///WRK_Station Build

TC_off · January 24, 2022

///WRK_Station

Hi everyone, this is my first build in 16 years and first time posting in this community (and it’s thanks to this community I’ve really managed to tune up this build and resolve a few teething issues).

I’ve been working from home a lot over the past couple of years and my laptop isn’t cutting it anymore, plus I’ve been doing more photography as a hobby so decided to embark on a new quiet workstation build.

Specifications:
- AMD Ryzen 5950x CPU
- Noctua NH-D15 Chromax Black Heatsink
- ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE Motherboard
- 2x 32GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM @ 3600Mhz
- 8GB nVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 GPU
- 1TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD
- 2TB Samsung 970 Evo M.2 NVMe SSD
- 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSD
- ASUS PCE-AX58BT Wireless PCIe Adapter
- Seasonic SSR-850FX Focus Plus 850W 80Plus Gold PSU
- Silverstone Seta Q1 Quiet ATX Case
- 5x Noctua NF-A14 Chromax.black 140mm Fans

I decided on the Silverstone Seta Q1 as a new case with a focus on sound and it’s also not huge as well as offering good support for fans and water cooling in the future. It’s also not RGB or windowed which was perfect for the subtle black, industrial aesthetic I was after.

I intentionally went with fast and workstation focused components including a Leadtek RTX 4000 that I nabbed as a bargain brand-new from a local retailer. I also decided on air cooling as I have little water cooling experience and wanted something 24/7 reliable.

Initial assembly went well (considering my last build was an Opteron workstation in 2005) with the case and PSU making it easy for good neat cable routing easy (I later decided to put in braided cables to improve aesthetics). LPX RAM fitted neatly under the NH-D15 cooler.

Noctua NH-D15 cooler is a real beast so I initially tried it with just one of the included fans where it was quite performant and quiet but the second fan cleared the RAM and knocked 2-5 degrees off with barely anymore noise.

The included Silverstone case fans were nice and quiet but they were DC not PWM reducing the flexibility of the fan curve I could set so I decided to go all-out Noctua A14 Chromax Black Swaps in their place.

I also bought a 2TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD at the same time for data which shares the PCIe lanes of the PCIe Gen 4 1x slot on the Asus Pro WS X570-ACE that the wifi card was sitting in. No issues for the wifi card but the SSD was running at 1/4 of it’s maximum speed so I repositioned to the second PCIe 16x slot.

After some benchmarking, thermal torture, gaming and light workload stuff I decided to swap to the provided air filter for the top of the case which replaces a slide-in heavy duty sound insulation layer to improve exhaust.

I fitted another A14 Chromax to the top of the case to help exhaust hot air and a 3rd front lower fan to increase the positive pressure cold air. I reset the fan curves to lower RPMs and tested/tweaked over a few weeks until neutral pressure and good temps were had at low noise levels.

Last change was moving the wifi card to the bottom PCIe slot to give the GPU maximum bandwidth on the CPU PCIe bus (worth probably 3fps in Halo :D).

This final configuration and some tuning gave me fully memtest stable DDR4 3600 (18-22-22-42-64) at 1.35V with PBO and Curve Optimizer set to Motherboard limits providing 5.05Ghz @ 1.41V single/dual cores and 4.5Ghz all-core 1.1V. This can pull 280W according to HWMonitor resulting in ~30K Cinebench R23 at 80C maximum at 1000 rpm fan speeds. This can be lower at higher RPMs but it’s very audible then.

I’ve tuned the power limits down a bit (due to the inconvenient case location with bad ventilation) and it still hits 5.05Ghz single core at 1.4V and 4.2Ghz all-core at 1.1V resulting in ~28K with much more constrained limits pulling only 180W and 75C max temps. With the system at stock everything (RAM DOCP but PBO off) gives me 5.0Ghz single core @ 1.45V / 3.8 Ghz all core @ 0.981V hitting 71C in single core cinebench and 65C on all core (R23 shows a ~25K all core score and 1618 single core). I usually toggle on “Eco” mode for office work which drops the temps to 50C .

TC_off · January 24, 2022

Some photos of the finished build including braided power cables, neatening up and having performed stability testing 24/7 at high ambient temps here in Australian summer (even pushing it hard it never goes above 75C CPU or 80C GPU).

Very pleased as its nice and quiet thanks to the clever case and all-Noctua 140mm Chromax.Black fans. Very performant for daily office work and video calls, AI/ML, Lightroom, Photoshop, DaVinci Studio and some even light gaming (Halo Infinite at 4K averaging ~75fps).

///WRK_Station

The only upgrade would likely be a GPU in the next 2-years once the market cools down. Thanks again to all the knowledgeable posters and people here for helping me dial in my RAM, CPU and temperatures.