Ultimate Workstation/Gaming build with upcoming Ryzen 7000.

[Mo0nbase]

Budget (including currency): Up to $25k

Country: United States

 

Hello I am a major PC enthusiast and do a lot of programming in crypto, 3D modeling, Game design, as well as gaming in general and in anticipation of the next gen Ryzen launch and the new rtx 4000 series I wanted to look into a endgame system to serve all my needs (and wants XD) equally. Now of course I understand this cannot be done with one system so I was initially thinking a corsair 1000D build with the ITX motherboard tray running a 16 core Ryzen chip with whatever top single GPU comes out from Nvidia and then in the main tray a thread ripper with a AMD graphics card as on this system I will be running a KDE arch Linux install and I would like to use and hopefully contribute to Wayland and Linux gaming development in the future. Now I should mention some needs from the workstation tray. I need it to be able to run a U.2 SSD array in either raid 5 or 6 (whichever you guys think is best when dealing with money) most likely virtualized under a hypervisor as a NAS and then two other VMS one for general system usage as well as pushing and compiling code (high core count necessary) and then another which is capable of allocating individual threads to run various crypto full nodes. So for example I want one full bitcoin node, avalanche, ren bridge, and lightning node, (in addition to something like a media server, PLEX perhaps running on a separate HDD array) with each of their data stored on the raid array who's processing is handled by a single dedicated thread on my CPU. Both systems should have a decent amount of ram I would like the development vm to have at least 64GB if not 128GB and the gaming to have at least 32GB.

 

With that out of the way let me describe some problems I ran into while specking out a design. First of all consumer thread ripper is being discontinued according to Linus but some leaks have suggested it being brought back for the 7000 series in 2023 with up to 96 cores. Now this is purely speculation on what AMD might come to bear and I don't want to rely on that or wait however long it's going to take for AMD to release that chip but I am also 100% against using a Lenovo workstation. Mabey a sever motherboard with EPYC? or maybe I can gut a Threadripper Pro rig if they haven't locked down their functionality? Otherwise let me know if it would be better without thread ripper or with three Ryzen 7000 systems instead (I perhaps would like to sell some of this in the future so that could be good). My main concern there is my interlink between the systems. I want to be able to transfer files from one system to the next at speeds at least at 10gigabit or preferably 25 gigabit. And Ryzen 7000 only has 24 PCIE gen 5 lanes. With one GPU in two of the systems and perhaps a raid card in the last as well as a highspeed M.2 NVME array for the gaming and development systems I'm not sure Ill have enough lanes. There is some speculation that M.2 SSD's could be reduced to 2 lanes each which would allow me to fit 4 M.2's into the lane budget but then I would need control of lane allocation which could be done but IDK how feasible that is. I guess I perhaps don't need 4 NVME's per system maybe just two on the gaming and development motherboards but I just want to know I'm going to be able to saturate all my network bandwidth. This also opens up the problem of a new case solution maybe the corsair 1000D isn't the best. I love the idea of rackmount PC's but nobody sells them outright from what I can tell. If you have any ideas that would be greatly appreciated.

 

Another problem is that Ryzen 7000 only supports ddr5. I'm not sure if there's anything I can do about this but currently ddr5 cas latency paired with mediocre speeds and their outrageous prices is very unappealing. Hopefully you guys think we'll see better latency and faster speeds by the time 7000 drops but without backwards compatibility for ddr4 I will be literally paying more for less because every ddr5 kit on the market is slower than a ddr5 3600 C14 kit. System latency and responsiveness is a huge thing for me I don't like clicking on applications and boxes and nothing being shown on screen. Also loading assets into memory is one of the really annoying tasks on my current rig which has very slow ram. Like I said nothing can probably be done I'm just throwing it in there. 

 

On the gaming system I like to run triple A as well as indie but were always talking demanding applications Including VR, CP2077, Call of Duty, God of War ect. Also I was wondering about monitor ideas. I love to watch high quality movies which i would stream off the plex server HDD array. I have a huge library of blurays (digitized of course) so i was hoping up to like 80TB of storage on the HDDS combined. And as for monitors I'm drooling at the idea of the new QD OLED ultrawide, but idk if its a good idea to buy the Alienware now or wait and hope for a Samsung native release in the coming months. I would also like to have displays for monitoring the NAS and Node servers that I'm running so i can keep track of their performance and uptime. And then maybe another display for development windows but with the size of QD ultrawide I'm not really sure of a good way to position these on my desk lol.

 

Anyway use leaks speculate all you want I would just like to see what you guys come up with. The timeline on this build is for summer to winter 2022 and budget is somewhat flexible so go crazy if you need to. I just don't want to pay more for less like any other person.

[TheStyne]

To be honest, there is no point speculating and getting your mind set on buying one thing. Wait until there are reviews for products before you make up your mind, as always.

[Mo0nbase]

7 minutes ago, TheStyne said:

To be honest, there is no point speculating and getting your mind set on buying one thing. Wait until there are reviews for products before you make up your mind, as always.

Yes ofc I'm just in the idea/planning phase. I'm not set on anything but I would like to asses the feasibility of different options based on the leaks and information available.  

[RONOTHAN##]

2 minutes ago, Mo0nbase said:

Yes ofc I'm just in the idea/planning phase. I'm not set on anything but I would like to asses the feasibility of different options based on the leaks and information available.  

I just wanna point out the leaks are pretty meaningless. Practically speaking, the only things we know about Ryzen 7000 and AM5 is that the CPUs will be LGA and look kinda funny, the X670 motherboards will have a ton of expansion options, and the CPUs will clock pretty well. That's it. Everything else is rumors, and if previous AMD rumors are anything to go by, at least half of them will be wrong, and good luck figuring out which half that will end up being. Plus, a lot can happen in the 5-6 months between now and the actual AM5 release. 

 

I'm not saying you can't go out and look at the rumors or anything, but know that a lot of them are BS, and you really can't plan any of this when you know basically no information about it for certain. 

[Mo0nbase]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I just wanna point out the leaks are pretty meaningless. Practically speaking, the only things we know about Ryzen 7000 and AM5 is that the CPUs will be LGA and look kinda funny, the X670 motherboards will have a ton of expansion options, and the CPUs will clock pretty well. That's it. Everything else is rumors, and if previous AMD rumors are anything to go by, at least half of them will be wrong, and good luck figuring out which half that will end up being. Plus, a lot can happen in the 5-6 months between now and the actual AM5 release. 

 

I'm not saying you can't go out and look at the rumors or anything, but know that a lot of them are BS, and you really can't plan any of this when you know basically no information about it for certain. 

Understood I'm trying to go off of the best information available which seems to suggest that AMD will release 16 core CPUs that will be fast for gaming and development workloads and will have up to 24 PCIE lanes. I'm really looking for help on deciding what kind of configuration of these CPUs and motherboards could yield the utility and performance I'm looking for so i can keep an eye on those products going into the future.

[4PcBuilder]

We haven’t gotten many leaks yet about pricing and specs mostly just performance and the only announced motherboards that got their prices leaked are the aorus Xtreme, aorus master, aorus pro ax, and the aero d so don’t set your mind on that one thing right now as someone else already stated 

[thrasher_565]

1 hour ago, Mo0nbase said:

Understood I'm trying to go off of the best information available which seems to suggest that AMD will release 16 core CPUs that will be fast for gaming and development workloads and will have up to 24 PCIE lanes. I'm really looking for help on deciding what kind of configuration of these CPUs and motherboards could yield the utility and performance I'm looking for so i can keep an eye on those products going into the future.

are then any games that even use the cores wee got now??? you can build an over the top pc now and still games wont use alot of it... even if some how there 1 game (seem to be always 1 game...) a few cores and higher clocks seems better then 200 cores...  aaa is dead. game are garbage mess. imo

Edited June 1, 2022 by thrasher_565

[brob]

Thermaltake offers several stackable case models. Much more flexible than a 1000D case.

 

Why lock yourself into a single platform? Since you are waiting for new CPU and GPU, there is no reason to only look at Ryzen 7000. It may be that other platforms are more suitable for some of your needs.

 

[LOG!C]

2 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I just wanna point out the leaks are pretty meaningless. Practically speaking, the only things we know about Ryzen 7000 and AM5 is that the CPUs will be LGA and look kinda funny, the X670 motherboards will have a ton of expansion options, and the CPUs will clock pretty well. That's it. Everything else is rumors, and if previous AMD rumors are anything to go by, at least half of them will be wrong, and good luck figuring out which half that will end up being. Plus, a lot can happen in the 5-6 months between now and the actual AM5 release. 

 

I'm not saying you can't go out and look at the rumors or anything, but know that a lot of them are BS, and you really can't plan any of this when you know basically no information about it for certain. 

Wasn't there a leak by a TV company a few days ago where they had mentioned the RX 7000 series and PS5 pro in their presentation? Any thoughts/ speculation on that?

[RONOTHAN##]

1 hour ago, LOG!C said:

Wasn't there a leak by a TV company a few days ago where they had mentioned the RX 7000 series and PS5 pro in their presentation? Any thoughts/ speculation on that?

1.) Completely unrelated to Ryzen 7000

2.) Literally the only information released by that was that there was gonna be a GPU called the RX 7700, which only one remotely paying attention to this industry could've guessed. 

3.) Don't care enough about consoles to speculate on a PS5 Pro, but again, no actual info was released about it, and based on the fact there was a PS4 pro, again it's not a bad guess to say there would also be a PS5 Pro. 

 

I'm about 70% sure they didn't actually have any inside knowledge that those cards existed and just assumed that they were being worked on. 

[Mo0nbase]

2 hours ago, brob said:

Thermaltake offers several stackable case models. Much more flexible than a 1000D case.

 

Why lock yourself into a single platform? Since you are waiting for new CPU and GPU, there is no reason to only look at Ryzen 7000. It may be that other platforms are more suitable for some of your needs.

 

Well I've had an excellent experience with Ryzen beyond the many socket changes for my thread ripper and generally I like well built and efficient products. AMD's chips are being built on a new 5nm node with better IPC and lower power consumption than the competition. Intel's next chip if it even launches this year will more than likely have a heftier price tag coupled with perhaps marginally better performance in a much less efficient package. This is not to say that I'm locking myself in if intel makes some sort of massive leap in front of AMD in the next 6 months then I'll probably reconsider but Ryzen 7000 has actually been announced and Raptor Lake doesn't even have a public announcement yet just some information from an investors meeting confirming that the platform will exist at one point or another. Additionally leaks related to power consumption don't look promising and it has been confirmed that Raptor Lake will be built on 10nm right off the bat puts the platform at a disadvantage. Anyway If there's some other platform I'm missing here feel free to let me know but for now I'm just planning on 7000. 

 

P.S. thanks for the tip on Thermaltake I will look there

[Mo0nbase]

3 hours ago, thrasher_565 said:

are then any games that even use the cores wee got now??? you can build an over the top pc now and still games wont use alot of it... even if some how there 1 game (seem to be always 1 game...) a few cores and higher clocks seems better then 200 cores...  aaa is dead. game are garbage mess. imo

Even though that particular part of the build is a gaming PC the real reason I want 16 cores is because it will be the only system running windows. I still have to used some locked down software or just software which doesn't work well on Linux for the time being such as the Adobe suite and Unreal Engine, Solid works, Blender ect. I need the extra performance in case I need to run a windows only application which requires it so while the games I run probably won't see much benefit, other applications will. As for the games themselves your probably right which is why I wanted to switch to a platform with higher frequency and IPC which usually yield better single thread performance over something with massive core counts for HEDT. This system is meant to cover all bases competently It's not necessarily about only gaming on windows or only programming on Linux. 

[Mo0nbase]

3 hours ago, 4PcBuilder said:

We haven’t gotten many leaks yet about pricing and specs mostly just performance and the only announced motherboards that got their prices leaked are the aorus Xtreme, aorus master, aorus pro ax, and the aero d so don’t set your mind on that one thing right now as someone else already stated 

Right motherboards will be a tough consideration especially since I don't think any have even been previewed with 8 ram slots although I'm pretty sure one of the systems at least is going to use a ROG x670-e. As for pricing I can imagine just based off of Asus pricing trends that it'll probably be around 500$ which I am prepared to pay if they have the features I need. And yeah I'm just going to have to see what comes out over the coming months.

[4PcBuilder]

2 hours ago, Mo0nbase said:

Right motherboards will be a tough consideration especially since I don't think any have even been previewed with 8 ram slots although I'm pretty sure one of the systems at least is going to use a ROG x670-e. As for pricing I can imagine just based off of Asus pricing trends that it'll probably be around 500$ which I am prepared to pay if they have the features I need. And yeah I'm just going to have to see what comes out over the coming months.

For my personal build I’m probably going to use a high end aorus or Taichi motherboard