Thinking of buying some parts for upgrade today / this afternoon (5950X, LF II 360, B550 Taichi, 2x32 3200/3600 Team, etc) ... are these okay?

PianoPlayer88Key · November 7, 2021

Okay, so I originally wanted to wait until DDR5 was more mature, and 2nd generation HEDT/server was available (like TR Pro / Epyc), but it's looking like that'll be more likely around 2024-2025 or so, rather than 2021-22 that I had thought (around 2017-18) it would be, so....

I'm planning on doing an upgrade from a 4790K + 32GB RAM desktop. I don't do a lot of gaming, and many games I do play run just fine on the Intel HD 4600. I do a lot of multitasking, though, VMs, some may think I have a browser tab addiction, want to do more 4K video editing/production, audio/photo editing, etc.

Okay what I'm looking at right now is:

CPU: Ryzen 9 5950X - $700 from Micro Center. (It's about an hour and a half drive each way to Tustin, and I typically get in the low 20s MPG on average in my 2004 Camry. I probably won't be heading up there before about 2 or 3 pm PST.)
CPU Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 - $118 from Amazon (An alternate option would be the NH-U12A)
Motherboard: ASRock B550 Taichi - $220 from Amazon or Newegg
RAM: not totally decided yet, but it will be using 32GB low-profile DIMMs, so either 64GB or 128GB. Looking at Team Vulcan or Expert, 3200 CL16 or 3600 CL18.
- Amazon has 2x32 3600 Expert for $250, Newegg has 2x32 3200 Vulcan Z for $257, 2x32 3600 Vulcan Z for $256, and Microcenter has 2x32 3200 Vulcan Z for 257.

You all think those parts are okay?

I plan to re-use other parts I already have, including:

Boot SSD: 1TB Silicon Power P34A80 - currently in my laptop, was a storage / game drive but has been pretty much emptied in anticipation of its new purpose in life
mass storage: 2x 8TB HGST Deskstar NAS, 10TB HGST Deskstar NAS, plus a still-empty 14TB Toshiba MG07ACA14TE (and a few other drives)
GPU: EVGA SC GTX 1060 3GB
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (the plain / basic version)
PSU: Corsair AX760

Also I'd like to still be able to power on my 4790K platform now and then, so I'm thinking of getting a:

Seasonic Core GM 500W PSU (CORE-GM-500 / SSR-500LM) - $45 at Newegg, on sale through today. (There's a MIR too but I don't do those.)

to allow it to power up.

The current system has:

CPU: Core i7-4790K
Cooler: CM Hyper 212 Evo
Motherboard: ASRock Z97 Extreme6
RAM: 4x32 G.Skill Ares DDR3-1600 CL9
Boot SSD: 1TB Samsung 970 Evo for Windows 10, 256GB Crucial M550 (2.5" SATA) for Linux

I'm also considering making the 4790K setup into a NAS, although I really would have liked support for ECC RAM. If I did that, though, I'd need a case ... and I'd want one that's as compact as possible, yet still supports a full ATX board, the Hyper 212 Evo (which is already attached) and several 3.5" bays. (One case I might consider is the Cooler Master N400, but I'd like to find something a lot smaller ... although I may not have space for a second case for a while. Maybe I should consider getting a lower-profile CPU cooler, like a downdraft type? I really wasn't wanting to take the 212 off though cause it was a gigantic pain in the gluteus maximus to install.)

I already have several HDDs that are currently backups of existing drives, including a third 8TB HGST Deskstar NAS, an 8TB Toshiba N300, and an extra 10TB HGST and 14TB Toshiba of the same ones mentioned earlier.

I need to find a way to back up several SSDs, though, including:

2TB Silicon Power P34A80 (in laptop, data/game storage, pagefile)
2TB Seagate Barracuda 120 (in laptop, data/game storage, etc)
1050GB Crucial MX300 (was data storage in laptop, not sure what's on it now, sitting on a table near the current desktop)
1TB Silicon Power P34A80 (in laptop now, will be boot drive in new platform)
1TB Samsung 970 Evo (in 4790K desktop, boot, Windows)
2x 1TB WD Blue 3D 2.5" (#1 in laptop as a boot drive, #2 on table near desktop, has several Linux VMs on it afaik that I was testing with the desktop a while ago)
2x 500GB Team Vulcan (both are backups/clones of the desktop boot drive, when Windows was on the 256GB Crucial M550, with the backups being in the interim on a couple 750GB-1TB HDDs I no longer have)
256GB Crucial M550 (Linux boot for 4790K desktop)
250GB Crucial MX200 M.2-2260 SATA (was Windows boot in laptop, now sitting somewhere on the desk, idk what's on it right now.)
240GB Crucial BX300 (in my dad's old Dell D830 laptop, Windows 10, experimental)

So that's a total of about 10.8 TB or so. (I'm not sure if I'm missing a drive or two ... I did get rid of a few SSDs a while ago that were starting to show signs of being close to EOL, and a couple had 2 feet in the grave on a banana peel already.)
So I'm looking at getting a 12TB HDD to back them up. Current drive of choice is the Toshiba MG07ACA12TE ($263.50 at Amazon or $266 at Newegg), and I missed a sale the other day on a 12TB WD Red Plus.

My current idea is to create one big partition on the 12TB HDD, then copy everything over ... but I have my doubts as to whether that'll work for restoration, especially for boot drives. I really don't want to have several partitions on that drive - been there done that, with another HDD (had like 25 or 30 partitions on an 8TB drive), it was an absolute mess! (I also don't want to buy multiple separate smaller drives.)

Also I'm missing some USB flash drives (and might have a dead one or two somewhere), so I might need to pick up a few for loading OS images, etc. Any suggestions on what to look for? (I want ones that have good write performance (including random) and endurance ... and for now I'm thinking around 16 or 32GB size mostly cause I'd like to maintain compatibility with older setups that don't support >32GB.)

Speaking of the OS ... I'm inclined to have Linux as my main boot OS for the new platform, with Windows 10 in a VM for the occasions that I need to do something that requires it.

Small possible issue, though ... last I checked, it's not possible to split the GTX 1060's resources up between multiple OS's ... and I only have one discrete GPU and wasn't planning on upgrading, at least not in the current market.

Hey ... I remember seeing a video Linus did a while back of running Crysis on *just* a 64-core Threadripper or Epyc CPU in "software" mode ... that gets me thinking, might it be possible to run my Linux desktop off the 5950X in "software" mode as well, and use the 1060 as passthrough for a Windows VM?

Or if that wouldn't work (either at all, or be too resource intensive on the 5950X), anyone know where I could find a good deal on a lower-end PCIe x1 GPU that I could use for display out?

I see a Zotac GT 710 for $60 at Amazon, that's a bit more than I'd like to pay for that caliber card though. I've seen an Asus x1 710 going for around $100 which is WAY too much IMO.

If there was a GT 1010 or 1030 available in PCIe x1 form for around $40-50 (1010) or $80-100 (1030) that would be really nice, but i don't know of any.

Another option might be getting an older GPU, like a 970 or 980 or another 1060, or 1070 or 1080, depending on what I could get for around $100-200. But, I was thinking of using that for a 2nd VM ... but, maybe I really only need 1 VM for gaming? (I do plan to run several other VMs though for other non-gaming workloads though.)
At any rate, if I have 3 GPUs in the system, at least one would need to be a PCIe x1 GPU, cause I want to leave the 3rd x16 slot open for a possible future SAS/SATA HBA (like an LSI 9211-8i or something) for storage expansion.

PianoPlayer88Key · November 8, 2021

Okay I ordered a few things, and went and picked up a couple others. Hope I didn't end up buying Scheiße...

Just so you all aren't alarmed, the 500W Seasonic Core GM PSU isn't for the new platform, it's so I can still power up the older board+CPU+RAM. (4790K, Z97 Extreme6, 32GB DDR3-1600)
I'll be re-using my Corsair AX760 for the new setup, in the existing FD Define R5 case, and pilfering a 1TB P34A80 SSD from my laptop that was a data / game storage drive but has pretty much been emptied. Also I'm reusing an EVGA SC GTX 1060 3GB.

Somerandomtechyboi · November 8, 2021

16 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Or if that wouldn't work (either at all, or be too resource intensive on the 5950X), anyone know where I could find a good deal on a lower-end PCIe x1 GPU that I could use for display out?

I see a Zotac GT 710 for $60 at Amazon, that's a bit more than I'd like to pay for that caliber card though. I've seen an Asus x1 710 going for around $100 which is WAY too much IMO.

If there was a GT 1010 or 1030 available in PCIe x1 form for around $40-50 (1010) or $80-100 (1030) that would be really nice, but i don't know of any.

Maybe on the second hand market look for a cheap display adapter that supports dx 11 like an hd 5450, 6350/6450, or 7470