Suggestions/improvements on planned build needing lots of parallelism, I/O and RAM

krepty · April 18, 2021

Budget (including currency): 2000 eur

Country: Austria

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: I want to run certain processes requiring simple computation but a lot of read/write, and ideally parallelize as many as possible. Each process needs about 300GiB of space, 4GiB of RAM and two threads.

Other details:

I want to buy a new PC (I have owned one in the past, played around a tiny bit with it, but I am not very well-versed on PC building), with the aim to run these processes outlined above needing a lot of space and RAM. Thus, my priority is number of cores, CPU I/O, RAM (ideally just above 4*#nodes GiB), and a lot of fast space, probably 3 m.2 drives (have not seen any mobos with more) so I can distribute over them and not bottleneck one of them. Also, I will probably will run Ubuntu and don't feel too confident to do any overclocking (unless someone advises of a relatively risk-free way).

I also care a lot about quietness of the system, and the ability to fit lots of HDD drives (see my choice of case), I don't care about RGB. My current tentative list of components would go something like this:

- Case: Fractal R6 (150eur) - I care fitting many HDDs, as I mentioned, and this fits up to 12HDDs at a stretch, so it's the item I am more confident about. Plus it seems to be fairly silent.

- CPU: i9-10900k (500eur) (maybe a 12-core Ryzen 9? The 5900 seems a bit too expensive, and not sure if the 3900 is gonna be slower than the i9). Also, I don't care about GPU (but still want to be able to watch videos), so I thought it would be more practical to have an integrated one.

- Motherboard: MSI MEG Z490 Unify (320 eur), has 3 m.2 slots, which I like, seems decent otherwise.

- RAM: HyperX Predator 3200GHz 64GB (400 eur) - With 8 cores or more I 32 GB RAM would be a bit limiting, so I thought 64GB would be better. Without overclocking I assume less Hz would be the same, but price seems to be similar... so just in case...

- PSU: be quiet! 650W Platinum11 (120eur)- Have not looked much here, mainly want something quiet and trustworthy. The 650W is likely overkill, but I might get a GPU later, who knows.

- Drive: Haven't thought of models, but would probably get something like 1 2tb nvme, and 2 1tb nvmes, which I guess would be about 500 eur.

Total current: about 2000 eur.

I am open to increase the amounts a bit for better performance. Looking forward to hearing what you guys think.

Thanks a lot!

Entropy. · April 18, 2021

18 minutes ago, krepty said:

Budget (including currency): 2000 eur

Country: Austria

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: I want to run certain processes requiring simple computation but a lot of read/write, and ideally parallelize as many as possible. Each process needs about 300GiB of space, 4GiB of RAM and two threads.

Other details:

I want to buy a new PC (I have owned one in the past, played around a tiny bit with it, but I am not very well-versed on PC building), with the aim to run these processes outlined above needing a lot of space and RAM. Thus, my priority is number of cores, CPU I/O, RAM (ideally just above 4*#nodes GiB), and a lot of fast space, probably 3 m.2 drives (have not seen any mobos with more) so I can distribute over them and not bottleneck one of them. Also, I will probably will run Ubuntu and don't feel too confident to do any overclocking (unless someone advises of a relatively risk-free way).

I also care a lot about quietness of the system, and the ability to fit lots of HDD drives (see my choice of case), I don't care about RGB. My current tentative list of components would go something like this:

- Case: Fractal R6 (150eur) - I care fitting many HDDs, as I mentioned, and this fits up to 12HDDs at a stretch, so it's the item I am more confident about. Plus it seems to be fairly silent.

- CPU: i9-10900k (500eur) (maybe a 12-core Ryzen 9? The 5900 seems a bit too expensive, and not sure if the 3900 is gonna be slower than the i9). Also, I don't care about GPU (but still want to be able to watch videos), so I thought it would be more practical to have an integrated one.

- Motherboard: MSI MEG Z490 Unify (320 eur), has 3 m.2 slots, which I like, seems decent otherwise.

- RAM: HyperX Predator 3200GHz 64GB (400 eur) - With 8 cores or more I 32 GB RAM would be a bit limiting, so I thought 64GB would be better. Without overclocking I assume less Hz would be the same, but price seems to be similar... so just in case...

- PSU: be quiet! 650W Platinum11 (120eur)- Have not looked much here, mainly want something quiet and trustworthy. The 650W is likely overkill, but I might get a GPU later, who knows.

- Drive: Haven't thought of models, but would probably get something like 1 2tb nvme, and 2 1tb nvmes, which I guess would be about 500 eur.

Total current: about 2000 eur.

I am open to increase the amounts a bit for better performance. Looking forward to hearing what you guys think.

Thanks a lot!

- 10900k. uhhh.... Yeah, I'd go with a 3900x instead.

-GPU: Integrated would be nice, yeah, but a cheap quadro or something should work just fine

-Motherboard: The unify is a great board, don't get me wrong, it's just probably overkill. If you go with a 3900x, I'd probably recommend a b550-a pro, b550 aorus elite/v2, or a b550 aorus master.

-Ram seems somewhat overpriced.

-PSU: I'd just recommend a corsair cx 650w or something. Decent psu for cheap.

brob · April 18, 2021

Unless you plan on adding a disk controller, the two platforms mentioned will not support more than 6 hdd. So getting a case that can house many more strikes me as pointless. Consider instead a new case like the Define 7, or better yet the Meshify 2. The later has much better airflow. As a result it may actually run quieter.

Some motherboards trade SATA and M.2 ports. Check to make sure that you will be able to connect all the storage devices you want.

If you need to save a bit you might consider the i9-10850K. Performance very close to the i9-10900K usually at a lower cost.

DDR4-2933 is fine for an i9-10xxx. Ideally CL15 or lower. Memory is a volume business so one generally finds more popular speeds at better prices. A 2x32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 will likely have better pricing and would be a good choice.

NVMe drive speeds vary significantly. The Samsung 970 models generally have better performance.