Planing for the Argo Refit

[Harry Voyager]

TL;DR version: I want to do a Ryzen 9 3900X build, but think for my use case, and current price trajectories, that an Intel I9-9900KF may be better performing and lower cost.

 

I'm currently planning out a backbone replacement for the PC I built several years ago. This is driven by my discovery of VR Flight sims (and there corresponding CPU devouring ways) and, what I believe is a persistent timing issue between my motherboard and the SSD that causes issues getting the system to boot. (Once I've gotten it booted, it comes in and out of sleep fine, so I haven't had that much need to find the problem and fix it. Plus, I think the root cause is pairing a 2013 motherboard that was developed before the SSD timings were finalized with an early SSD drive.)

 

The primary heavy lift for this machine will be playing the DCS F-14B and Il-2 Great Battles in VR, with, preferably, ludicrous resolution, at, hopefully minimum frame rates of 45+. 90 fps would be nice if viable, but right now I don't see it at as important as being able to support tons of pixels. (And my reaction time is poor in general. Spotting is life!) Basically, looking to reach a system that can keep up 45+ FPS in DCS VR with an HD Reverb or Pimax 5k+ grade or better headset. 

 

As I understand them, the Il-2 and DCS core engines are both very old, and very single thread dependent. (Il-2 is derived from the Rise of Flight Engine, with first shipped back in 2009, and DCS is a development of the old LoMAC (2003), and which could very well still be using code work from the original SU-27 Flanker of '96 vintage. Flight sims can have quite a lengthy development life.) Both of the games also tend to be rather large. Just in the two directories, I've got around 174 GB of game files and another 1.4GB of mods. Load times are also a thing, as are peripherals.

 

Also, I've got VAIRIO integrated into DCS so voice recognition is also a performance need, though I believe, since it is using the Windows Voice Recognition software, that that should be on its own thread, rather than living in the same thread as the main game. I might need to use thread locking software to keep the scheduler from intermingling them, however.

 

Additional considerations are wireless Internet. I need to run an Ethernet cable through the attic to get a wired connection to the cable box, but that's probably going to be some ways off, and if I can get a solid connection set up by wireless for online play, that works for me for now. I'm also looking for solid blue tooth support that's compatible with PS4 controllers. (I prefer them to the XBox controller setup for games that work better with controllers. Yes I may, one day, return to FF14, and I'd rather not be tethered, if possible.) 

 

Finally, USB. I'm counting 14 devices permanently plugged into my tower, 12 of which I can identify at the moment. The majority of these are game controllers. Remember that line about fifty different controls? Yeah, that's just the right vertical panel... At some point I may decide I'm going to go all in and build something completely insane but that a bridge for another day.

 

I believe I only need 4-6 USB 3.0 ports. I need two for the Oculus Rift sensors, and I believe another for the headset, and I'd like to have a couple free for the front panel. I haven't looked into external audio DACs yet, so not sure what the right ports for those would be, but would like to have the correct type of connector for if I decide to do that in the future.

 

The rest of the USB ports should be fine as 2.0 speeds. While I have many controls interfacing with them, the data rates are relatively low; I just need to be able to be sending commands through several of them at once without a traffic jam. (Nothing quite like having your rudder decide its going to *stop talking to you* because you're trying to lock the guy up and the controllers have had the equivalent of a bus collision, or worse, something bumped one of the head tracking towers into degraded mode while your tracking someone over your shoulder and trying to maneuver in four+ axis.) So, the more USB port and USB headers, the merrier, along with enough extra PCI express slots for an additional USB controller or two.

 

The build plan is to do the rebuild over the Christmas break, so probably getting parts on order in the November timeframe. Target budget is between $1000 to $1500 USD, preferably closer to the $1k limit than the $1.5k. Also, finding out that certain retailers are going to start charging sales tax on October 1st, so unless we can expect more than a 8% price drop in certain components (RAM, I'm looking at you) between then and November, it may make price sense to buy some of the parts early rather than late. 

 

The current state of the Argo should be in the link below:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/jgZznH

 

Parts they aren't able to list are, the case is a Corsair Obsidian 800D Full Tower ATX case, and I'm currently using an Oculus Rift CV1 . I'll use 1-3 1920x1200 IPS monitors: 1x HP2475w, and a pair of Asus PA249Q monitors.

 

I believe I should be able to just replace the CPU/Motherboard/RAM backbone and keep the rest of the system, though I think I'll need to find an adapter bracket for the cooler if I go AMD.

 

The first debate is Intel vs AMD. Right now, its looking like the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is the best overall CPU on the market, however, the Intel I9-9900KF still seems to hold the edge in single threaded performance, which is the big bottleneck in the current VR flight sims, at least until one or the other major maker decides to completely rework their engine for multi-threading. Might happen. Might not. 

 

Also, given that these games are either single or at most dual threaded games, I'm wondering if it is worthwhile to look at the i7-9700KF has the 4.9Ghz boost speed near the 9900KF, and comes in considerably cheaper. Likewise, the Ryzen 7 3800X is just 100mhz shy of what the 3900X performs, though with current price trends, it, ironically ended up being just about the same price as the i9-9900KF's that I'm seeing. Note: since I already have a 3d card, I'm primarily looking at the 'F' version of the Intel chips, since they tend to cost less and I'm given to understand they have a bit less thermal load. I'm actually thinking, if the Intel 9900's keep dropping and end up in Ryzen 7 3800 or 3700 territory, that may tip the scales, for my use case, decisively onto the Intel side. Then again, based on some of the performance numbers I'm seeing, it may not.

 

That brings up a question, assuming I get DDR4-3600, which architecture would be expected to make more effective use of it? DCS in particular is a very RAM heavy game, that sometimes tries to load everything under the sun into ready memory.

 

Platform growth is another area I'm still hazy in. I know on the Intel side, pretty much any CPU upgrade would be another backbone replacement. In contrast, I'm given to understand that the AM4 platform is a bit more flexible, however, from everything I can find, the AM4 seems to have been only planned to go through 2020, so I think I'd be coming in near the end of life for that platform? If it's likely to last a couple more years of high performance processors, that could be a measurable buying factor. I'm not sure how much though. I've had this backbone since 2013, and looking at the benchmarks, it's only in the last generation or so that it seems to be falling behind more than 10-15% in single threaded performance. 

 

Last thing I'm debating on is whether an M.2 drive might be worth getting for holding my game files on. Just looking at Newegg, the WD Blue M.2 drives are about 1TB for ~$100 USD, 2TB for $240 USD. How much of a game load time difference should one expect from that range of M.2 drive vs a SATA6 SSD? My current "0 to flying" time on the DCS F-14B is about 1:45. Il-2's running at about another 2m of loading screens as well, and unfortunately it's got about 4 of them to get from start to flying.

 

So, for those of you all who've managed to get to the bottom of this wall of text, your thoughts? 

 

Intel or AMD? 

 

DDR4 3600 RAM? RAM now or later? 

 

Are motherboards going to be a key differentiator?

 

M.2 drive worthwhile over a SATA 6GB SSD?

 

Any refurb work I should do on the case, PSU, and cooler before reusing them?

 

Better ways of managing the peripheral nest than tons of USB headers and Rosewill USB PCI-E Express cards?

 

Thank you,

 

Harry Voyager

Edited September 7, 2019 by Harry Voyager

[brob]

At the moment latest generation AMD desktop cpu IPC is better than that of comparable Intel cpu. In single threaded apps Intel still outperforms AMD because of higher clocks.

 

Performance differences between various memory speeds is quite small. Typically within the testing margin of error, rarely more than 2%. In addition to speed, timings are important.

 

Motherboards within the same price range are going to have very similar performance. In fact performance differences between same chipset motherboards are fairly small. X570 motherboards have an advantage in storage and potentially gpu bandwidth.

 

M.2 drives come in multiple flavors, including SATA III. Worth of using NVMe M.2 drives is debatable. I'm a believer in using highest affordable bandwidth storage.. The Intel 660p and Crucial P1 are slower than higher end models like the Samsung 970, but still significantly faster than SATA III units. They are very well priced and represent a good compromise.

 

Given their ages, I'd probably replace the psu and cpu cooler.

[Harry Voyager]

And what I'm noticing is, at the moment, I9-9900KF's are on sale for ~$400 USD, while the Ryzen 9 3900X are running at $550 USD list, if you can find one.

 

I'm wondering if what I'm seeing is a combination of retailers feeling a price pressure from AMD, and Intel clearing out their current I9 stock in prep for offering thing like that "All 5Ghz" I9 editions for higher sticker prices.

 

I'l admit, part of the reason I'm thinking about getting an M.2 drive is the newness factor, but I'm also running low on space in my SSD. I've been starting to shuffle archived stuff off onto the hard drives, but that involves digging through all of my folders to figure out what's really there (hazards of running a disk without reformatting for 6+ years...) and shifting my games folders over to a 2TB SSD would cover a multitude of sins.

 

So building off of that, thinking the following:

 

Intel I9-9900KF

Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro WiFi

G.Skil Sniper x 64 DDR4-3000

Intel 660p 2TB drive

 

New Corsair H100x cooler and Corsair RMx (2018) 850W 80+ Gold ATX power supply.

 

Remove the WD Hard Disks, and just have the 850 Pro and 660p drives.

 

The final config would look something like this, and current bill would be ~$1,300 USD

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel Core i9-9900KF 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor	$419.99 @ Newegg
CPU Cooler	Corsair H100x Liquid CPU Cooler	$79.89 @ OutletPC
Motherboard	Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI ATX LGA1151 Motherboard	$179.99 @ Amazon
Memory	G.Skill Sniper X 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory	$279.99 @ Newegg
Storage	Samsung 850 Pro Series 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive	$522.99 @ Amazon
Storage	Intel 660p Series 2.048 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive	$184.89 @ OutletPC
Video Card	Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11 GB Founders Edition Video Card
Power Supply	Corsair RMx (2018) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	$137.99 @ Amazon
Optical Drive	Lite-On IHBS112-04 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
Operating System	Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit	$139.00 @ Amazon
Sound Card	Asus Xonar Essence STX 24-bit 192 kHz Sound Card
Headphones	Beyerdynamic MMX 300 Headset
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$1959.73
	Mail-in rebates	-$15.00
	Total	$1944.73
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-09-07 23:57 EDT-0400

 

[brob]

Slightly faster or lower CL memory would be my choice.

Have you investigated the use of 32GB memory modules?

[Harry Voyager]

Honestly, when I do my builds I tend to aim for twice the current recommended RAM capacity for future proofing. My current machine was built when 16GB was the recommended size, and I know for DCS currently, if you've got less than 32, it really hurts performance.

 

One thing I'm still wondering about, is, with the remaining expected life of the AM4 platform, can we expect another iteration of the Ryzen chips to come out that will outperform the I9-9900KF in single threaded performance? If i go I9, I'm likely locked into that CPU for the next five to six years, but reportedly AMD is much easier to do CPU upgrades with.

 

If we're looking at another 2-4 years of new high performance AM4 chips, it would be a strong argument to give up ~5% now for 20-30% in a few years, but what I've seen seems to be indicating that the AM4 platform was originally planned to run through 2020. Do we know if AMD is likely to extend that?

[brob]

With every new Ryzen core AMD has introduced a new generation of chipsets. While the new cpu will run on older chipsets, the newer generation always introduces features that make moving attractive. I'm of the opinion that the longevity of the socket is as much a marketing ploy as anything else. 

 

I think one has to accept that cpu upgrades are always likely to mean replacement motherboards. Consider recent history with Ryzen desktop cpu. First gen chipsets were designed for 1st gen cpu. The latest generation cpu has a higher stock memory speed and supports PCIe 4.0 so one of necessity has to give up some of the latest gen enhancements when reusing an older motherboard.