build in SG10

[agent0815]

Budget (including currency): 4000€

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: older RTS (Age of Empires DE), Unreal Tournament, Stable Diffusion, occasional Blender rendering, occasional Autodesk Inventor, occasional experimental machine learning models.

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):

• all required peripherals are available
• redundant mass storage with backups is available in my home network, this machine is not for storage.
• I'm going to buy approximately in April/May 2024
• I need to make final decision on Processor and Graphics card until end of February 2024
• budget can be overdrawn if justified, but  I'm trying to stay as low as possible.

 

Hello everyone, I have been an avid watcher of LTT for probably a decade, but have not felt the need to take part in the community before.

Ever since LTT showcased the Calyos NSG-01 prototype, I was in love with this idea, and even more with the price they offered. I think that was in 2016. SInce then, a lod of hard word have been said, and while I am not a backer of the kickstarter campaign, I still preordered a passively colled chassis from their shop at a very reasonable price (considering the technology promised).

 

I too wasn't happy with the progress of the project and I voiced my concerns directly to Calyos. There were times I doubted, that is was going to end well, but look at it now. Well, kind of. I might get what I wanted, albeit at a higher price. 
However, I am still very fond of the idea of passive cooling and fortunately I am now even more in the position to afford it, so that I will continue through with this project. It may be sunken-cost-fallacy, or just the overall love of technology. I mean, 1200€ still seems like a reasonable price for complete passive cooling with a well-built case. I just wished I knew this upfront.

 

So, what's done is done and this is now the past. I have decided I want to make the most out of my purchase, and get back to building my dream PC eight years later.

My desktop system is still running on an i7 2600k with 16GB DDR3 Ram, SATA SSD and a Radeon R9 290X2.

In the meantime, I have been using my work notebook running a Ryzen 7 5800X, 32 GB of Ram and a mobile RTX3060. All the workloads I do run on it, but I want to speed up stable diffusion in particular and also try out more machine learning models (which is partly my job as an engineer in optimization research).

 

Ultimately, I plan to build a new system with the aforementioned specs. Going completely passive seems not robust to me, so I want to try "semi-passive", i.e. add 2 or three case fans with a customizable fan controller and a custom tempreature probe, so that they can aid heat dissipation, should the condensers become too hot.

 

Since, everything is going to be built around the case, this is it:
Case: https://streacom.com/products/sg10-fanless-gaming-pc-case/ (the limited preorder copper variant)

 

For the graphics card, stable diffusion requires a large amount of VRAM, so the best choices probably would be a RTX3090 or RTX4090 series card at 24GB VRAM.

The cooling solution coming with the GPU will not be relevant, as I am going to replace it with the calyos vaporizer anyway.

So, that leaves me with the citeria coil whine, power delivery plug.

In terms of coil whine, I can see that for the 4090 series, any Gigabyte, PNY, Zotac or Founders Edition card promises a low chance of coil whine at a reasonable sample size (https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ada-lovelace-rtx-4xxx-coilwhine-fiep-rassel-thread.1324904/).

I am open to hear any suggestions here.

 

In terms of CPU, I am considering going AMD, out of pure habit, probably on socket AM5.

I'm happy to hear any thoughts about that. Cooling solution is again provided through the case.

 

In terms of RAM, it will be 64, 96 or 128 GB. RGB is optional, and ideally I would be able to deactivate it. Probably I should go with whatever is cheapest at the time of buying, right?

 

In terms of mainboard, I probably should go with X670 or X670E. Most importantly, it must not have an active fan. Secondly, I would prefer RGB to be absent or deactivateable. Thirdly, it should visually match a black/copper scheme, so I prefer it not to be white. There is no need for WiFi, Bluetooth, SATA. If an iGPU is part of the CPU, that's a nice extra and I will find a way to use it, but not necessary. I probably weill need at least two m.2 slots.

As a brand, I have previously had good experiences with Gigabyte, but never had Aorus hardware. Would that make a sensible choice? Or even considering the Asus Pro Art line?

 

In terms of storage, I don't need much. Probably the system will sufficiently run on 3-4 TB of NVME SSD.

 

For the power supply, I have good experience with the passive Seasonic models. I will probably buy one of these again. How much Power do you actually recommend for my system?

 

For fans, I think three black noctua fans will be just fine in this case, as they are not intended to run continuously. Therefore it is more important to have a good fan controller, which allows me to disable the fans depending on a custom temperature input. I am thinking about mouning a probe right to the copper condenser, so I can spin up the fans when/if the condenser reaches ~75°C.

I have not worked with fan controllers before. Can you recommend me one? It is perfectly fine if it's an onboards solution.

 

 

 

I'm happy to discuss all of my points, get taught and educated, and hear your opinions.
Thank you very much.

 

[TatamiMatt]

21 minutes ago, agent0815 said:

Budget (including currency): 4000€

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: older RTS (Age of Empires DE), Unreal Tournament, Stable Diffusion, occasional Blender rendering, occasional Autodesk Inventor, occasional experimental machine learning models.

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):

• all required peripherals are available
• redundant mass storage with backups is available in my home network, this machine is not for storage.
• I'm going to buy approximately in April/May 2024
• I need to make final decision on Processor and Graphics card until end of February 2024
• budget can be overdrawn if justified, but  I'm trying to stay as low as possible.

 

Hello everyone, I have been an avid watcher of LTT for probably a decade, but have not felt the need to take part in the community before.

Ever since LTT showcased the Calyos NSG-01 prototype, I was in love with this idea, and even more with the price they offered. I think that was in 2016. SInce then, a lod of hard word have been said, and while I am not a backer of the kickstarter campaign, I still preordered a passively colled chassis from their shop at a very reasonable price (considering the technology promised).

 

I too wasn't happy with the progress of the project and I voiced my concerns directly to Calyos. There were times I doubted, that is was going to end well, but look at it now. Well, kind of. I might get what I wanted, albeit at a higher price. 
However, I am still very fond of the idea of passive cooling and fortunately I am now even more in the position to afford it, so that I will continue through with this project. It may be sunken-cost-fallacy, or just the overall love of technology. I mean, 1200€ still seems like a reasonable price for complete passive cooling with a well-built case. I just wished I knew this upfront.

 

So, what's done is done and this is now the past. I have decided I want to make the most out of my purchase, and get back to building my dream PC eight years later.

My desktop system is still running on an i7 2600k with 16GB DDR3 Ram, SATA SSD and a Radeon R9 290X2.

In the meantime, I have been using my work notebook running a Ryzen 7 5800X, 32 GB of Ram and a mobile RTX3060. All the workloads I do run on it, but I want to speed up stable diffusion in particular and also try out more machine learning models (which is partly my job as an engineer in optimization research).

 

Ultimately, I plan to build a new system with the aforementioned specs. Going completely passive seems not robust to me, so I want to try "semi-passive", i.e. add 2 or three case fans with a customizable fan controller and a custom tempreature probe, so that they can aid heat dissipation, should the condensers become too hot.

 

Since, everything is going to be built around the case, this is it:
Case: https://streacom.com/products/sg10-fanless-gaming-pc-case/ (the limited preorder copper variant)

 

For the graphics card, stable diffusion requires a large amount of VRAM, so the best choices probably would be a RTX3090 or RTX4090 series card at 24GB VRAM.

The cooling solution coming with the GPU will not be relevant, as I am going to replace it with the calyos vaporizer anyway.

So, that leaves me with the citeria coil whine, power delivery plug.

In terms of coil whine, I can see that for the 4090 series, any Gigabyte, PNY, Zotac or Founders Edition card promises a low chance of coil whine at a reasonable sample size (https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ada-lovelace-rtx-4xxx-coilwhine-fiep-rassel-thread.1324904/).

I am open to hear any suggestions here.

 

In terms of CPU, I am considering going AMD, out of pure habit, probably on socket AM5.

I'm happy to hear any thoughts about that. Cooling solution is again provided through the case.

 

In terms of RAM, it will be 64, 96 or 128 GB. RGB is optional, and ideally I would be able to deactivate it. Probably I should go with whatever is cheapest at the time of buying, right?

 

In terms of mainboard, I probably should go with X670 or X670E. Most importantly, it must not have an active fan. Secondly, I would prefer RGB to be absent or deactivateable. Thirdly, it should visually match a black/copper scheme, so I prefer it not to be white. There is no need for WiFi, Bluetooth, SATA. If an iGPU is part of the CPU, that's a nice extra and I will find a way to use it, but not necessary. I probably weill need at least two m.2 slots.

As a brand, I have previously had good experiences with Gigabyte, but never had Aorus hardware. Would that make a sensible choice? Or even considering the Asus Pro Art line?

 

In terms of storage, I don't need much. Probably the system will sufficiently run on 3-4 TB of NVME SSD.

 

For the power supply, I have good experience with the passive Seasonic models. I will probably buy one of these again. How much Power do you actually recommend for my system?

 

For fans, I think three black noctua fans will be just fine in this case, as they are not intended to run continuously. Therefore it is more important to have a good fan controller, which allows me to disable the fans depending on a custom temperature input. I am thinking about mouning a probe right to the copper condenser, so I can spin up the fans when/if the condenser reaches ~75°C.

I have not worked with fan controllers before. Can you recommend me one? It is perfectly fine if it's an onboards solution.

 

 

 

I'm happy to discuss all of my points, get taught and educated, and hear your opinions.
Thank you very much.

 

This is a big read, but im going to preface this before i even read any further, pc part market can be volatile, not very but prices do go up and down often enough, if youre planning to buy this in May, what we may or may not suggest today might end up being overpriced or there might be a better or cheaper option when the time comes to buying this

 

That said (post now read), while its been an effort, ordeal and quite the expense for you, thats an awesome looking and functioning case

[agent0815]

Thank you for the heads up.

I understand the pricing on the PC market is volatile, however, there is a constraint I didn't mention so far:

 

When buying this case from streacom, there is a copper heatplate manufactured onto the vaporizer, which needs to match the CPU and a second one which needs to match the GPU. As far as I understand, these plates can in the future be replaced (but streacom needs to build the replacement parts or I need someone to machine them for me). At the date of purchase, I need to specify which GPU and which CPU  I will be using, so they can manufacture the right model for me. And the date of purchase will be at the end of February.

 

So, the planning must happen now. To make the most of the time in between, I will observe the market for price drops and offers on the chosen models.

[TatamiMatt]

4 minutes ago, agent0815 said:

Thank you for the heads up.

I understand the pricing on the PC market is volatile, however, there is a constraint I didn't mention so far:

 

When buying this case from streacom, there is a copper heatplate manufactured onto the vaporizer, which needs to match the CPU and a second one which needs to match the GPU. As far as I understand, these plates can in the future be replaced (but streacom needs to build the replacement parts or I need someone to machine them for me). At the date of purchase, I need to specify which GPU and which CPU  I will be using, so they can manufacture the right model for me. And the date of purchase will be at the end of February.

 

So, the planning must happen now. To make the most of the time in between, I will observe the market for price drops and offers on the chosen models.

Ah i see, that makes more sense, im a little busy at work right now but ill try throw something together when i get the chance!

[igormp]

2 hours ago, agent0815 said:

For the graphics card, stable diffusion requires a large amount of VRAM, so the best choices probably would be a RTX3090 or RTX4090 series card at 24GB VRAM.

Since you're going mostly for stable diffusion and with a single GPU, a 4090 should be noticeably faster than a 3090 in this case.

2 hours ago, agent0815 said:

In terms of CPU, I am considering going AMD, out of pure habit, probably on socket AM5.

 

A 7950x would do you great. If you main focus is gaming, then a X3D model ought to be better, but depends on how important gaming is to you. The non-X3D models should do better at productivity tasks.

2 hours ago, agent0815 said:

In terms of RAM, it will be 64, 96 or 128 GB. RGB is optional, and ideally I would be able to deactivate it. Probably I should go with whatever is cheapest at the time of buying, right?

I'd say to go either with 96GB or 192GB, 48GB sticks seem to be easier to reach higher XMP speeds for some reason.

just look into your mobo's QVL and pick the cheapest option.

2 hours ago, agent0815 said:

Or even considering the Asus Pro Art line?

I'd say this only makes sense if you plan to eventually add a second GPU to your build (irrelevant for SD as of now, unless you're doing tons of parallel generations, but may be relevant to other models).

 

2 hours ago, agent0815 said:

How much Power do you actually recommend for my system?

1000W should do more than fine. You could even plug two 4090s in there as long as you properly tune their power limits, there's no reason to have then running full tilt for productivity tasks IMO.

[agent0815]

10 minutes ago, igormp said:

Since you're going mostly for stable diffusion and with a single GPU, a 4090 should be noticeably faster than a 3090 in this case.

[...]

I'd say this only makes sense if you plan to eventually add a second GPU to your build (irrelevant for SD as of now, unless you're doing tons of parallel generations, but may be relevant to other models).

With this case and cooling method, a second GPU is not an option (aside from wonky custom setups where I go with a regular CPU cooler and dual GPU cooling, but still I doubt the space is enough)

 

10 minutes ago, igormp said:

A 7950x would do you great. If you main focus is gaming, then a X3D model ought to be better, but depends on how important gaming is to you. The non-X3D models should do better at productivity tasks.

Gaming is important, but productivity is as well, Since my 5800X can run all the games I play sufficiently smooth, (and even the old 2600k could), I get the feeling that productivity will be more important?

 

11 minutes ago, igormp said:

I'd say to go either with 96GB or 192GB, 48GB sticks seem to be easier to reach higher XMP speeds for some reason.

just look into your mobo's QVL and pick the cheapest option.

Okay, makes sense to me. DOn't you think 192GB of RAM is a bit excessive? Even my Homeserver, which is running a bunch of virtualized appliances, only has 128.

[igormp]

9 minutes ago, agent0815 said:

With this case and cooling method, a second GPU is not an option (aside from wonky custom setups where I go with a regular CPU cooler and dual GPU cooling, but still I doubt the space is enough)

Fair enough, makes things easier.

9 minutes ago, agent0815 said:

Gaming is important, but productivity is as well, Since my 5800X can run all the games I play sufficiently smooth, (and even the old 2600k could), I get the feeling that productivity will be more important?

Yeah, then go for the highest core count non-X3D Ryzen CPU you can fit in your budget.

10 minutes ago, agent0815 said:

Okay, makes sense to me. DOn't you think 192GB of RAM is a bit excessive? Even my Homeserver, which is running a bunch of virtualized appliances, only has 128.

Depends on your workload. With 2x3090s I usually run out of RAM here, but I deal with quite a lot of data and LLMs/CNNs/ViTs. If you can get by with 96GB (with 2 sticks only), it should be more stable and faster than 128GB

[agent0815]

18 hours ago, igormp said:

Yeah, then go for the highest core count non-X3D Ryzen CPU you can fit in your budget.

After reading up n the differences, is your recommendation based on the value-for-money ratio or are there actual disadvantages to the efficiency cores for productivity?

 

18 hours ago, igormp said:

Depends on your workload. With 2x3090s I usually run out of RAM here, but I deal with quite a lot of data and LLMs/CNNs/ViTs. If you can get by with 96GB (with 2 sticks only), it should be more stable and faster than 128GB

I am running only small experimental models as prood-of-concepts on my own system. If I have success with them, I can move to a larger scale and ask my employer for the necessary hardware.

 

 

Good points have been made, but I am still missing some advice on a fan controller and passive mainboard.

[igormp]

1 hour ago, agent0815 said:

After reading up n the differences, is your recommendation based on the value-for-money ratio or are there actual disadvantages to the efficiency cores for productivity?

There's no efficiency cores in the current ryzen desktop lineup. The difference between the 3D models and the non-3D is an extra layer of cache piled on top of the CPU.

For applications that are cache sensitive (like games), this gives a nice performance bump, but for others it makes no difference, and since it's extra material on top of the die and in between the actual die and the heatspreader, clocks and power on the 3D models are lower than their regular counterparts, impacting in those other tasks.

2 hours ago, agent0815 said:

Good points have been made, but I am still missing some advice on a fan controller and passive mainboard.

No idea on fan controller, sorry. And motherboard you can just go with an Aorus that you mentioned that has all the IO you need.