MicroATX workstation build

[Mandrew]

Budget (including currency): $900

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Machine learning fine tuning/ inference, remote workstation (something I will be SSHing into)

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Already got the CPU from microcenter, will also be dropping in either a 3090 or 4090 in a month or two for ML, I am in need of a general workstation rn. I already have peripherals and will be dual booting Ubuntu 18/20/22 (depending on software support) and windows 10 most likely. Mostly need opinions on mobo, cpu cooler (last time i build a pc 212 evos were $20) and PSU. I want 32GB ram sticks so that I can upgrade to 128 later on if needed. I want the microatx form factor since I will be living in an apt and space will be at a premium, and with miniATX i worry that I wont have the space/ cooling capabilities for a 4090.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor  (Purchased For $250.00) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition 42 CFM CPU Cooler  ($49.99 @ B&H) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte B660M DS3H AX DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($99.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-2666 CL18 Memory  ($117.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($75.00 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Hitachi 0F18335 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($89.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: Zotac GAMING Trinity GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card  ($0.00) 
Case: G.Skill LT1 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($64.98 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS PLUS 850 Gold 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($159.99 @ B&H) 
Total: $907.93
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-03-28 16:01 EDT-0400

[tkitch]

If you're buying today, and intending to do MS?  You need to make some changes:

 

1) Go DDR5.  No real reason not to today, the price has balanced out, also the RAM you picked is absolute hot garbage.  Slow as hell, with pretty meh timings.

 

2) The 212 is trash.  It works, but it's 30$ overpriced.  For another 10 bucks or so, get an AK-620 which will rival many 240 AIOs.

 

3) Case:  Get a Fractal Pop Air.  It's a great case.  Or if you want all the air cooling, Fractal Torrent Compact.  

 

4) Storage:  You can get solid 2TB SSDs for < 100$ now.  I would not buy a HDD for anything related to what you're doing.

 

5) PSU:  Corsair RM850x is what I'd go for, for a few bucks less.

[Agall]

16 minutes ago, Mandrew said:

Budget (including currency): $900

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Machine learning fine tuning/ inference, remote workstation (something I will be SSHing into)

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Already got the CPU from microcenter, will also be dropping in either a 3090 or 4090 in a month or two for ML, I am in need of a general workstation rn. I already have peripherals and will be dual booting Ubuntu 18/20/22 (depending on software support) and windows 10 most likely. Mostly need opinions on mobo, cpu cooler (last time i build a pc 212 evos were $20) and PSU. I want 32GB ram sticks so that I can upgrade to 128 later on if needed. I want the microatx form factor since I will be living in an apt and space will be at a premium, and with miniATX i worry that I wont have the space/ cooling capabilities for a 4090.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor  (Purchased For $250.00) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition 42 CFM CPU Cooler  ($49.99 @ B&H) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte B660M DS3H AX DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($99.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-2666 CL18 Memory  ($117.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($75.00 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Hitachi 0F18335 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($89.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: Zotac GAMING Trinity GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card  ($0.00) 
Case: G.Skill LT1 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($64.98 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS PLUS 850 Gold 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($159.99 @ B&H) 
Total: $907.93
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-03-28 16:01 EDT-0400

I don't see any problems, beside throwing an RTX 4090 in it as you mentioned. Though if you set the RTX 4090 to like 85% TDP, you're still gapping the hell out of everything else while keeping most of the performance available. The RTX 4090 runs surprisingly cool for drawing +450W, so if you lower that to like 90% even, you'll be sitting at a cool 60C even in micro atx, or 80C if you dial it silent.

 

The 13600k on the other hand will be sweating. A 7950x or 7900 with a 105W TDP (eco mode PBO) would probably be a better fit if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of gaming performance for far more multithreading.

[JoHeJo06]

34 minutes ago, Mandrew said:

Budget (including currency): $900

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Machine learning fine tuning/ inference, remote workstation (something I will be SSHing into)

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Already got the CPU from microcenter, will also be dropping in either a 3090 or 4090 in a month or two for ML, I am in need of a general workstation rn. I already have peripherals and will be dual booting Ubuntu 18/20/22 (depending on software support) and windows 10 most likely. Mostly need opinions on mobo, cpu cooler (last time i build a pc 212 evos were $20) and PSU. I want 32GB ram sticks so that I can upgrade to 128 later on if needed. I want the microatx form factor since I will be living in an apt and space will be at a premium, and with miniATX i worry that I wont have the space/ cooling capabilities for a 4090.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor  (Purchased For $250.00) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition 42 CFM CPU Cooler  ($49.99 @ B&H) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte B660M DS3H AX DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($99.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-2666 CL18 Memory  ($117.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($75.00 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Hitachi 0F18335 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($89.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: Zotac GAMING Trinity GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card  ($0.00) 
Case: G.Skill LT1 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($64.98 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS PLUS 850 Gold 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($159.99 @ B&H) 
Total: $907.93
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-03-28 16:01 EDT-0400

you should really go for faster ram. with DDR4, at least 3200mt/s with cl16 timings or higher speed and with DDR5, anything faster than 4800mt/s with max cl36 is good.

2X32gb is expensive but you should not go with 4X16gb, as it is slower

Edited March 28, 2023 by JoHeJo06
accidentaly posted mid typing

[Mandrew]

7 hours ago, tkitch said:

If you're buying today, and intending to do MS?  You need to make some changes:

 

1) Go DDR5.  No real reason not to today, the price has balanced out, also the RAM you picked is absolute hot garbage.  Slow as hell, with pretty meh timings.

 

2) The 212 is trash.  It works, but it's 30$ overpriced.  For another 10 bucks or so, get an AK-620 which will rival many 240 AIOs.

 

3) Case:  Get a Fractal Pop Air.  It's a great case.  Or if you want all the air cooling, Fractal Torrent Compact.  

 

4) Storage:  You can get solid 2TB SSDs for < 100$ now.  I would not buy a HDD for anything related to what you're doing.

 

5) PSU:  Corsair RM850x is what I'd go for, for a few bucks less.

1) 64Gb of DDR5 is ~$200, so almost double the price, and my workload wont benefit a huge amount from the extra speed. Also I would need a more expensive mobo. 

 

2) Ok

 

3) Ok

 

4) 980 is for speed, since reading from storage into memory tends to be a bottleneck in ML training. 6TB hard drive if for dataset collection tasks as well as movie storage.

 

5) Ok

[Mandrew]

7 hours ago, Agall said:

I don't see any problems, beside throwing an RTX 4090 in it as you mentioned. Though if you set the RTX 4090 to like 85% TDP, you're still gapping the hell out of everything else while keeping most of the performance available. The RTX 4090 runs surprisingly cool for drawing +450W, so if you lower that to like 90% even, you'll be sitting at a cool 60C even in micro atx, or 80C if you dial it silent.

 

The 13600k on the other hand will be sweating. A 7950x or 7900 with a 105W TDP (eco mode PBO) would probably be a better fit if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of gaming performance for far more multithreading.

79xx series is almost double the price of the 13600k

[igormp]

On 3/28/2023 at 5:06 PM, Mandrew said:

Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS PLUS 850 Gold 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($159.99 @ B&H) 

Are you planning on going for a dual GPU setup in the future? If so, it may be better to get a beefier PSU. Otherwise, your build sounds solid. You could even try to go for a cheaper i5 model, should be good enough still.

 

On 3/28/2023 at 5:21 PM, tkitch said:

1) Go DDR5.  No real reason not to today, the price has balanced out, also the RAM you picked is absolute hot garbage.  Slow as hell, with pretty meh timings.

Memory speed is pretty much irrelevant for ML, and people have a really hard time going for 128gb on any DDR5 platform - DDR4 is the safe bet here.

On 3/28/2023 at 5:21 PM, Agall said:

A 7950x or 7900 with a 105W TDP (eco mode PBO) would probably be a better fit if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of gaming performance for far more multithreading.

Neither will this CPU bring any benefit, but it's also DDR5 only, so getting 128gb of ram is going to be a pain.