work. There will also be a little bit of game playing when the work day has finished, hence the GPU and monitor choice.

It needs to be portable so that I can take it home when the opportunity arises, thus not a tower, and wi-fi enabled as my current router is just too far away for a wired connection.

All has been specified on Scan.

Your observations would be gratefully received!

Thanks

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU
Gigabyte X570 Aorous Elite Mobo
16GB Corsair Vengance LXP Black RAM
Gigabyte Aurous 500GB M.3 PCIe 4.0 SSD (O/S storage)
Intel 660p 512GB M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD (Data storage)
1TB WD Green SATA 3.0 SSD (Archive storage)
Power Cooler Radeon RX5700 GPU
be quiet! White Pure Base 500 case
Gigabyte GC-WB17330-1 PCIe wi-fi card
Strike-X 1100w 80 Plus Gold Modular PSU
AOC G2590PX 144Hz 1080p HD Monitor

[ik9000]

can you push to the Aorus master? It's the board I wish I'd gone for.

do you need the wifi card? If you get the master it has built-in wifi6

check RAM QVL carefully and try and make sure it's samsung B-die or mircon E-die. Better to have a B-die at slower speed than a non b-die at high speed but which your mobo grumbles about syncing with.

re ram check if it is single rank or dual rank - single tends to perform better if you plan to OC the RAM.

save your money on the NVMe - no need for PCIe4 atm IMO. PCIe3 Nvme perfectly fine and gives you more money for other components. I would just go for Samsung 970plus or 980 plus (whatever the model is these days). That or a crucial MX500. Wouldn't bother with Intel NVMe personally.

You can drop the powersupply down to 750W easily. Really no need for 1100w. Get a good fully modular gold or platinum (even titanium) 750W supply and it will see you right. Make sure it has two mobo power connectors.

I would go IPS monitor and sacrifice the 144Hz, but that is just my preference for better colour reproduction and viewing angles etc. for 1080p IPS screens (if carefully chosen) still have good enough response times and screen lag. www.TFTcentral.co.uk do in-depth reviews where you can check it out in detail to make sure you're happy with all aspects of the screen.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A few websites have said the MSI X570 Tomahawk is excellent for thr price. Also avoid the Intel 660P and get a TLC drive such as the WD Blue SN550,or an Adata SX8200. A smaller PSU is fine - for one graphics card 600w~700w would be more than enough IMHO.Agreed with IK9000 regarding RAM....in fact most of what he suggested!

[MrJim]

It needs to be portable so that I can take it home when the opportunity arises

When I saw that you needed a 'portable' system, I assumed you'd go for an ITX system and a fairly small case...I guess everyone's idea of what's 'portable' is different

I've seen a few reviews of this case recently, & if I were looking to build a portable PC, this is what I'd be thinking about:

https://www.lian-li.com/pc-tu150

[spacein_vader]

If the spinning rust is genuinely only used for archive storage you could save some cash and go for a spinning rust drive. For archive purposes the speed increase is rarely going to be of use.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If you want a small ATX case I would look at the Riotoro CR1080.

When I saw that you needed a 'portable' system, I assumed you'd go for an ITX system and a fairly small case...I guess everyone's idea of what's 'portable' is different

I've seen a few reviews of this case recently, & if I were looking to build a portable PC, this is what I'd be thinking about:

https://www.lian-li.com/pc-tu150

I would probably agree with what you said - that case has a handle too which is useful.

[Ciber]

3900x, X570 mobo and PCIE4 SSD are all massive overkill for the sort of tasks you mention. You can probably spend half that much and get all the power you need. It's worth working out exactly what features you need from your mobo before choosing.

In terms of RAM, do you intend to tweak it or just fit it, activate DOCP and leave it at that? If you are spending on a 3900x you probably should look to tweak the RAM to get the best out of the CPU. As mentioned it may be worth looking for RAm that's on the QVL list for the motherboard but I'm not altogether sure how valid that is.

Storage wise I would go for two ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB M.2 NVME drives instead of the three drives you've chosen.

The Lian Li TU150 case does look a great case for a powerful, portable system although I wouldn't want to work on it with my big hands!

[Helios451]

Thanks for your advice!

can you push to the Aorus master? It's the board I wish I'd gone for.

do you need the wifi card? If you get the master it has built-in wifi6

I've seen you shout out for this board on another thread and so have looked into it - solid, great VRM, future proofed, wi-fi, three M2 slots, lots of happy owners, and so with a bit of rejigging it'll make the additional cost just about okay - thanks!

check RAM QVL carefully and try and make sure it's samsung B-die or mircon E-die. Better to have a B-die at slower speed than a non b-die at high speed but which your mobo grumbles about syncing with.

re ram check if it is single rank or dual rank - single tends to perform better if you plan to OC the RAM.

I've checked the QVL and it's okay. Also, the mobo manual is clear on A2 and B2 locations for dual rank on order to allow data double rate to be switched on.

save your money on the NVMe - no need for PCIe4 atm IMO. PCIe3 Nvme perfectly fine and gives you more money for other components. I would just go for Samsung 970plus or 980 plus (whatever the model is these days). That or a crucial MX500. Wouldn't bother with Intel NVMe personally.

I'm keen to make the most of the CPU and the PCIe 4.0 for the SSD running the OSs, so will stick with that. I will, though, swap the inter SSG for the suggested Samsung and also ditch the WD for the time being to save money (I have a couple of 2TB WD Green HDDs which were sitting in my other rig - they were in a RAID 1 configuration but Windows managed to somehow de-RAID them, leaving them as two stand alone drives with identical data. I'll bring those in as my archive and reinstate the RAID 1 configuration.)

You can drop the powersupply down to 750W easily. Really no need for 1100w. Get a good fully modular gold or platinum (even titanium) 750W supply and it will see you right. Make sure it has two mobo power connectors.

Good advice, have done!

I would go IPS monitor and sacrifice the 144Hz, but that is just my preference for better colour reproduction and viewing angles etc. for 1080p IPS screens (if carefully chosen) still have good enough response times and screen lag. www.TFTcentral.co.uk do in-depth reviews where you can check it out in detail to make sure you're happy with all aspects of the screen.

I know this is the area with the most subjectivity, so more research here, methinks!

[Helios451]

With respect to the portability question, I looked and thought about an ITX build, and looked and thought again but just couldn't find a comfortable set up which didn't make me feel as if I'd skin my knuckles when building it or look like a microwave oven, while having a mobo which didn't have everything I want for now and the future.

Also, I simply adore the be quiet! case for its engineering, package and looks. It's also not too large (463mm tall) that I can't sling it in the boot when I can hit the road home again.

That said - that Lian Li TU150 is a lovely looking case too!

[Helios451]

3900x, X570 mobo and PCIE4 SSD are all massive overkill for the sort of tasks you mention. You can probably spend half that much and get all the power you need. It's worth working out exactly what features you need from your mobo before choosing.

Yes, you're quite right, however, I'm buying this through my company as the vast majority of use will be business orientated so will get tax relief against profits and the VAT set off too. So, I'm taking the opportunity to build something that will give as much future proofing as possible, with plenty of spare capacity

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Get the X570 as AMD basically said B450 is not going to get any more updates due to some lame,Intel-like reason.

[DanceswithUnix]

All the fancy SSD stuff, you would be better off getting 32GB of ram and a cheaper SSD. The fastest SSD is one that isn't touched as the data is already in ram. At that point I would ditch the Corsair Vengance, it seems that most of the 16GB sticks are V4.32 and those don't work well in Ryzen machines. If you can be absolutely sure they are a different version that's fine, but personally I have been very much put off the stuff. I tend to buy Ballistix as decent and good value.

A couple of points with SSDs, firstly as a rule the bigger an SSD is the faster it is. More flash chips means the controller can do more in parallel, has more space to move things around. A percentage of the drive will often be SLC cache for the TLC/QLC main flash, so a bigger drive means a larger cache size for bigger write buffering.

Second, the PCIe4 drives all seem a bit new and optimised for long file reads. The good PCIe3 ones are tuned for IOPs.

So I would want to get a decent sized PCIe3 drive, something like a recent Samsung, and keep your other SSD slots free. Maybe next gen get a PCIe4 boot drive.

[Helios451]

All the fancy SSD stuff, you would be better off getting 32GB of ram and a cheaper SSD. The fastest SSD is one that isn't touched as the data is already in ram. At that point I would ditch the Corsair Vengance, it seems that most of the 16GB sticks are V4.32 and those don't work well in Ryzen machines. If you can be absolutely sure they are a different version that's fine, but personally I have been very much put off the stuff. I tend to buy Ballistix as decent and good value.

A couple of points with SSDs, firstly as a rule the bigger an SSD is the faster it is. More flash chips means the controller can do more in parallel, has more space to move things around. A percentage of the drive will often be SLC cache for the TLC/QLC main flash, so a bigger drive means a larger cache size for bigger write buffering.

Second, the PCIe4 drives all seem a bit new and optimised for long file reads. The good PCIe3 ones are tuned for IOPs.

So I would want to get a decent sized PCIe3 drive, something like a recent Samsung, and keep your other SSD slots free. Maybe next gen get a PCIe4 boot drive.

Thanks, you who tangos with Unix, you have a good argument and you have taught me something about SSDs, too. Given my wish to future proof my build I will certainly consider this.

[ik9000]

One quick thing re single and dual rank ram: is to do with the number of chips on the ram stick and therefore how much addressing the ram module/memory controller has to do. Eg an 8gb single rank will use, say, 4no 2gb chips on one side of the ram stick only. A dual rank stick would use 8no 1gb chips with 4 on each side of the stick and the way it addresses data through the stick is different. Mixing types isn't a great idea even when the ram is placed in different channels on the mobo. It can lead to stability issues and boot problems etc.

Note dual rank chips is a different thing from dual channel ram mode on the motherboard.

[Helios451]

One quick thing re single and dual rank ram: is to do with the number of chips on the ram stick and therefore how much addressing the ram module/memory controller has to do. Eg an 8gb single rank will use, say, 4no 2gb chips on one side of the ram stick only. A dual rank stick would use 8no 1gb chips with 4 on each side of the stick and the way it addresses data through the stick is different. Mixing types isn't a great idea even when the ram is placed in different channels on the mobo. It can lead to stability issues and boot problems etc.

Note dual rank chips is a different thing from dual channel ram mode on the motherboard.

Thanks - useful to know, and underlines why it's always better to use only one type of RAM, and not mix it up (we're not baking a cake here, after all!).

[Ciber]

Another thing to note is that RAM timings will make more difference to your system performance than the difference between PCIe4 drives and PCIe3.