BGross

Blackberry Cylance Antivirus. Been recommending them a lot as they are one of the best in the industry and are Canadian home boys.

The Sun is Dead by Dragonforce. Great rift in here.

Idea, see if Cylance would be interested in product sponsorship (Blackberry's anti malware). I think that would be cool and they are Canadian bros.

I agree. If you can go for at least a 750W power supply I think that would really help for when you get your new gpu. In the event you can go for an even more powerful power supply for similar price from a reputable brand such as corsair or EVGA or Seasonic, go for it. It will be something you will be less likely to need to upgrade later.

So just to confirm, you are looking only for pc fan recommendations? If so then go with a Noctua fan that works in your case. They are generally very reliable and good airflow. They are more pricy but they will preform well. If you want RGB, Lian Li has some cool looking fans that I forget the name of and Corsair has some too. f you have other questions about your build, please post them.

So it seems generally well balanced. I would say you could save a buck by going Ryzen 5 3600XT as you likely won't need 8 cores for gaming but they can be nice to have if you like to also do streaming or want to make sure future games can take advantage of them. Not sure what availability of the Ryzen 7 5700x or Ryzen 5 5600x are in your region. I found some in Canada that were in a bundle with a power supply that I was able to sell on Facebook. Maybe one of those would be a better option. If you could go full ATX motherboard and case then you would also have much greater possibilities for upgrades, etc. and likely at the same or cheaper price. If you really like the case and only are gaming and don't see yourself adding HDDs or more m.2 or sata SSDs then the case and motherboards look good. If you are looking to eventually add one or more HDDs then you will need a different case from what I can see. After a very quick look I didn't see any space for one. If you can get the Nvidia 3060 at MSRP, GO FOR IT NOW! DO NOT WAIT! They are so hard to find. The power supply might be a bit under powered and I haven't heard of or seen anyone use a Fractal Design power supply. Probably not a bad choice but if you could get an EVGA or a Corsair 750W power supply even a 80 plus bronze would be good. I would recommend an EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G5, 80 Plus Gold 750W if you can find one for a decent price. All in all it looks good and fairly well balanced. You will get a decent performance boost if you can go Ryzen 5000 series (e.g. Ryzen 5 5600x or a Ryzen 7 5700x). If you don't need the extra cores and can make do with just 6, you might also be able to go intel for similar performance at a lower cost because they have availability at MSRP.

I agree, if you can find a 3060 or a 3060 to for retail prices (might be able to get on a wait list if you don't get it at launch) that would absolutely be your best bet. AMD new Rx 5000 series graphics cards look good too. There looks like the Radeon RX 6700 XT might be coming soon and if you can snag one of those at MSRP, it would be a great deal for you too.

So I just looked up the part and found a link to Seagate's website where they layout which drives are which. Turns out all barracuda drives are SMR (which explains some performance loss I have been having lately when moving the majority of my library around). I may reconsider then and go to a exos or iron wolf platform if I can sell off these drives and afford the extra cost. I will see. https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

Are you able to connect this to a monitor? Can you get in the operating system (windows)? if yes to both of these, you can check what CPU, GPU, how much ram, what speed of ram, and what storage types/sizes you have through opening task manager and going into the performance tab (you will have to click on more details tab when it is first opened if you have not done so already). Why do you need to know? Just curious or something more? (Thinking this might help us better help you find what you need to know).

Thanks for the suggestions. I will look into snapraid. I don't know for sure. Any idea how I could double check?

I agree on the cpu choice and any compatible motherboard should be fine. Another option you can go is a ryzen 5 2600x or 3600x would also likely serve you well. Feel free to check the used market as you might be able to get these for cheaper. I think you might find 8 GB of RAM as not quite enough. I would recommend going to 16 GB if you can. If you can't now, this is also an easy upgrade later, just make sure you have some empty slots for more ram later so you can pair your existing ram with more new ram later. I would also say, unless you are doing high precision models, I have found a GTX card works well for SolidWorks. I have a laptop that has a 1060 6gb in it and it seems to do fine. If you can find a good used graphics card like a GTX 1660 or a GTX 1070 would likely serve you very well and usually have more horse power for far less money than the Quadro side of things. Also depends on what graphics your laptop has. Do you know? If it just has basic integrated, then you could probably go to even a GTX 1050 or 1650. Hope this helps.

Note on this Build: I am looking to create this build sometime between now and next Christmas. I am in no rush, but I did want to do my research and ask for help on the implementation of the storage specifically (see questions below). Help, suggestions or links to references are all much appreciated. Budget (including currency): ~$1500 CAD Country: Canada Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Emulating Wii, GameCube, etc., Media storage and consumption, home server, considering using also as a Plex server. Other details: So main question is how to do setup a mass storage drive that has drive parity (something like RAID 5) where I can get a performance benefit from pooling 3+ drives together with the added resilience of being able to loose 1 drive while being completely in Windows 10 pro (not server) so I can use Backblaze for backup. Secondary question: once I do that, can I possibly add a single large storage SSD or a NVMe SSD as like a L2 cache or tiered storage to that mass drive so that when I write big files to it, it writes to the SSD and the trickles into the HDD array and copies frequently used files into the SSD for use (such as copies a season of a show I am watching into the SSD when I add it all to play in VLC). I have looked at windows storage spaces but I wasn't sure if there are other options out there. I do prefer to go software as apposed to hardware based configuration as this is a system I will be upgrading over time and would like to keep the same or a similar configuration just with newer parts and I don't want to lock into AMD or Intel only. Parts: Cpu: Ryzen 5 or i5 latest gen (basically a six core) Mobo: Asus TUF wifi (or something similar) Ram: 16 GB 3200MHz ram (likely corsair vengeance, but might like ECC if going AMD) BOOT SSD: Crucial 128 GB SATA SSD (already own) Additional SSD: Intel m.2 1 TB 665p HDD: 4 X Seagate Barracuda 8TB (I know, probably should go iron wolf or exos, but I am not hitting these berry hard and I already have two and will run with 1 drive parity and live Backblaze backups so it will be fine till they are all old enough to upgrade later when I am more flush with cash) GPU: Would like something like a 2070 super or 3060. Will check used market vs new when it comes time to buy in a few months. Case: building a custom case so my wife approves of the asthetic. Price of case not included in budget. PSU: EVGA 750W G3 Super Nova (already own) Cooler and fans: water cooled so will be looking into cpu water blocks (recommendations would be helpful here). I do like the promo chill fittings in white and the Alpha cool radiators that you can connect in to the top and out of the bottom. Will likely use noctua 120mm black fans. Again, any help and suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks for clarifying. So then ya, if you want to overclock or possibly do that, you might want a better cooler. Again, not needed also can do later.

I agree. Looks good. Two things I would advise you maybe to think about (totally up to you to decide if you need them). If you look at Seagate's external drives (the kind in enclosures with a power supply and usb connection) you can often get more capacity for a good price and they are typically barracuda drives. I have done this twice with 8 TB drives and paid closer to $180CAD (see link below) each vs $240 for the bare drive (odd, but whatever). If you think you might like significantly more storage, this is an easier swap out today for this rig. If 2 TB is plenty, then that's all good. Other thing is you may want to consider is investing in a better than stock cooler. Not needed but it is a simple upgrade that might keep thermals down in a more comfortable range. Again, not needed as you are getting a B550 board and cannot overclock (or I don't think you would be able to, I would have to double check). All in all, you have a solid parts choice. https://www.newegg.ca/black-seagate-expansion-8tb/p/N82E16822178951?item=N82E16822178951

Side note, I have found Chrome to not work that well on a large number of occasions for the web client but edge (not the new edge based on chomium, but the old one) seems to work consistently better.