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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.
ectoplasmosis-
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.
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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
CYOA
Velocio
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:
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:
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.