What to build for high VRAM and single core performance requirements?

[ChalkChalkson]

TLDR

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Budget (including currency): ~2000€ could stretch a bit higher, and obviously nice if I get by with less

Country: Germany

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

• Most demanding: AI work and compute. At several points VRAM was a limiting factor for me, so I'd like to go to 16GB+. The speed isn't too important here, VRAM and the bus are limiting in my workloads anyway. This also means that I'm locked into buying NVidia.
• Games I mostly play e-Sports titles like CS or LoL and turn based strategy where the FPS don't matter. But going to stable 288+ FPS in CS would be nice. Turn time in Civ and 5 speed in EU4 would be really nice though. Weirdly (single/low core count) CPU performance is going to be important for this PC.

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): 

I'm probably going to be build an entirely new PC and use my old one as a console / media center for my TV. 

 

Bottom Text

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I've been out of the scene for a while now, so I don't know what the big 3 are currently up to... I also realize that my requirements are probably really weird. Needing a decent speed, but mostly high VRAM card and a CPU that likely isn't considered a good match for such a card. But here we go:

 

I'm a researcher doing AI stuff and GPU based deterministic modelling. When I'm in the home office I like to work on my private PC as the laptops suck, so I want my new PC to perform well on those tasks. It's mostly float tensor manipulation in torch or jax with each tensor being of the order of (10, 10, 100, 10, 10) or so ie 1e6 elements-ish. Once you include gradients etc I regularly get to the limit of my 1080s VRAM which slows down everything a lot. I think I want to go to 16GB-ish so I have a little headroom. 

 

In my free time I mostly play games like CS and LoL, but also EU4 and Civ. For the former I'd like to saturate my high refresh rate monitor 144Hz 1440p at least twice over, ie 300ish FPS at 1440p max settings would be nice. For the latter I'd really like faster speed 5 / turn times. So I suspect a high single core performance CPU would be nice?

 

I also do a fair bit of work in Lightroom, but that probably aligns with the former criteria. 32GB of fast RAM would probably be nice, ideally in 2 sticks with 4 slots so I can upgrade later.

 

Specific Questions

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• I'm confused on the current desktop / gaming lineup from NVidia - 4070ti super costs almost the same as a 4080 super which is the same as a 4080? Are there major differences between these cards? 
• Why is there a 16GB 4060? is that a decent card? It seems my workload would be the ideal one for such a card if there is one at all, but I'm very suspicious 
• What is going on with AM4 / AM5 ? Why are there 8000 APUs and only 7000 CPUs? I don't really need an APU, but does buying a CPU from them right now mean buying an older generation chip?
• How loud are GPUs these days? My existing PC is custom watercooled, but that was a ton of work that I don't really want to repeat. If I buy a decent card (say ASUS TUF or something like that) and a noise dampening case (eg the beQuiet 600 one), will the sound be annoying during heavy work loads?

 

Update

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Here is what I'm considering right now:

 

• 7800x3D
• RTX 4080Super Asus TUF Gaming
• Gigabyte B650 "Eagle AX" 
• 2x16GB DDR5 CL30 6000 (Lexar ARES) Corsair 4800 CL40 
• 2TB 990 Pro M2 PCIe 4 
• Dark Rock 4 (had good experiences with that cooler)
• 850 W Pure Power 12 M 80+ Gold (mostly because native 16pin PCIe, 80+ Gold and reputable brand)
• Pure Base 600 (sound deadening version)

Is that a reasonable config? Ends up hitting 2000€ almost to the point, so I hope I'm not missing anything...

 

Does the B650 support 7800x3D out of the box, or do I need a bios update?

[porina]

3 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

I'm confused on the current desktop / gaming lineup from NVidia - 4070ti super costs almost the same as a 4080 super which is the same as a 4080? Are there major differences between these cards? 

You can look up their specs but the 4070 TiS and 4080S are later refresh generations, offering more value than the initial wave. 4080 was the initial model and gets replaced by the 4080S.

 

3 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

• Why is there a 16GB 4060? is that a decent card? It seems my workload would be the ideal one for such a card if there is one at all, but I'm very suspicious 

The internet complained there wasn't enough VRAM. Nvidia gave them more VRAM. Internet still complained. Obviously as a lower GPU than ones mentioned earlier, there will be less compute potential.

 

3 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

• What is going on with AM4 / AM5 ? Why are there 8000 APUs and only 7000 CPUs? I don't really need an APU, but does buying a CPU from them right now mean buying an older generation chip?

They're the same core microarchitecture of Zen 4. In general the APUs will be cut down compared to the full desktop chips as they trade CPU space for the iGPU. For your use case the APUs probably aren't a great fit.

 

Rumours are we might not be that far from Zen 5 release and that might have significant uplifts over Zen 4.

 

3 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

• How loud are GPUs these days? My existing PC is custom watercooled, but that was a ton of work that I don't really want to repeat. If I buy a decent card (say ASUS TUF or something like that) and a noise dampening case (eg the beQuiet 600 one), will the sound be annoying during heavy work loads?

Get something with a decent cooler and it'll likely be fine. Does your workload scale easily to multiple GPUs? Might be a consideration?

[HanZie82]

If you really need more VRAM then 16GB and AMD is not an option, i think you should maybe look at this type of graphics cards.
https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Quadro-P6000-Graphics-DisplayPort/dp/B01M0S2FKR

[Capt_Monk]

Sound shouldn't be an Issue with any modern card unless you get some sketchy off-brand one. For Nvidia graphics cards, The super series is just a refresh of the older cards. (4070>4070s>4070ti>4070tis) For AMD a 7000 series CPU should work fine for you, and they are current-gen. Use userbenchmark to compare cards if you want more info. if you can afford it a 4090 has 24gb of VRAM, but if not a 4070ti super has 16gb and has a decent bus width

[porina]

4 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

If you really need more VRAM then 16GB and AMD is not an option, i think you should maybe look at this line up.
https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Quadro-P6000-Graphics-DisplayPort/dp/B01M0S2FKR

Be careful as they're much older GPU architecture with Pascal generation. Before RTX era tensor cores if they're needed at all.

[HanZie82]

5 minutes ago, Capt_Monk said:

Use userbenchmark to compare cards if you want more info

Just FYI, comparing between NVIDIA and AMD does NOT really work, as they are somewhat biased. (lots of info online)
But comparing in-brand does work. Just friendly fyi.

 

 

2 minutes ago, porina said:

Be careful as they're much older GPU architecture with Pascal generation. Before RTX era tensor cores if they're needed at all.

Very good point. I'm sorry, i missed this.

[ChalkChalkson]

9 minutes ago, porina said:

Get something with a decent cooler and it'll likely be fine. Does your workload scale easily to multiple GPUs? Might be a consideration?

Sadly not - or rather it would be possible but a shitton more work  

[tkitch]

16 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

• I'm confused on the current desktop / gaming lineup from NVidia - 4070ti super costs almost the same as a 4080 super which is the same as a 4080? Are there major differences between these cards? 
• Why is there a 16GB 4060? is that a decent card? It seems my workload would be the ideal one for such a card if there is one at all, but I'm very suspicious 
• What is going on with AM4 / AM5 ? Why are there 8000 APUs and only 7000 CPUs? I don't really need an APU, but does buying a CPU from them right now mean buying an older generation chip?
• How loud are GPUs these days? My existing PC is custom watercooled, but that was a ton of work that I don't really want to repeat. If I buy a decent card (say ASUS TUF or something like that) and a noise dampening case (eg the beQuiet 600

So, for single core performance, current gen Intel i7 and i9 are going to be the king, hands down.  (unless a task is especially optimized for AMD.)

 

The 4060 TI is generally a poor card in terms of price/performance, but if your main concern is VRAM, it's the easiest way to get 16GB on NVidia.  (That being said, you can find used RTX 3090s for 500ish bucks now, which is a damned good price and might suit your needs better.)

 

As for AMD CPUs:  You're getting confused.  
Ryzen 7000 are the desktop CPUs.  8000 is the lineup for APUs.  There are no 8000 desktop chips, and there are no 7000 APUs.

 

AMD, however, is releasing Ryzen 9000 this fall, and it may actually be a good bump over 7000.  (But it's rumors, so grain of salt.)

 

Of course:  Intel is also releasing 15th gen (with new names) this fall, and that's also rumored to have some significant performance bumps.  

[porina]

1 minute ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Sadly not - or rather it would be possible but a shitton more work  

Yeah, that's why I had to include the word "easily". I guess AMD would suffer similarly? It sounds like they're getting better.

[ChalkChalkson]

7 minutes ago, tkitch said:

releasing ... this fall

Yeah so my current PC feels like it's slowly dying (regular crashes, 2 video outputs died etc). So I'll probably not wait

 

7 minutes ago, tkitch said:

it's the easiest way to get 16GB on NVidia

6 minutes ago, porina said:

I guess AMD would suffer similarly?

I'm locked into NVidia anyway because CUDA

 

7 minutes ago, tkitch said:

As for AMD CPUs:  You're getting confused.

Thanks for clearing it up! 

 

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Looking for motherboards on AM5 and 1700 right now - are 7 segment displays not a thing anymore? Couldn't find a sub 250€ motherboard with them on AM5 at all O.o

[porina]

7 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Yeah so my current PC feels like it's slowly dying (regular crashes, 2 video outputs died etc). So I'll probably not wait

Had random crashes earlier in the year. Turned out a stick of ram had gone bad. Worth a check? Video out dying sounds like a bigger problem.

 

7 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Looking for motherboards on AM5 and 1700 right now - are 7 segment displays not a thing anymore? Couldn't find a sub 250€ motherboard with them on AM5 at all O.o

There's usually a few LEDs for troubleshooting, something like CPU, ram, VGA. Haven't seen the post code displays recently outside of no name Chinese boards.

 

If you do go AM5 with Zen 4 now, you could drop in Zen 5 if worth doing so when it gets released later. Intel's next gen will be a new platform.

[ChalkChalkson]

7 minutes ago, porina said:

Had random crashes earlier in the year. Turned out a stick of ram had gone bad. Worth a check? Video out dying sounds like a bigger problem.

Yeah pretty sure it's the video card. Crashes don't really occur under pure CPU load, but are very common in games, Civ6 especially weirdly. The video outputs dying also always coincided with one of the blue screen of death crashes, soo......

 

I could buy a new GPU first, but I'd have to redo some of the water loop, so I'd rather just do everything at once which means now. 

 

I suspect it'll be an AMD chip anyway? They do appear to be more power efficient, so are probably easier to cool without getting annoyingly loud

[brob]

9 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

 

I suspect it'll be an AMD chip anyway? They do appear to be more power efficient, so are probably easier to cool without getting annoyingly loud

 

You will want to investigate AMD models with large 3D V-cache, (7900X3D, 7950X3D, etc.). Some AI benchmarks show significant performance benefits with these CPU.

[ChalkChalkson]

21 minutes ago, brob said:

 

You will want to investigate AMD models with large 3D V-cache, (7900X3D, 7950X3D, etc.). Some AI benchmarks show significant performance benefits with these CPU.

Yeah, I'm looking at a 7800x3D right now. Put specific specs into the top level post - do they seem reasonable?

[BentleyOwen123]

1 hour ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Corsair Vengence 2x16 GB DDR5 4800 CL40 (reputable brand, 2x 16GB and reasonably priced)

7000 series runs best with 6000mhz cl30

[BentleyOwen123]

that mobo only has 1 gig lan if that matters to you, and 7000 series is the first generation of am5, meaning every current am5 mobo was made for 7000 and bios will work

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, BentleyOwen123 said:

7000 series runs best with 6000mhz cl30

Ok, switched it out - is only 10€ more anyways

[BentleyOwen123]

1 hour ago, ChalkChalkson said:

• 7800x3D
• RTX 4080Super Asus TUF Gaming
• Gigabyte B650 "Eagle AX" 
• 2x16GB DDR5 CL30 6000 (Lexar ARES) Corsair 4800 CL40 
• 2TB 990 Pro M2 PCIe 4 
• Dark Rock 4 (had good experiences with that cooler)
• 850 W Pure Power 12 M 80+ Gold (mostly because native 16pin PCIe, 80+ Gold and reputable brand)
• Pure Base 600 (sound deadening version)

seems good!  if you want to even just for fun, the 7900x3d is on sale for like 50 more and has 12 cores, might help down the line

 

 

harder to cool tho

[tkitch]

30 minutes ago, BentleyOwen123 said:

seems good!  if you want to even just for fun, the 7900x3d is on sale for like 50 more and has 12 cores, might help down the line

 

 

harder to cool tho

the 7900x3d is the redheaded stepchild of CPUs.  It's generally worse than a 7800x3d, and dramatically worse than a 7950x3d.  

[brob]

2 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Yeah, I'm looking at a 7800x3D right now. Put specific specs into the top level post - do they seem reasonable?

 

The specs are fine.

 

High airflow cases can actually result in quieter systems than those in "quiet" cases.

 

The Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE offers excellent, quiet cooling at a better price point than the Dark Rock 4. In reviews it shows noise normalized performance that is competitive with the NH-D15 and superior to the Dark Rock Pro 4.