mATX build for productivity (and some casual gaming)

[TudorF]

Purpose: productivity and some casual gaming (I don't mind playing on low graphics or 1080p)

Budget: I got it all planned already, according to the list

 

Planned build:

 

Case: Riotoro CR1080

CPU: i5 11500

Mobo: Gigabyte B560M AORUS ELITE, Intel B560, socket 1200, mATX

RAM: Crucial Ballistix Black 16GB, DDR4-3200MHz, CL16, Dual Channel

GPU: ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce® GTX 1650 4GB GDDR6

PSU: Seasonic FOCUS GX Series GX-550, 550W

Cooler: stock for the moment, planning on getting something better later

Storage: SSD and HDD from previous rig

 

What do you guys think about this build ?

[jaslion]

What falls under productivity?

[TudorF]

19 minutes ago, jaslion said:

What falls under productivity?

Developing software, websites, testing them, occasionally using programs from the Adobe CC suite (which can be very demanding, they need a GPU or recent iGPU to accelerate some of the functions they offer), working on multiple monitors, occasionally working with large datasets, collections of files, organising them, managing remote servers via command line, occasionally might need to compile code, multitask between all these windows and projects, etc.

 

I am currently working on a project in which one file has 20000 lines of code. I'm working on an old machine with an i5 3210m and my editor is visibly slow to handle even this amount of text in one file, especially when it has to update multiple entry points, maintain syntax highlighting, read the whole file when I open the editor and launch some services with the web server. It's one of the reasons I decided to build a new system, because this toaster I'm using right now is slowing my work down.

Adobe programs don't even support the iGPU on this processor anymore, so it defaults on software emulation, which is terrible and slow to render.

[aisle9]

The only thing I'd suggest is taking the plunge on a better cooler, even if it's just the $25 Vetroo V5 from Amazon. You can adjust the length of time that boost clocks are held for by adjusting wattage at each PL in BIOS, but if your cooler can't handle, for instance 180W, it'll throttle anyway. The stock cooler on the stock curve will give you 224W of power for 30 seconds (or until it throttles, which will happen first) then drop to 65W, your stock clock. If you have a better tower cooler, you can set the wattage and duration much higher. With a Noctua NH-C14S, I was able to hold a 10700F right at its all-core turbo frequency indefinitely on a B560M board. Just some food for thought.

[jaslion]

19 minutes ago, TudorF said:

Developing software, websites, testing them, occasionally using programs from the Adobe CC suite (which can be very demanding, they need a GPU or recent iGPU to accelerate some of the functions they offer), working on multiple monitors, occasionally working with large datasets, collections of files, organising them, managing remote servers via command line, occasionally might need to compile code, multitask between all these windows and projects, etc.

 

I am currently working on a project in which one file has 20000 lines of code. I'm working on an old machine with an i5 3210m and my editor is visibly slow to handle even this amount of text in one file, especially when it has to update multiple entry points, maintain syntax highlighting, read the whole file when I open the editor and launch some services with the web server. It's one of the reasons I decided to build a new system, because this toaster I'm using right now is slowing my work down.

Adobe programs don't even support the iGPU on this processor anymore, so it defaults on software emulation, which is terrible and slow to render.

This system is good to go then. BUT get a decent cooler now it really doesn't have to be much 30$ is going to save you a LOT of headaches in the future. Also get 2 arctic p12 fans as this case only comes with one fan.

[TudorF]

13 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

The only thing I'd suggest is taking the plunge on a better cooler, even if it's just the $25 Vetroo V5 from Amazon. You can adjust the length of time that boost clocks are held for by adjusting wattage at each PL in BIOS, but if your cooler can't handle, for instance 180W, it'll throttle anyway. The stock cooler on the stock curve will give you 224W of power for 30 seconds (or until it throttles, which will happen first) then drop to 65W, your stock clock. If you have a better tower cooler, you can set the wattage and duration much higher. With a Noctua NH-C14S, I was able to hold a 10700F right at its all-core turbo frequency indefinitely on a B560M board. Just some food for thought.

I've been reading and getting updated on the current market, but I still haven't learned much about the TDP of coolers and how that is supposed to match a system's cooling needs.

Not sure if you're referring to CPU TDP here, as far as I know the 11500 is locked at 65W TDP. How could the stock cooler go as high as 180W? I'm not familiar with the connection between CPU TDP and cooler specs.

[TudorF]

7 minutes ago, jaslion said:

This system is good to go then. BUT get a decent cooler now it really doesn't have to be much 30$ is going to save you a LOT of headaches in the future. Also get 2 arctic p12 fans as this case only comes with one fan.

Yeah, my initial build plan included a Noctua cooler, but I went a bit over my budget when I got the GPU, which currently sells way above MSRP. Unfortunately, I needed to get a GPU because the programs I'm using need GPU acceleration and iGPU does not seem to be enough.

So I was thinking maybe I could run with this stock cooler for a month, then get a decent cooler at the next paycheck.

I will need to check with the case dimensions, because it's a mATX case, with a special 2-chamber compartmentalisation. So I have to make sure it will fit in this case which is a bit narrower in the area where the motherboard is housed.

 

The Riotoro site ( https://www.riotoro.com/cr-1080 ) says the case has a width of 23cm / 9" and there's 12.2cm available between the motherboard and the visiting side panel. So I suppose I need to find a CPU cooler that fits within this space budget.

[jaslion]

Just now, TudorF said:

Yeah, my initial build plan included a Noctua cooler, but I went a bit over my budget when I got the GPU, which currently sells way above MSRP. Unfortunately, I needed to get a GPU because the programs I'm using need GPU acceleration and iGPU does not seem to be enough.

So I was thinking maybe I could run with this stock cooler for a month, then get a decent cooler at the next paycheck.

I will need to check with the case dimensions, because it's a mATX case, with a special 2-chamber compartmentalisation. So I have to make sure it will fit in this case which is a bit narrower in the area where the motherboard is housed.

 

The Riotoro site ( https://www.riotoro.com/cr-1080 ) says the case has a width of 23cm / 9" and there's 12.2cm available between the motherboard and the visiting side panel. So I suppose I need to find a CPU cooler that fits within this space budget.

Just get the cooler aisle recommended or the ol trusty hyper 212 or whatever. The 10500 is too much for the stock cooler but is easily cooled by very cheaper tower coolers. You'll save yourself a massive mount of work just spending the extra 20-30$ now and have a fully functional system that can run to it's max.

 

I no way do you need a big boi noctua or even the nf12 at all.

[TudorF]

9 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Just get the cooler aisle recommended or the ol trusty hyper 212 or whatever. The 10500 is too much for the stock cooler but is easily cooled by very cheaper tower coolers. You'll save yourself a massive mount of work just spending the extra 20-30$ now and have a fully functional system that can run to it's max.

 

I no way do you need a big boi noctua or even the nf12 at all.

It's an i5 11500.

I've seen someone on youtube running it with the stock cooler and he said it was working fine, but temperatures were like 10-15 degrees higher than if you used a better cooler. But in terms of performance, there was no significant gain with an aftermarket cooler on a locked i5 CPU.

But yea, as I said, I am planning on adding a better cooler after a while.

I've checked the hyper 212 but it doesn't seem to support socket 1200. Or are these basically universal.

[Cheburek]

1 hour ago, TudorF said:

Purpose: productivity and some casual gaming (I don't mind playing on low graphics or 1080p)

Budget: I got it all planned already, according to the list

 

Planned build:

 

Case: Riotoro CR1080

CPU: i5 11500

Mobo: Gigabyte B560M AORUS ELITE, Intel B560, socket 1200, mATX

RAM: Crucial Ballistix Black 16GB, DDR4-3200MHz, CL16, Dual Channel

GPU: ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce® GTX 1650 4GB GDDR6

PSU: Seasonic FOCUS GX Series GX-550, 550W

Cooler: stock for the moment, planning on getting something better later

Storage: SSD and HDD from previous rig

 

What do you guys think about this build ?

You should get the 11400f instead of the 11500,the only difference is the integrated graphics and the price.

 

 

If you can buy the GPU now then you can save money on the CPU but if you want to buy the GPU later then the integrated graphics are going to be a nice bonus whilst you wait.

 

[TudorF]

1 minute ago, Cheburek said:

You should get the 11400f instead of the 11500,the only difference is the integrated graphics and the price.

 

 

If you can buy the GPU now then you can save money on the CPU but if you want to buy the GPU later then the integrated graphics are going to be a nice bonus whilst you wait.

 

I've already bought the GPU while I could still find it. It's now almost out of stock here and prices have jumped 100 bucks more above the already overpriced level at which I bought mine four days ago.

Basically as the last remaining stock of previous generations of GPUs are getting depleted, their prices are soaring, even if they are older ones.

It's a crazy market and even if I bought mine overpriced, I might have done the right thing because soon there won't be any usable GPUs on the market.

 

Yeah, I thought about going with the 11400f too, which is obviously cheaper, but I think it's a safer choice to still have some iGPU, just in case the GPU fails, it's better to have some backup graphics functionality and still be able to run the system. And I've also thought about going with the 11400 with iGPU, but the 11500 has the more advanced UHD Graphics 750 implementation.

[aisle9]

33 minutes ago, TudorF said:

I've been reading and getting updated on the current market, but I still haven't learned much about the TDP of coolers and how that is supposed to match a system's cooling needs.

Not sure if you're referring to CPU TDP here, as far as I know the 11500 is locked at 65W TDP. How could the stock cooler go as high as 180W? I'm not familiar with the connection between CPU TDP and cooler specs.

TBQH, it's all guesswork on the cooler manufacturer's part. Theoretically, a part labeled with a 150W TDP can dissipate 150W worth of heat, but there are enough open-ended questions in measurement that who knows how accurate that is?

 

The 11500, along with all of Intel's more recent CPUs, runs on power levels. Each power level determines how much is fed to the CPU, and the more juice the CPU is getting, the faster it can go.  65W is the amount of power it consumers to reach the base frequency, and the stock power level runs at a thermonuclear 224W for 30s or until your miserable little stock cooler catches fire, then scales down to 65W.

 

That's absolutely stupid for Intel to do.

 

By putting a better tower cooler on there, you can tweak the power levels so that it bumps to, say, 180W for 30s, then settles in at 150W indefinitely if your CPU cooler can handle that. It's not overclocking, but it is the reason that I just wouldn't buy a K-SKU CPU anymore. If you can peg your system to the max all-core turbo at all times, there's not really much of a value proposition left for sinking a ton of extra money into a mid-tier Z board and a K CPU which will, combined, cost you an easy extra $100 over B560 and an 11500 that won't net you too much beyond that point anyway.

[TudorF]

@aisle9I agree. I don't like Intel's K SKUs because they are highly inefficient in terms of power consumption / output performance.

That's why I chose to go with this i5 11500, because it's high enough in their lineup to get the more advanced iGPU, but it keeps a more reasonable level of power draw.

Well, isn't turbo boost activated when you're using the CPU on very intensive tasks, like gaming? But if you have a GPU, doesn't that offload a lot of the work from the CPU?

Idk, I think in most normal productivity tasks I don't imagine turbo boost would get triggered that often.

But yeah, I get the idea that an aftermarket cooler would do a much better job than the stock one.

[TudorF]

It's actually tough finding a cooler that can fit in this meme case.

Read a review which said the case can only allow clearance for a cooler of about 4.6” to 5.1” height (max 13 cm). Review link.

I found a Noctua NH-U9B SE2 which fits this limitation, but it's out of stock in my area.

Anyone knows a site which can filter coolers based on height? That might speed my search up for a proper cooler for this build.

[TudorF]

Hm, what about the Be quiet! Shadow Rock LP.

 

 

 

 

This one is specifically made for SFF builds and I can find it in my local store.

 

There are even some improved versions like Be quiet! Shadow Rock TF2 which can output more air pressure and can handle more TDP (160W).