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This is my first actual hardware build. Being a software programmer, I work more with software, not so much hardware, and all of the systems I have had up until now were AIOs. Fair warning: some ranting and personal opinion is in here, and there is no TL;DR despite the length of this article being longer than the others I skimmed here on the forums. (I'm thorough and precise, and I know what I want, okay?) As of writing this, my current build is an MSi GE72MVR 7RG Apache Pro which originally came with a 128GB M.2 PCIe SSD, and upgraded that to a Samsung PM961 256GB NVMe SSD. Summary: Purpose of this Thread I could use some general advice about particular things, as well as some out of curiosity. I would also like to invite any critique and opinion on this build, constructive or otherwise. 1. Budget & Location This build is, to no one's surprise, upwards of $3200 USD with chassis and components alone excluding peripherals. With peripherals, this intends to be upwards of $4400, however, this pricing logic will be explained of course. These are the parts I already have: Chassis: Thermaltake Core P7 TG Edition Motherboard: MSi MEG X399 Creation CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8G (I have an MSi R9 380 4G lying around that was given to me as well. Can't SLI without hacks, but I wonder how that might work with both in?) RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB (quad-channel) SSD*: Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB (*Need to buy and ship) Network Card: Should I get one of these (on PCIe)? The motherboard comes with Intel LAN and Intel WiFi. Cooling: Water, Thermaltake Floe Riing 360mm (the package says AM4, but the description on Amazon lists TR4 as well); 3x Silent Wings 3. Power Supply: EVGA 1000W GQ 80 Plus Gold. Thermal Paste: indeterminate at this time. I would like to know what is actually most efficient, be it graphite thermal pad paste replacement, or regular old thermal paste. Yes, I will be overclocking, which I know even less about. I need just a quick summary of all the BIOS tuning parameters, how they affect each other; and what software should I use for overclocking if necessary. My primary operating system will be some flavor of Linux, probably Arch, as that is what I used back in 2012; it's familiar to me, and I have more control over the entire system, and has improved considerably since then. For HDR support, I will dual-boot Windows 10 Pro. Theoretically, since image sampling is one of the most expensive GPU operations, the throughput performance of the CPU should help against bottle-necking the GPU, or vice versa. Also, I prefer AMD over Intel; the only reason games run better on Intel, as far as I know or care, is because the game engines are not well-optimized for multi-threaded environments or throughput and do not focus on optimization, but features rather; and I would argue that games really could look nice without requiring extremely high-end graphics when you can achieve photo-realism on Unreal Engine 4 with a single GTX 1080 Ti getting around 80 FPS, and quite a smooth frame rate as well, whereas AAA titles with RTX struggle to get beyond 60 FPS at times. Those games that do implement multi-threading don't do it quite right either, as mutable state is not what multi-threading is made for. 2. Aim of This Build This build is intended for myself as both a high-end gaming rig, as well as a designer workstation (I am a software programmer). As a designer, programming is my playground, and is where I can be truly creative using the power of math, and simulation. I have had all manner of ideas for things that I want to make which would not be possible unless I had hardware capable of pushing out what I plan to pump into it (how about voxel rendering as an efficient rendering method for photo-realistic graphics?). Meanwhile, I do not do heavy gaming, but at least I can enjoy Minecraft with some expensive shaders on higher settings, and if I want to get into AAA titles, I now can. I have played Minecraft, CSGO, Halo PC, Halo 2 PC, and that's about it. 3. Monitor(s) This easily adds $1000 to the build (based on the cheapest price I could find) as it is an LG 34GK950F-B, or some variation thereof (G-SYNC, Freesync, Schmeesync... Freesync is more flexible, at least on this panel, for obvious reasons). This will be the only monitor. As for HDR support, I will either wait for Wayland/Weston support for Linux; try to hack Linux support using wine(!?), or forking Wayland (nah, too much work), or ultimately just use Windows 10 Pro for gaming, and Linux for design until Linux catches up with the rest of us and becomes mainstream over Windows. My Theoretical OS > Linux > Windows. (Well, my OS doesn't quite exist yet, so I can't really say it's better. May never happen; who knows?) 4. Peripherals I already have a Logitech G502 gaming mouse; since I won't have a built-in keyboard anymore, some advice on a low-latency keyboard with a good in-between for fast typing, and responsive tactile feedback for gaming, then I will be golden. My wrist stature indicates I have a small form-factor, and I do have long(er) fingers as well. I primarily use a claw grip on my mouse. I need a larger mat because my Razer Firefly is too small. I like how buttery smooth it is, with the caveat that the smallest specks land on here and make a nice scratchy noise if it gets under my mouse. Despite how smooth it is, I don't care for RGB, so it has a useless RGB chord extending frontwards, and I can't play low-DPI for games like CSGO, or even Minecraft for that matter. Yes, I know, I said I'm not a heavy gamer, but I do enjoy a bit of tactical FPS, and if I play a competitive FPS like CSGO, I want to play it well. That being said, I could use some advice on a nice big mat that has plenty of X and Y, while maintaining a rather smooth feel. 5. Why I am Upgrading I would like a smoother gaming experience as there are many kinds of performance and auditory benefits lost when going to a high-end laptop versus upgrading to a full-tower gaming/designer workstation (I'll call it a workstation, I guess) that has better air-flow and cooling solutions. Furthermore, this hardware is at least one generation old since it has an 8th gen Intel Core i7-7700HQ, and a GTX 1070. The other pain is how bloated MSi is with their software in having multiple GUIs, and multiple software components hogging my RAM, as I only have 16GiB of RAM, and in the beginning, I had only 14% RAM usage, whereas today, that is easily 24%, and with chrome, looking at task manager right now, I'm at 50%. That is ridiculously inefficient, even if I do have two youtube tabs with video. Switching to Arch Linux back in 2012 on my old Toshiba Satellite C855D, I saw a small yet noticeable performance improvement, and just tweaking the JVM parameters for garbage collection among other things, I managed to get a consistent and stable 60FPS in Minecraft. I don't know why my system requires Gibibytes of memory when it should only require a few Mebibytes. Linux easily achieves this because it isn't a bloated architecture like Windows, and doesn't need to maintain PEXE compatibility across its own versions, or deal with DLL Hell: it just works. Hopefully this long post doesn't take up too many kilobytes of memory on whatever server this is stored on, so it should probably be compressed--oh wait, that's too extreme of an optimization. I #BlameDonaldKnuth for slow software!

Hi, New here and a quick question... I just build a threadripper 2950x build on a Asus Prime 399 Mboard and 4 x 8g GSkill Trident Z 3200 ram (noctua TR4 cooler). I got the ram setup in bios to run at 3200mHz, that works but everything else is left stock. I expected to see the CPU boost up to 4.4gHz but I only see it go up to 4.1gHz, sometimes 4.25... What gives?? Thank you in advance for your answers

Hi! These are the specs that recently dropped for the upcoming 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper 2950X: 16 cores, 32 threads, a base clock of 3.5GHz and boost clock of 4.4GHz, for $899. Does anyone know at what FSB they will / could run? How far do you guys think we could overclock it and how? If we push a little over the 4.4ghz boost clock, how do you think could it perform in gaming compared to a 8700k for example? I am looking for a new video rendering / gaming CPU and am wondering if this could be a neat choice for me. Thank you for your feedback!