PC Tech Thread

If anyone is after cheap and decent M.2, I just bought 2TB PNY XLR8 CS3030 for £140, which is around what 1TB drives go for!

And 1TB can be had for £80.

Similar, just picked up two 2TB SSDs for £136.99 each from Scan's Today Only deal: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-crucial-bx500-25-ssd-7mm-sata-iii-6gb-s-3d-nand-read-540mb-s-write-500mb-s

One of the 2TB HDDs in my ESXi box is failing so I took the opportunity to replace them with SSDs. My ESXi box only gets light usage so I've no problem putting non NAS/Enterprise versions in it. My NAS gets treated to NAS level HDDs.

One of the 2TB HDDs in my ESXi box is failing

Oddly I'm also getting errors from one of the 128GB SSDs, but I think the machine may just need a dusting and reseating everything. I can't remember whether I set it up with ESXi installed on one of the SSDs or one of the HDDs, suppose I should have written things down.

Anyway, I've got a spare 128GB SSD (if one is failing) and, if required, I can swap one of the 2TB HDDs for the new 2TB SSD to get things up and running. My old backup VM has the OS on the failing HDD but the data is in a zfs pool split across the two drives. The first job will be working out how I setup it up all those years ago.

Also need to setup a Prometheus exporter for both the ESXi 6 box and the NAS (QNAP TS-431P) for all of the datas.

Is anyone after a RTX 2060?
Got one for sale in the Classifieds :-)

Punch price seeing as they can be had for that new, which is still a scam.
https://www.cclonline.com/product/347410/RTX-2060-VENTUS-GP-OC/Graphics-Cards/MSI-GeForce-RTX-2060-VENTUS-GP-OC-6GB-Overclocked-Graphics-Card/VGA6136/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAmKiQBhClARIsAKtSj-nNjXfiTC_KxWqKiE2iapfcQdP0FHrBbOtQ2aUGj0MaHvzC4y_YaVEaAq1FEALw_wcB

Thinking of building a new PC.

Could wait a year and get my employer to contribute $3k, but could also just pull the trigger.

What I'm using at the moment is an "OMEN by HP 875-1008na"... which cost me £1.6k and has an Intel i7-9700k, 16GB RAM and GeForce RTX 2080 Super. Purchased as a relatively cheap gaming PC at the beginning of the pandemic, I've absolutely got a lot of value out of it. Also, due to my really bad experience with my MacBook Pro (which now gathers dust) and discovering Windows 11's ability to run Linux... I now live on a Windows machine.

My use of this one PC is on 16h per day and I'm using it for gaming, transcoding, editing video webinars, 12h of meetings once a week (really heavy video conferencing), music, coding, photographic processing (RAW from 40Megapixel sensor, batch processing), etc.

Where I find my existing PC limited:

• No true Thunderbolt, just a lower USB-C spec.
  
• Water cooled is nice, but even when relatively idle the radiator fans run at near constant (and audible) speed.
  
• Case couldn't fit a larger GPU.
  
• Motherboard couldn't do ECC RAM and I am considering it now I'm coding more.
  
• Single NVMe slot, which is occupied.
  
• Slow on transcoding (beats all of the laptops, but it's not "fast").
  
• Gaming really only excels on 1080p, my monitor is 1440p and the fps drops... I may consider going 4k but there's no way this system goes there.
  
  

It's basically what it is... good value for the price point, got a hell of a lot of use out of it... but it's really not upgradeable at all and as I'm using it way more than I intended to I am feeling that.

So I want to consider something that is air-cooled (with ability to have fans stop or run slow when idle and not required), full Thunderbolt, at least two NVMe slots, potential for video capture improvements, a GPU that could in theory be fine with 4k or higher, ECC RAM (at least the option for it even if initially I'll just load it up with non-ECC).

I'll start by determining what a stupid version of this looks like, and will "value engineer" down to a palatable price point later.

My first draft thoughts have gone this way:

• Case (£200)- Fractal Design Torrent https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/torrent/torrent/black-rgb-tg-light-tint/
  
• Motherboard (£390)- ASUS ProArt X570 https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/ProArt/ProArt-X570-CREATOR-WIFI/
  
• CPU (£640) - AMD Ryzen 9 5950x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x
  
• CPU cooler (£90) - Noctua https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15-chromax-black
  
• RAM (£500) - 128GB DDR4 4x32GB
  
• GPU (£1.5k) - RTX 3080 https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards-Components/Graphics-Cards/TUF-Gaming/TUF-RTX3080-12G-GAMING/
  
• PSU (£135)- 860W https://www.fractal-design.com/products/power-supplies/ion/ion-2-platinum-860w/black/
  
  

First pass, comes out around £3.5k but a lot of that is the GPU and RAM, the rest feels reasonably good for what it is.

Could drop the motherboard down to a gaming one, but I super appreciate the cooling on it and the fact that it comes with 2 x 40Gbps Thunderbolt in addition to an abundance of USB3, and two ethernet which are a 10G and 2.5G one.

This is a lot of money... but this is also 16h per day and my livelihood and recreation. It doesn't feel wild to invest in that.

Maybe things have changed, but I thought Intel CPU's played much more nicely with thunderbolt?

And I may bite the bullet but cannibalise the HP Omen to make it initially cheaper.

Move the 2080 Super and the RAM over, deferring £2k of spend.

Ah that's interesting. Couldn't find anything new.

I'll update the price.

/waves in v. similar build.

I had some random crashes when doing unnecessary scaling playing games but since diagnosed it's been perfect. I put it through similar 16h+ days of video editing/transcodes/animation/photo editing/design and pretty much constant gaming.

Mine was around £5-6k if I recall but does have a 3090 instead of 3080 (though half the ram). Also mine has 4TB of nvme.

5950x / vision b550 d / vision 3090 / 64gb 3600 corsair vengeance rgb (2x32gb) / 2 x
wd black sn850 2tb / noctua nh d15s / 4 x nf s12a / corsair 4000d airflow

I went with the B550d which is a bit out there but it visually matched the only 3090 I could secure and it had 2 x actual thunderbolt 3 which has been crucial for work. When I next upgrade it'll be a new mobo with additional thunderbolt ports and better ethernet options.

I don't know Fractal enough to feel comfortable relying on their PSU not setting my main source of income on fire (I know they do nice cases but had no idea about power).

You already running this?

Mine looks similar-ish.

So the big questions.

1. Do you regret the spend?
   
2. How big a difference do you feel day to day working and gaming on that build?
   

Bear in mind that consumer Ryzen chips only have 24 PCIe lanes (including CPU-chipset), so once your GPU has munched 16, your single M.2 drive taken 4, and you’ve plugged a single Thunderbolt 3 device in that also consumes 4, you’ve saturated the bus.

Any further PCIe devices you connect will oversubscribe the bus. This might not be an issue for you, but if you’re looking to add capture cards and a second NVME drive then I’d start looking at Threadripper Pro/EPYC platforms instead, with 128 lanes of PCIe.

For a year.

1. Yes and no. I can play all the games I want, with all the frames I want, at all the settings I want. Which is definitely a lot more fun than struggling along in bootcamp. I bought parts over about two months as they became available. It was still a chunk of money at a tricky time when a lot of shoots were being cancelled. My thinking was having something more powerful at home would be a complimentary investment to the 100k+ I've spent on cameras/lighting etc over the years that was then gathering dust, and that perhaps I could get more remote work in post production. That has happened (to a degree but more always welcome). So I've earned many times the cost back from the purchase alone. And the avenues for upgrade are good(ish - comments below around threadripper etc not withstanding). However I do like small, quiet and neat things. So there is a big chunk of me wishing I just had a fully decked M1 Max Pro that I could take with me and get comparable edit performance in the field as well as at home. I suspect it wouldn't solve all the problems and I certainly wouldn't be able to game and some codecs would be a pain to render, but it would be small and quiet.

2. Working is fantastic. Playing is fantastic. Both the best I've ever experienced. Fans kick in playing games but quickly chill out when I'm done. And I have headphones on so can't even hear them. The loudest thing is my keyboard.

How does an oversubscribed bus present itself?

I have 2 x M2 drives, the 3090 and a thunderbolt raid plugged in for most of the day and never seem to have any problems. But maybe I just don't know I don't have any problems and I should actually be running even faster. Or something.

With your setup, you’ll see reduced peak bandwidth if you hammer all your drives simultaneously, which may not be a problem for you.

If you’re also loading a multi-channel capture card for example, you’ll start dropping frames, which becomes a much bigger problem.

Go for 3080ti. I got it for £1500, some friends managed at £1200.

Sorry meant to reply @Velocio

What’s this work thing you keep mentioning?

Nvidia FE cards still occasionally show up at RRP on the official site. You need to be on Telegram to get an alert and be quick on the draw. I'm not but I guess something like this...

https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEii3xT81U1A6tLjrQ

Echoing what others have said. PCIE lanes are gonna be your biggest constraint. Even if you go with last gen threadripper like I did you’ll end up with something far more usable. I sourced lightly used parts over time (except PSU) and borrowed ram. To give you a price comparison, I build a threadripper 1950x, x399 mobo, dual nvme drives, dual 3090 OC gpus, 1200w platinum PSU in a fractal define 7 xl case and I reckon I got change from £4.5k. Price up ram accordingly. YMMV etc.

The only thing about threadripper CPUs is that they’re power hungry, even at rest.

How does an oversubscribed bus present itself?

On older machines, especially when attempting weird shit like daisychaining eGPUs I’ve had Windows report code 43 errors

Even a i9-12900K only had 20 PCIe lanes.

Threadripper and Xeon both may improve that but the power draw, high tdp... It's not worth it. And so many apps remain single core and the 5950x or i9 would be higher performance in single core, single thread things.

I've had a dual Xeon system in the past... It was great, but nowhere near as capable at mixed use.

The 5950x with some other bits is the right fit for what I truly do. But now I know to balance what's in it according to PCIe lanes.

Might look at the i9 tomorrow though... PCIe5 and DDR5 could be a reason to wait a couple of months. Will check tomorrow

If you’re concerned about power draw, then fair enough. The AMD Rome/Milan based chips are very thirsty. Although they can all be set with a fixed cTDP value in watts which they stick to rigidly...

Consumer Ryzen entails a compromise with multiple devices, including any Thunderbolt controllers, secondary M.2 slot, USB controllers etc all hanging off the chipset which is connected to the CPU with a grand total of 4x Gen4 lanes in the case of X570. It all has to flow through this narrow pipe.

But it seems like you’re sure that your use case won’t be hobbled much by this, and single-core boost performance on the consumer Ryzens is appreciably higher.

A mitigating method is using an X570 motherboard that allows bifurcating the Gen4 16-lane GPU slot into 2x Gen4 8-lane slots, such as the ASUS WS X570 Ace. This particular board also uniquely exposes a third full bandwidth 8-lane Gen3 slot connected via the chipset’s 4-lane Gen4 link.

I’ve built several media servers using this board with a GPU, 8-channel capture card, a 25Gb NIC and a Gen4 NVME drive all running on a single consumer Ryzen platform with nothing oversubscribed.

Speaking of power draw, spent a couple of hours undervolting my 3080 last night. Results are pretty amazing, knocked a whole 50W off peak power use and it's either cooler or quieter depending on my preference.

Performance exactly the same.

ASUS WS X570 Ace

Nice motherboard, very comparable to the one I chose too. I think they're the same base unit.

That's not how you're meant to do it. You should add 15% to the voltage for no noticeable increase in performance while praying it doesn't fry itself like the rest of us.