Thunderbolt 3 PC Build

[emcantillo]

Budget (including currency): $1600 CAD

Country: Canada

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Audio Work, Games, Unity, Unreal.

 

Hey everybody, first time posting. I'm currently looking to build my first PC (moving from Mac, I work mostly in audio and most high end audio equipment is compatible only with Mac). My biggest issue is that I need Thunderbolt 3 (for my audio equipment) which limits my options on what I can get. There are only few a motherboards that even support TB 3, on the AMD side, only a couple of ASRock and ROG motherboards have internal headers for it, and on the Intel side there are more options but they are quite more expensive (though just having to buy the Thunderbolt 3 add-on for the AMD motherboards puts them around the same price). Right now, for an AMD build I'm thinking Ryzen 5 3600 paired with a B550 ROG MB with the Thunderbolt add-on, and for an Intel, I'm thinking on a 10600KF paired with a Gigabyte Z490 Vision D. I wanted to hear your opinion on the matter, suggestions on which side I should go, MB recommendations, etc etc. 

 

On an extra note, I also wanted to know about the RAM speed with Intel, since you need a lot of RAM for audio work and I don't want to be hindered by that. I'm mostly going to be using it for audio work, some gaming and some game development (on a hobby level). All opinions and suggestions are welcome! Thanks!

 

[emcantillo]

4 minutes ago, BlueScope819 said:

I mean you can always get a PCIe card for it if you want but if you need it on the motherboard you can get the 3600 but with an X570 motherboard with T3 because high end B550 is basically just X570 with a cut down feature set. Of course, throw in 4 16gb DIMMs for 64gb RAM or if you can find 32GB DIMMS you could get 128gb any more and you're looking at threadripper, it depends on what you want.

Thanks for your answer! For now, I'm going for 32 GB RAM (my budget is a little limited). 

 

The biggest issue with x570 and B550 MBs is that only a handful are TB3 certified by Intel, and only two of them are X570. The ASrock Phantom Gaming ITX which limits any future updating, and Gigabyte x570 Taichi which is really out of my budget. The rest of them don't have the internal header needed for TB3, so the PCIe card is only useful for Intel MBs. Now, Asus is including this header in their ROG line up for the B550s, so I don't know if I should just wait until they are available again and try to make it work with the PCIe add-on (which worries me because of the whole Intel tech on AMD boards), or just pull the trigger on the Intel build which will cost me around 300 bucks more for an arguably slower processor...