Morgan MLGman

HPE and DELL are good but most expensive. Fujitsu and Lenovo are just as good in reality, but cheaper usually. If you want a more budget-friendly one, you can look at SuperMicro as they make their own servers as well as supply tons of companies with their servers as OEM devices for the companies to brand as theirs. That being said, you would probably be best off if you used a 1U server as the "head" of the system, it should be equipped with SSDs, and use a budget-friendly storage array for data. Something like a Lenovo/IBM Storwize V3000-series (V3700 for example) with another disk shelf if you need even more space would do the job quite well. You connect that array to the server directly and you're golden. To build the best system possible, you need to determine which part of the system is the most heavily used (storage or compute) and then go from there. If fast and/or reliable storage is important, a dedicated storage array would be ideal.

Question about the boldened part of your reply - why? Why wouldn't anyone else be able to do what you described?

Fixed that for you

It has nothing to do with that. Chinese Communist Party is extremely sensitive to matters regarding PR of any kind but especially Taiwan, as officially they recognize that Taiwan is China, so Gigabyte even making that distinction on their Chinese website was bold to say the least. The "apology" is clearly made so the party officials don't take reprisal for that, as they could easily temporarily or even permanently forbid sales of Gigabyte products.

B250 motherboards are locked in terms of overclocking, so there's not much you can do. You can enable multicore enhancement if you have such setting, and in theory you could overclock the BCLK I believe, though this is a messy way of trying to overclock because it overclocks some other components on the motherboard as well

What could help in this case (cinebench temps) would be using a different LLC (Load Line Calibration) setting, this pretty much determines what's the voltage curve depending on the CPU load. Each motherboard manufacturer implements that a little differently, so I can't say which setting would you have to choose. Preferably the one that has higher voltage droop. Honestly when applying a thermal paste it's actually better to use more than you need than less than you need, so applying more of it in general is a good practice. Your IHS may not be perfectly flat, but thermal paste should mostly fix that issue. Keep in mind that with Ryzen chips, and especially the current Ryzen 7 lineup you have only one, fairly small area that gets very hot - which is where the CCX die is. Here's a render picture, I marked the "hot" die over there: The other die is the I/O die and it doesn't get nearly that hot. So you've got a very small, dense and hot area that's not in the middle, which is why proper thermal paste application matters a lot

Well, since clock speeds in modern CPUs depend on a combination of temperature and power requirements it may perform better if it's kept at lower temps. In my case the CPU runs about 4.85GHz in lightly threaded workloads and 4.55-4.6GHz in multithreaded ones like Cinebench or other stress tests. What's the thermal paste you're using? Also, why did you write in the original post that your case side panel is open? It should be closed for optimal case airflow, provided you have a correct fan setup (usually front & bottom are intake and top and rear are exhaust).

Yes, this is a setting that you set in BIOS (PPT), it limits how many watts of power your CPU can draw and purely stock would be 105W. If it's reaching 140W then it's unlocked in the BIOS to do that, and it's pretty common for motherboard vendors to do that out-of-the-box to get higher performance at the expense of thermals. What are your temperatures when gaming?

Those figures only apply if your CPU runs fully stock, without PBO enabled and adheres to the TDP number. Mine doesn't, because I've removed those limits so higher temps are indeed expected Also, different workloads use different instruction sets and cinebench is one in particular that heats those CPUs up, for instance in AIDA64 CPU stress test it doesn't get nearly as hot and rarely hits 80C for me.

Well, my 5800X runs at stock settings with PBO enabled and all voltage/current/wattage limits removed. In gaming it runs around 70-75C, but in Cinebench R20 it can reach even 88C. And this is in a Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic case that has 9 fans and a 360mm Corsair AIO cooler. The thermal paste is Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, so I've got a pretty high-end setup there and the temps are still quite high. Idle temps are irrelevant, voltages usually are very high on Ryzen chips when they're in idle. It runs 45-60C when browsing the web for me too.

In general your clock speeds and performance seems a tiny bit lower than what they should be, but regarding the temperatures I had the same case when I upgraded from 3700X to 5800X. Apparently the 5800X does run that hot and that's by design according to AMD, to get higher performance as the silicon itself is made so it can run at that temperature. https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-views-ryzen-5000-cpu-temperatures-up-to-95c-as-typical-and-by-design/ Hope this answers your question.

It's not a big deal at all. 1.45V is above stock spec, but it's well within margins of safety for DDR4 RAM. Higher-end RAM runs at higher voltages due to higher frequencies or better timings like in this case. This message is just a note, which honestly is quite pointless.

No it won't. 3700X is perfectly sufficient for a 3060.

They're similar, but the B550 Gaming E is a better choice IMO. They're both very similar boards, but the ASUS one has POST Code screen for easy troubleshooting which can be very useful. It has a better PCIE slot layout too. I also prefer ASUS BIOS to MSI.

Those are all great boards, I think it doesn't matter much as they're all overkill in terms of VRM design and overclocking even for a 5950X, so the only things that differ are features. Choose the cheapest one that suits your needs feature-wise and you're good.

Yeah the "SS10" markings are wrong on the board, only 2 ports on the rear I/O are 10Gbit and connected to the CPU. Apparently you could also do 10Gbit front USB-C but that goes through the chipset. The Creation also has 10Gig LAN if that's your thing

I think the Crosshair is a waste of money if you're not into overclocking or those "gamer" features that ROG boards offer. I chose the Creation because it had all the features I wanted from a board, so it wouldn't be a downgrade from my previous Crosshair VI Extreme. It's not a good value board if that's what you're looking for. The MEG ACE seems like a reasonable choice provided it fits your needs in terms of the feature set

I don't think there's an X570 board that has better I/O than the Prestige Creation, so a bummer there. There are boards with thunderbolt, but they sacrifice on other connectivity. If you want something cheaper that'd fit the 5950X,you can look at these two: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/pGXYcf/msi-meg-x570-ace-atx-am4-motherboard-meg-x570-ace https://pcpartpicker.com/product/ZRBhP6/gigabyte-x570-aorus-master-atx-am4-motherboard-x570-aorus-master

Both are similar. The Aorus Master seems to be a bit more high-end board in the lineup, but the Tomahawk Wifi is a good choice as well. Though both seem fairly entry-level considering you intend to put a 5950X in there.

Looking at the back of the board you'd assume that all of the red USB ports are 10Gbps because that's what "SS 10" means: According to Wikipedia both USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 can have 10Gbps transfer speeds. USB 3.2 just can be configured in a 20Gbps variant, combining transfer of two 10Gbps connectors into one USB-C connector.

It's around $500: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/KBmFf7/msi-prestige-x570-creation-eatx-am4-motherboard-prestige-x570-creation It's also E-ATX but since it fits great in my standard O11D, it will definitely fit in the O11D XL. Here are USB specifications for this board:

I use an MSI Prestige X570 Creation and it would fit everything you'd probably want. Have a look at the rear I/O: I suggest you check it out. Both are great, out of those two I'd probably get the Aorus Master one.