Seeking Recommendations for Personal "Workstation"/Gaming Build

[lesser-spotted-bambi]

Budget (including currency): Flexible, but want best bang for buck. Unlikely wanting to go as far as a threadripper budget.

Country: United Kingdom

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Machine learning (but for personal learning of machine learning rather than using it for production), gaming, running minikube (local kubernetes cluster), big data software development, possibly eventually VR (for play, rather than anything else).

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

Not going to reuse any parts. Unlikely to do major upgrades this generation (e.g. new motherboard, CPU or graphics card). Have been building PCs for roughly 15 years and never done an upgrade within a couple of generations. Not that likely to overclock as stability is top priority. Thinking of something around the region of a RTX 3080 and Ryzen 5950X, 32GB of RAM minimum as this is what have on work laptop, though would prefer 64GB and/or the ability to add more. As machine learning is on the cards, really needs to be Nvidia based machine. I have been using 1080P 60Hz for years now so while would be great to go up from there, not strongly opinionated on refresh rate vs resolution if I include a new monitor. Not in any hurry as unlikely to get an RTX 3080 for a little while. If there's something likely to be out in next 3 months, happy to wait (likewise will wait for a 3080 to be available as can't actually get right now), though I don't think we're in that part of the release cycle (as far as I know there's new stuff, just hard to get and newer new stuff is unlikely soon). Not likely to need a massive amount of hard drive space but big data workloads are heavily dependent on IO so fastest pci-e x4 nvme drive that can get without it being unreasonably expensive is very appealing.

[brob]

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor  (£871.51 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler  (£96.83 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Motherboard: MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£158.27 @ CCL Computers) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (£229.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£159.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB XC3 BLACK GAMING Video Card  (£742.67 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Case: Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case  (£86.49 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2018) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (£124.97 @ CCL Computers) 
Total: £2470.72
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-01-24 00:43 GMT+0000

[lesser-spotted-bambi]

2 hours ago, brob said:

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor  (£871.51 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler  (£96.83 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Motherboard: MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£158.27 @ CCL Computers) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (£229.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£159.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB XC3 BLACK GAMING Video Card  (£742.67 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Case: Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case  (£86.49 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2018) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (£124.97 @ CCL Computers) 
Total: £2470.72
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-01-24 00:43 GMT+0000

Many thanks for the recommendations! I think the cooler is a good idea and the EVGA seems to be the cheapest model available and the Corsair memory is also a good price for a 64gb kit. 

 

In terms of motherboard, I will take a look at B550 vs X570. The motherboard you recommended would allow me to upgrade to 128 GB and has PCI-E 4. Does anybody have any thoughts as to anything I would miss from X570 or is B550 good enough for what I'm looking for?

 

The NVM-E, I am not sure if I am missing something. Is that the cheapest 1TB or something? I would probably prefer something faster (?) in the 500GB range.

 

In terms of case, I might need to look at that whole question in more detail. I am not too concerned about aesthetics, but rather would prefer something without drive bays or a detachable drive bays if possible and very good air cooling. 

 

[TargetDron3]

B550 vs x570 is negligible for what you are doing.  Unless you are going to max out expansion slots on the board you don't need the added PCI-E lanes for the x570

 

If you want bang for buck, I would go down to a 5900x.  And please, for the love of all that is holy, use the difference in the CPU cost to get a nicer monitor.  With all the horsepower your computer will have, you deserve to view something nice.

Having a RTX 3000 with a 1080p 60hz monitor is like having a 1000HP car with Toyota Prius wheels on it.

 

[lesser-spotted-bambi]

18 minutes ago, TargetDron3 said:

B550 vs x570 is negligible for what you are doing.  Unless you are going to max out expansion slots on the board you don't need the added PCI-E lanes for the x570

 

If you want bang for buck, I would go down to a 5900x.  And please, for the love of all that is holy, use the difference in the CPU cost to get a nicer monitor.  With all the horsepower your computer will have, you deserve to view something nice.

Having a RTX 3000 with a 1080p 60hz monitor is like having a 1000HP car with Toyota Prius wheels on it.

 

The point on B550 vs X570 seems to fit with the bit of research I have just done on the topic. With the consensus seeming to be to get a higher end B550 rather than a cheap X570, especially as, as you say I'm unlikely to max out the expansion slots and I probably won't need more than one M.2 drive.

 

Thanks also for your reply.

 

my budget isn't fixed, so I don't need to trade off in that way. I think given the kinds of workflows I have, where, for example I have many applications running on a cluster on the PC that I would miss the 4 CPU cores, that I would lose by going down to a 5900x.

 

For gaming, I can definitely see the argument as to needing a monitor upgrade and it's definitely on the cards, however for development purposes it probably won't make too much difference other than screen real estate. I've yet to make my mind up on going after screen resolution vs refresh rate vs some sweet spot between them.

[TargetDron3]

If you aren't gaming, the refresh rate issue is negligible.  For development, more screen real estate is always better.  

As far as workload with 12 vs 16 core unless you are doing some really intensive work and you are able to assign cores to certain work, it's not going to make a huge dent unless you are doing some massive compiles or renderings.  

If you got the cash for it, then go balls to the wall.

[brob]

6 hours ago, lesser-spotted-bambi said:

The NVM-E, I am not sure if I am missing something. Is that the cheapest 1TB or something? I would probably prefer something faster (?) in the 500GB range.

 

In terms of case, I might need to look at that whole question in more detail. I am not too concerned about aesthetics, but rather would prefer something without drive bays or a detachable drive bays if possible and very good air cooling. 

 

The NVMe suggested is a low cost PCIe 4.0 drive. Without any budget guidance my tendency is chose value over performance.

 

The Meshify C has no drive bays, just mount points. It is generally judged to have excellent airflow.

[igormp]

On 1/23/2021 at 9:43 PM, brob said:

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor  (£871.51 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler  (£96.83 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Motherboard: MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£158.27 @ CCL Computers) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (£229.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£159.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB XC3 BLACK GAMING Video Card  (£742.67 @ Overclockers.co.uk) 
Case: Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case  (£86.49 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2018) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (£124.97 @ CCL Computers) 
Total: £2470.72
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-01-24 00:43 GMT+0000

That build does sound perfect for such needs.

 

On 1/24/2021 at 12:37 AM, lesser-spotted-bambi said:

For gaming, I can definitely see the argument as to needing a monitor upgrade and it's definitely on the cards, however for development purposes it probably won't make too much difference other than screen real estate. I've yet to make my mind up on going after screen resolution vs refresh rate vs some sweet spot between them.

I've gone with a cheap 4k 43" TV due do the actual available real estate. It's perfect for having a jupyter page + another browser with docs + terminals all open at once.