Developer PC (secondary gaming)

[Egil]

Budget (including currency): $1000-$2000

 

Country: EU / Denmark

 

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

• Primarily programming, but also plan to start gaming a little again with the kids, and it should have no problem streaming to e.g. Twitch.
• Programming workloads are usually spiky, with frequent high loads on CPU. Longer compiles that takes seconds or minutes to run, where a full (CPU) load should be expected.
• Storage is key - it should handle small text files very well and be able to load then as fast as possible.
• 64 GB memory or more, for running VMs or Docker images locally.
• As quite as possible.

Other details: 

Needed:

• Good keyboard
• Monitor arms for the two 27" I already have (ideally with expansion possibility for a 3rd monitor)

Have:

• I already have two 27" 2560x1440 displays, and I want to add a bigger 37"+ high refresh rate 4K/5Kish monitor, but its not a priority right now. 
• Windows license 

My own thoughts:

• ITX form factor, as small as possible.
• Considering building a case myself, otherwise a small and minimalistic case as possible without compromising thermals and noise. No RGB.
• Looking at Noctua D15 chromax black as the cooler https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15-chromax-black
• Think perhaps two NVME in RAID 0, with a larger SSD as (nightly) backup target will give the best small file read performance, but not sure.
• Not sure what kind of GPU I need, but with the latest release from NVIDIA I think some pretty good ones should be available at a very good price soon.
• I will gladly pay more for quite operations, e.g. higher rated power supply with silent operation

Thanks, Egil

[jaslion]

Sounds like you already have a computer. Buying one now today is a bad idea anyways as well the rtx 3070 is launching soon and amd ryzen 4000 too. So use what you hve now for a little longer and get a much better system out of it for the same money (or even less).

 

Now first a couple things:

For silence there are the silence focused cases but the best way to achieve silence is to just have good airflow which means the fans have to work less hard to keep the temps low.

A sycthe ninja 5 or sycthe fuma 2 is cheaper and as good as the noctua whilst tending to be even more quiet. (the ninja the fuma is the same noiselevel)

Raid 0 is not recommended that and well for programming, gaming and regular work there is no difference between a regular sata drive and a super high performance nvme drive. So just stick with 1 simple big drive. Backups do whatever you wish but just use a hdd for that that is bigger for some file history backups too.

Gpu since you'll probably be playing on 1 screen a 3070 would be a nice starting point.

[Egil]

@jaslion, thanks for the input. I do indeed have a computer, its a laptop, so it works, but I could really use the additional power. But I agree, a 3070 with Ryzen 4000 might be worth the wait.

 

As for disk performance, I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying that a SATA SSD is as good as a NVME for my workload?

 

[Fatih19]

5 minutes ago, Egil said:

@jaslion, thanks for the input. I do indeed have a computer, its a laptop, so it works, but I could really use the additional power. But I agree, a 3070 with Ryzen 4000 might be worth the wait.

I would wait for Black Friday or the holiday, lotta sales in that period.

[jaslion]

7 minutes ago, Egil said:

@jaslion, thanks for the input. I do indeed have a computer, its a laptop, so it works, but I could really use the additional power. But I agree, a 3070 with Ryzen 4000 might be worth the wait.

 

As for disk performance, I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying that a SATA SSD is as good as a NVME for my workload?

 

Waiting would very much so be worth it and indeed for your workload the difference is basically none.

 

@Fatih19 black friday and that stuff barely if at all has discounts on computer parts. As the parts that do get a discount are either really really old and not selling because of the high price for them or are items that are not selling well and really need to go (due to something wrong with them or just being bad products).

[Egil]

48 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Waiting would very much so be worth it and indeed for your workload the difference is basically none.

Thanks. Do you have some tests I can look at to understand why SSD vs NVME wont matter in my case?

[jaslion]

45 minutes ago, Egil said:

Thanks. Do you have some tests I can look at to understand why SSD vs NVME wont matter in my case?

Linus made a video about it for gaming. The only time I could ever see it make a difference is if you have a massive amount of data to ingest. But then again that will be bottlenecked by the cpu normally. Vms it MIGHT make a difference if you have a bunch running all doing tasks that hit the disk hard. You can always just get a little more expensive sx8200 nvme drive. It's a lot faster than sata whilst not being a lot more expensive.

[Egil]

Hi again folks

 

Now that AMD and NVIDIA have dropped some GPUs and CPUs on us, I am back to dreaming about a new PC. Here is my wish list so far:

 

- AMD Ryzen 9 5900X or AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

- Crucial Ballistix 64GB Kit DDR4-3600: https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/bl2k32g36c16u4b

- Corsair SF 750: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Power-Supply-Units/Power-Supply-Units-Advanced/SF-Series/p/CP-9020186-NA

- ASUS ROG-Strix-X570-I: https://rog.asus.com/Motherboards/ROG-Strix/ROG-Strix-X570-I-Gaming-Model/

- Noctua NH-D15S-chromax-black: https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15s-chromax-black

- GeForce RTX 3070 or Radeon RX 6000

- Samsung 970 PRO 512 GB PCIe or ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB

 

Still need to find a good wireless keyboard, numpad optional.

 

What do you think guys. Anything you would change?