First custom build for software development

[MoVo]

Hello all,

 

I'm currently looking into buying a new system. I'm currently on a 2019 16" MacBook Pro that is slowly starting to be a worse and worse option for my hobby tasks as it is getting increasingly unreliable, probably thanks to Apple focusing on their Apple Silicon lineup. I initially considered buying a M2 MacMini, but the price for any reasonable spec is not worth it for me. I contemplated buying a Mini PC "MacMini killer" as shown on LTT (Minisforum), but I'm somewhat concerned about the noise under load (I absolutely hate fan noise) and the lack of upgrade paths. So my goal is to build a reasonably priced compact Mini ITX system that is somewhat future-proof and can be upgraded for a long time. 

My goal is to build a relatively power-efficient system that is relatively silent under normal use and reasonable under load. 

 

However, due to being relatively similar in price, I'm very unsure if I should go with current gen AMD or Intel. Do you have any input on that?

 

My current configuration looks like that:

• 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus: 103€
• Corsair Vengance DDR5-6000 32GB Kit: 106€
• Lian Li x Dan H20-A4 Mini ITX Case: 158€
• Be Quiet SFX-L 600W: 110€
• beQuiet Silent Loop 2 240mm: 119€

As I said, I'm unsure regarding the platform to choose. A R9 7900 configuration with a suitable mainboard is roughly the same price (slightly more expensive) than an Intel 13700KF. I have no clue which benchmarks could be a useful indication for performance in my usecase, so I was hoping to get some help here.

 

Regarding graphics card, I was lucky and got a hand-me-down 2070 Super for essentially free, which is more than enough for my purposes for now.

 

I appreciate your input!

 

Post Template

 

Budget (including currency): 1.300 EUR max

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

• Light gaming (occasional Minecraft session)
• Software development work 
• Virtualization (KVMs with Windows, Docker)
• Data analytics & computer vision 
• Light video editing

[Somerandomtechyboi]

6 minutes ago, MoVo said:

1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus: 103€

1tb is a third of that price nowadays so you are getting ripped off hard, not like samsung isnt almost always overpriced but this is particularly bad, might aswell go buy yourself an equivalent 2tb like the mushkin tempest, silicon power a80, etc.

 

7 minutes ago, MoVo said:

Be Quiet SFX-L 600W: 110€

You sure there arent any higher power or cheaper units around?

 

7 minutes ago, MoVo said:

beQuiet Silent Loop 2 240mm: 119€

Definitely look for a cheaper aio, or a better one like the liquid freezer ii

 

8 minutes ago, MoVo said:

As I said, I'm unsure regarding the platform to choose. A R9 7900 configuration with a suitable mainboard is roughly the same price (slightly more expensive) than an Intel 13700KF

As for intel vs amd

 

Definitely amd for sff cause their cpus dont draw that much power, intel is only valid when you can get cheap z690 and cheap ddr4 alongside a cheap 13700(f)

[Agall]

18 minutes ago, MoVo said:

Hello all,

 

I'm currently looking into buying a new system. I'm currently on a 2019 16" MacBook Pro that is slowly starting to be a worse and worse option for my hobby tasks as it is getting increasingly unreliable, probably thanks to Apple focusing on their Apple Silicon lineup. I initially considered buying a M2 MacMini, but the price for any reasonable spec is not worth it for me. I contemplated buying a Mini PC "MacMini killer" as shown on LTT (Minisforum), but I'm somewhat concerned about the noise under load (I absolutely hate fan noise) and the lack of upgrade paths. So my goal is to build a reasonably priced compact Mini ITX system that is somewhat future-proof and can be upgraded for a long time. 

My goal is to build a relatively power-efficient system that is relatively silent under normal use and reasonable under load. 

 

However, due to being relatively similar in price, I'm very unsure if I should go with current gen AMD or Intel. Do you have any input on that?

 

My current configuration looks like that:

• 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus: 103€
• Corsair Vengance DDR5-6000 32GB Kit: 106€
• Lian Li x Dan H20-A4 Mini ITX Case: 158€
• Be Quiet SFX-L 600W: 110€
• beQuiet Silent Loop 2 240mm: 119€

As I said, I'm unsure regarding the platform to choose. A R9 7900 configuration with a suitable mainboard is roughly the same price (slightly more expensive) than an Intel 13700KF. I have no clue which benchmarks could be a useful indication for performance in my usecase, so I was hoping to get some help here.

 

Regarding graphics card, I was lucky and got a hand-me-down 2070 Super for essentially free, which is more than enough for my purposes for now.

 

I appreciate your input!

 

Post Template

 

Budget (including currency): 1.300 EUR max

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

• Light gaming (occasional Minecraft session)
• Software development work 
• Virtualization (KVMs with Windows, Docker)
• Data analytics & computer vision 
• Light video editing

I recently experienced a defective Gigabyte B650i motherboard with an r5 7600, which has been my first motherboard failure in about 9 years. The system is being replaced with an i5 13500, largely since that Gigabyte board was the only mITX AM5 motherboard I liked.

 

MSI MPG B760I EDGE WIFI LGA 1700 DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard SATA 6Gb/s, 2.5Gbps LAN,Wi-Fi 6E - Newegg.com

As much as I prefer AMD right now, I just can't find a mITX AM5 board I do like, which in this build, is required to be compact. Swapping that out for a 13600k or 13700k should be sufficient if you're already aiming for an AIO.

 

Its the last time I'll be buying a motherboard with any vertically socketed daughterboards, even though I've owned several ROG Impact mITX boards over the years that are notorious for that.

 

Regarding AIOs, I prefer EKWB's since they're simple, with only an aRGB and 4pin fan header coming from the pump, means you can get away with not having an entire SATA power cable in mITX. That BeQuiet AIO looks like it requires a SATA power cable, so you'd have to wire up an entire SATA power cable just for it if you're not planning any SATA SSD/HDD in the build.

[MoVo]

28 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

1tb is a third of that price nowadays so you are getting ripped off hard, not like samsung isnt almost always overpriced but this is particularly bad, might aswell go buy yourself an equivalent 2tb like the mushkin tempest, silicon power a80, etc.

Thanks for the heads up! I found a Crucial P3 Plus with 1TB for 41€ as an alternative

33 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

You sure there arent any higher power or cheaper units around?

This was the cheapest unit with that power output I was able to find from a reputable brand. I found a 650W unit from Cooler Master for only 4€ more, anything else is substantially more expensive. 

 

35 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Definitely look for a cheaper aio, or a better one like the liquid freezer ii

Oh wow, just watched a Der8auer video and selected the Liquid Freezer II 240 instead. 80€ instead of 120€ with better performance! 

 

35 minutes ago, Agall said:

The system is being replaced with an i5 13500, largely since that Gigabyte board was the only mITX AM5 motherboard I liked.

Yeah I was shocked regarding the absolutely horrendous mITX AM5 mainboard availability. There's a grand total of 4 to 5 boards I was able to find and they're all super expensive. The cheapest one was the MSI B650I Edge, but I chose to go with a somewhat more expensive one in my configuration because this one has an VRM fan and I had bad experiences with high pitch fan noises with these kinds of things. The Asus ROG B650E-I Is the one I currently have configured and comes in at 280€. 

What exactly is the issue you experienced with the vertical daughterboards? What ports are they used for?

[Agall]

16 minutes ago, MoVo said:

Thanks for the heads up! I found a Crucial P3 Plus with 1TB for 41€ as an alternative

This was the cheapest unit with that power output I was able to find from a reputable brand. I found a 650W unit from Cooler Master for only 4€ more, anything else is substantially more expensive. 

 

Oh wow, just watched a Der8auer video and selected the Liquid Freezer II 240 instead. 80€ instead of 120€ with better performance! 

 

Yeah I was shocked regarding the absolutely horrendous mITX AM5 mainboard availability. There's a grand total of 4 to 5 boards I was able to find and they're all super expensive. The cheapest one was the MSI B650I Edge, but I chose to go with a somewhat more expensive one in my configuration because this one has an VRM fan and I had bad experiences with high pitch fan noises with these kinds of things. The Asus ROG B650E-I Is the one I currently have configured and comes in at 280€. 

What exactly is the issue you experienced with the vertical daughterboards? What ports are they used for?

The system in question is a gaming PC for my father in a Fractal Design Ridge which is currently being mailed back to me. I tested it for three weeks without problem, he gets it home after a visit and driving cross country to start running into issues. We even tested it and gamed on it for several hours together while he was here for two weeks, less than a week when he gets home and boom.

 

The issue with it is eventually it would but wouldn't POST, getting to the splash screen with the AORUS logo and hanging there for about 30 seconds before rebooting. It got incrementally worse for him after a few times that it froze in Windows, to end when we were video calling to troubleshoot and it froze in the UEFI (really bad sign, lol).

 

My theory being some sort of motherboard IC that has a bad trace and/or defect component that took a month to gestate, since I ran it hard for several weeks before hand to avoid this sort of defect for a PC that'll exist 1800mi away. Like a bad trace on the sound controller or such that took a hundred thermal cycles to break, but wasn't important enough to prevent POST.

 

The problem with troubleshooting was with the excessive daughterboards, having my dad in his late 50's troubleshoot it with the M.2 daughterboard and front IO board made it impossible to properly eliminate variables. I'll have the system this week to do even more testing, but we literally did everything over the phone. We even tried 3 different UEFIs using the Q-flash, RAM musical chairs, minimum POST including without the m.2 riser board, etc.

 

He did a really good job for how impatient he is, so it was a great learning experience for him, but I'd rather not have had this happen entirely. The MSI B760 board will be far simpler if he is to run into an issue. Even before that when we were still at my house, we did have an instance where I had to reseat the 'front IO' card, where the power button stopped working, but I chalked that up to me potentially not seating the board after a few internal manipulations.

 

Either way, less is more and there's not a single AM5 mITX board I would recommend. Whether that's complex proprietary daughter boards or chipset fans, its just not worth it. Even my x570 Impact had an occasional issue where I would have to reseat the soDIMM.2 board that housed both M.2 drives, without any sort of internal manipulation that could've induced that issue.

 

My Z97 Impact board is still trucking on, and even recently threw my RTX 4090 into it to do some 4790k vs 7950x3D CPU testing in Warframe. That CPU+mobo+RAM I bought well back in 2014. I don't run it with the modular sound card in its current state but still do run the WLAN+M.2 board since I've run an AHCI SM951 M.2 drive in it since 2015. That however has been relatively problem-less beside when I would accidentally pull it out of its socket and not BOOT when messing with the WLAN antenna. 

 

 

[brob]

Locked Intel CPU can operate within a 65W TDP envelope. In fact unless one is running close to full load, current Intel CPU run cooler than AMD.

 

If you are not familiar with it, https://cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/, is an excellent PSU resource.

 

PSU is a critical component. While excellent units are expensive, the investment is generally worth the expensive. Good PSU will often  outlast the rest of the system.

 

Depending on the software development tools being used, Chromium compile benchmarks can often be useful in determining relative cpu performance.

 

Arctic Liquid Freezer II AIO are excellent. However, one must take into account radiator thickness, especially in SFF cases. The radiators are 38mm thick. Coupled with 27mm thick fans, 65mm clearance is required. As compared to the more common 52mm thickness of a Silent Loop. The case is limited to AIO no thicker than 55mm.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-13700 2.1 GHz 16-Core Processor (€405.80 @ Amazon Deutschland) 

CPU Cooler: be quiet! Pure Loop 240 Liquid CPU Cooler (€97.89 @ notebooksbilliger.de) 

Motherboard: MSI MPG B760I EDGE WIFI Mini ITX LGA1700 Motherboard (€226.94 @ Computeruniverse) 

Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory (€119.36 @ Mindfactory) 

Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (€104.90 @ Alternate) 

Video Card: NVIDIA Founders Edition GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB Video Card (Purchased For €0.00) 

Case: Lian Li A4-H20 X4 Mini ITX Desktop Case (€167.12 @ Mindfactory) 

Power Supply: Fractal Design Ion SFX 650G 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply (€131.61 @ Computeruniverse) 

Total: €1253.62

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-06-12 19:30 CEST+0200

[Somerandomtechyboi]

10 hours ago, MoVo said:

Thanks for the heads up! I found a Crucial P3 Plus with 1TB for 41€ as an alternative

I would look for dram gen3 like the silicon power a80, lexar nm620, mushkin tempest, msi m371, etc. P3 plus is kinda shit, qlc gen4 but it has the speeds of a gen3 and its dramless ontop of that

 

The gen3 im mentioning should be available for around the 40-50€ mark though the msi one i tend to find for somewhere around 35€