Did I shoot myself in the foot buying Threadripper?

[Ben_R4mZ]

I currently use a 4 year old, custom built, Sager gaming laptop with an i7 6700K, GTX 960M, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD+1TB HDD. Currently it powers this setup.

 

I've been wanting to upgrade for a while but my new job gave me extra cash to finally go for it.

 

Long story short I was going to buy an NZXT custom built rig, but while browsing Amazon saw a Threadripper 2920X on sale for under $350. I've had my eye on Threadripper CPUs for a while so, being the chronically impulsive person I am I bought it, (with accompanying motherboard), and started the process of learning how to build a PC while assembling a list of parts. (To all be bought on Cyber Monday to maximize on savings, if any.)

 

My final build looks something like this:

Corsair Icue 465X RGB Mid-Tower ATX Case

Threadripper 2920X *Bought (Thermal paste as well)

GIGABYTE X399 Aorus PRO Motherboard *Bought

Corsair H100i RGB Platinum AIO (Turns out I don't need that thermal paste)

16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance PRO RGB 3200MHz C16

RTX 2080 Super w/ Windforce fans by GIGABYTE

Corsair Force Series Gen 4 PCIe MP600 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD (that's a mouthful)

960 M.3 Gen 3 PCIe M.2 from Corsair just like above. (you pay a lot extra for Gen 4 :/ )

Samsung 860 QVO 1TB SATA SSD

Corsair 750 Watt 80+ Gold PSU

Misc other stuff like a Commander Pro and a CyberPower UPS.

 

My primary use case is Gaming, Streaming/Recording said gaming sessions, and editing the footage down into questionably watchable videos. (I will also be upgrading to a 1440p, 144hz monitor so keep that in mind)

I have the multitasking bug so anything that lets me game, record games, watch YouTube, and be in discord at the same time because I run 3 monitors is always a plus.

 

My concerns are these.

 1.) If the PSU is 750W, does the UPS have to output that much? I would assume so, plus It should power a monitor as well as anything else I plug into it for surge protection and such. (probably a stupid question but I don't honestly know the answer.)

2.) Will the Threadripper run 3200 MHz RAM? I've seen it's allowed "base clock" speed is 2966 or something but I don't actually know what that means. Am I not going to get the full benefit of my memory if I continue with this or sill it support custom RAM speeds up to 3200?

3.) I know the Threadripper series are not "Gaming" CPU's, stuff like the normal Ryzen 3/5/7/9 run games much better. (probably due to their integrated graphics or something idk) But most of the benchmarks I've been watching were done with 1080 Ti's and my big $600 question is; Will buying a 2080 Super compensate for my lack of gaming prowess on the side of my CPU?

4.) A smaller thing but I've only been able to get osu! to run on my computer if I let it use integrated graphics. If I set it to use the GTX 960M then it straight up won't run. Since the Threadripper doesn't have integrated graphics is there a good chance osu! won't even be able to run on it?

5.) Is quad channel memory something I should be shooting for? I'm only getting 16 GB (2X8GB). Should I up that to 32 and get 4X8 or will that not really be beneficial for me?

 

Should I just scrap the "whole thing," (CPU and MoBo), and just buy a Ryzen 7 3800X? (Same price (~350) and does better with games)

Or is this a decent build for my use case, I just have to change some BIOS settings, (upgrade for Threadripper Gen 2 and RAM speed), and it should work as I expect it to? (144+ fps in most titles these days; CoD Modern Warfare, Apex Legends, Metro Exodus, League of Legends, CS:GO, and so on, top of the line video editing, multitasking galore, etc.)

 

Minor disclaimer, yes, I know that RGB is more expensive, it's a personal choice. If I'm building my first PC it might as well look as pretty as I can afford. (at least I'm not buying a waterblocked GPU)

 

Thank you for your time,

Ben_R4mZ

[minibois]

1 minute ago, Ben_R4mZ said:

 1.) If the PSU is 750W, does the UPS have to output that much? I would assume so, plus It should power a monitor as well as anything else I plug into it for surge protection and such. (probably a stupid question but I don't honestly know the answer.)

2.) Will the Threadripper run 3200 MHz RAM? I've seen it's allowed "base clock" speed is 2966 or something but I don't actually know what that means. Am I not going to get the full benefit of my memory if I continue with this or sill it support custom RAM speeds up to 3200?

3.) I know the Threadripper series are not "Gaming" CPU's, stuff like the normal Ryzen 3/5/7/9 run games much better. (probably due to their integrated graphics or something idk) But most of the benchmarks I've been watching were done with 1080 Ti's and my big $600 question is; Will buying a 2080 Super compensate for my lack of gaming prowess on the side of my CPU?

4.) A smaller thing but I've only been able to get osu! to run on my computer if I let it use integrated graphics. If I set it to use the GTX 960M then it straight up won't run. Since the Threadripper doesn't have integrated graphics is there a good chance osu! won't even be able to run on it?

5.) Is quad channel memory something I should be shooting for? I'm only getting 16 GB (2X8GB). Should I up that to 32 and get 4X8 or will that not really be beneficial for me?

1) Your UPS doesn't have to match that necessarily. A PSU will only use as much wattage as needed.

What you should rather look at with a UPS is the graphs they should have and the amount of power you will use:

Spoiler

This just the graph from some random APC unit. Say your PC was using 400W (like when you are using the GPU fully and the CPU a bit), this UPS will last just under 3 minutes.

Is that enough? That is what you should think about.

Usually with a UPS you just want to power your system for long enough to save any documents and properly turn it off.

 

2) Threadripper 2's base max frequency is 2933Mhz. Anything above that is an overclock done by the motherboard. No guarantee if that will work.. On LTT's CPU reviews from yesterday they had their Threadripper 2 build run 2933Mhz memory, so I assume you are quite dependent by your motherboard if you can get anything above that.

 

3) They are not gaming CPU's because they have just more cores than the  'consumer chips', which games do not care about. Your CPU still needs to match your GPU in performance. If you CPU can't output 100 frames, your GPU will never get 100 frames. Doesn't matter how good or bad your GPU is.

Threadripper isn't meant for 144Hz, but 60Hz gaming will do just fine.

The Ryzen chips (other than the G CPU's) don't have integrated graphics by the way.

 

4) osu! was able to run on my previous PC just fine, on Nvidia graphics.. So must have been a bug in the game.

It should just run as far as I know.. With normal Ryzen chips also not having integrated graphics, we would have probably seen more issues with that.

 

5) Depends on what you do. Wont do much in gaming, but if you are pushing lots of memory in video editing, 3D modeling, etc. it could be worth it.

 

To be honest, unless you really need the 24 threads, the 3700X would have probably made more sense with its 16 threads. (or even 3900X, if you factor in the difference in price of motherboard).

[Windows7ge]

1. No, a 750W PSU can supply up-to ~750W. It does not draw this from the wall continuously. Usually a system like this all parts together will idle in the ~150W range.

 

2. With an unlocked CPU any overclock is possible but I do believe 1XXX/2XXX series TR don't have an official supported speed of 3200MHz. You'd have to overclock it yourself. I don't know if X.M.P. would do it for you right.

 

3. All I can say about this is if the CPU is the gaming bottleneck buying a bigger/faster GPU won't necessarily help. Especially considering the CPU may hold the GPU back. I'd do some research as to what would be best paired with the 2920X. Do note you can overclock the chip which can help the CPU bottleneck.

 

4. I'm not familiar with "osu!". Can't help you there.

 

5. It really depends on your workload as it if more memory bandwidth will help you but if you've gone for TR there's no reason to short yourself potential performance improvements (Note: Gaming will not be one of them). I'd get 4x8GB.

 

Really depends on your workload. Personally I don't try to keep up with the latest & greatest. What works for you really depends on if your tasks benefit from fewer faster cores or more slower cores.

[Ben_R4mZ]

7 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

3. All I can say about this is if the CPU is the gaming bottleneck buying a bigger/faster GPU won't necessarily help. Especially considering the CPU may hold the GPU back. I'd do some research as to what would be best paired with the 2920X. Do note you can overclock the chip which can help the CPU bottleneck.

Then I guess I'm confused as to how CPU's work, It doesn't make sense to me that the R7 8-core 3700X gets ~133 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider but the TR 2090WX only gets 110. (Just going off LTT benchmarks in the product review videos for the 3700/3900 and 3rd Gen Threadripper. They both use an RTX 2080 Ti.)

As many people keep saying whenever big core counts come up, games don't benefit from larger core counts, because they are by and large single-threaded processes so hyper threading is useless, but I still don't understand why a 12-core can't perform as well as an 8-core. They're both using the same amount of cores right?

 

It also turns out that TR Gen 2 doesn't support PCIe Gen 4 either so I'm starting to like the sound of starting over more and more

[Windows7ge]

49 minutes ago, Ben_R4mZ said:

Then I guess I'm confused as to how CPU's work, It doesn't make sense to me that the R7 8-core 3700X gets ~133 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider but the TR 2090WX only gets 110. (Just going off LTT benchmarks in the product review videos for the 3700/3900 and 3rd Gen Threadripper. They both use an RTX 2080 Ti.)

As many people keep saying whenever big core counts come up, games don't benefit from larger core counts, because they are by and large single-threaded processes so hyper threading is useless, but I still don't understand why a 12-core can't perform as well as an 8-core. They're both using the same amount of cores right?

 

It also turns out that TR Gen 2 doesn't support PCIe Gen 4 either so I'm starting to like the sound of starting over more and more

From there it comes down to micro-architecture and the per core speed of each core. What can happen is the GPU can have more headroom to process data but the cores of the CPU being utilized can't go any faster than the set clock rate meaning going with an even higher end GPU could result in no additional performance without manually overclocking your CPU.

 

It's actually more complicated than that but that's a oversimplified explanation.

[Kilrah]

4 hours ago, Ben_R4mZ said:

As many people keep saying whenever big core counts come up, games don't benefit from larger core counts, because they are by and large single-threaded processes so hyper threading is useless, but I still don't understand why a 12-core can't perform as well as an 8-core. They're both using the same amount of cores right?

Because on higher core count parts each core is typically slower. You get many slow cores instead of few fast ones, IF all are used the total performance will be higher but anything that can't use them will suffer.

The game runs on 1-2 cores so the many other ones are useless to it, and those it runs on are slower than on a CPU with fewer ones.