New build - AMD Workstation

OliOliOli · May 28, 2021

Budget (including currency): £700-ish it's flexible.

Country: England, UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: LED Wall Driving, OBS 1080p Streaming (not game streaming), Traktor DJ, Docker (Web Dev), WSL (Ubuntu, Kali), Fusion 360, FLStudio, Resolve, Rocket League, Transport Fever 2, Cities: Skylines, Dyson Sphere Program

Other details:

Needs to run 4 Monitors at 1080p

Needs as many USB3 ports as possible, currently running 11x mix of USB2 & 3, likely need 15 total?

Needs firewire card (audio interfaces)

1gbit LAN is fine, no wifi needed

Bluetooth onboard would be nice (saves a usb dongle)

1x M.2 Drive + 1TB SATA currently - i have a spare M.2 i could throw in to make it 2x M.2 and ditch the SATA. (see post-note)

Already own an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT and happy enough with it, don't have the budget to be upgrading GPU at this time.

Do not need:

Monitors

Mouse & Keyboard
Case - Already have a rackmount to use: ebay example

No optical drives

GPU

RGB

4K

Not done water-cooling previously, don't want to overcomplicate the rig long-term unless people think the performance boost if worth the effort?

Post-Note;

Current pc will be turned into an Unraid rig, so current 1TB disk would likely go into an array, and current M.2 would come over to new PC.

Current M.2 is a Crucial MX500 1 TB CT1000MX500SSD4 - imagine this could go into secondary and i should buy something newer / faster?

With all of the above, i think i just need M/B, CPU, Cooling, RAM.

CPU;

AMD Ryzen 7 3700x - https://www.ebuyer.com/883790-amd-ryzen-7-3700x-am4-cpu-processor-with-wraith-prism-rgb-cooler-100-100000071box

AMD Ryzen 7 3800x - https://www.ebuyer.com/883788-amd-ryzen-7-3800x-am4-cpu-processor-with-wraith-prism-rgb-cooler-100-100000025box

These come with air coolers

M/B;

Gigabyte B550 GAMING X V2 ATX - really not sure on this, don't think it's enough I/O for me. and isn't this PCI3 ? Should i be looking at PCI4?

RAM:

I want 16gb of something fast, which i'll later double to 32gb if necessary (guessing it may be for some of my workloads (audio / video processing plugins))

If i go water-cooling, what can i get that would durable enough withstand being moved occasionally?

I'm pretty sold on the rackmounted case as it'll become part of a touring rack at times, but mostly it'll just be a workstation in my studio, with the odd bit of gaming.

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers.

Chris Pratt · May 28, 2021

CPU: 3800X isn't worth it unless it's the same price as the 3700X.

Mobo: B550 is PCIe 4.0 on the CPU lanes and PCIe 3.0 on the chipset lanes. Your only other option would be X570, which is PCIe 4.0 on both. However, nothing you're doing will benefit from PCIe 4.0 anyways, and you can still do at least one PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive with even B550 (one M.2 will be on the CPU lanes). Also, no mobo is going to have that many USB ports on board, but you can either install a USB expansion card or get a hub.

RAM: 16GB is light for using Docker. You're going to feel that quicker than anything else. I'd really recommend going 32GB now.

Cooling: There's no need to water cool, especially with a 65W chip, and it's just added expense. A good single tower air cooler will be more than enough. Even the stock Prism cooler works fine. It's just a little noisy.