It’s that time again. And what a time it is. If anyone reads this blog they probably know the last time I had upgraded my computer is coming up on 5 years ago, and my component choices were solid for the time. My needs have changed a bit though with a lot more focus on creativity and less focus on gaming. That being said, for 2020, my current i5-4690k and 16GB of RAM really aren’t feeling as quick as they once were. Having Lightroom and Photoshop open at the same time with a few chrome tabs in the background pretty much means we’re paging a bunch of data to storage, and although my SATA SSDs are SSDs, they’re not as fast as NVME is now. So going into this, the parts list:
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon MAX WiFi
64GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200mhz DDR4
ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD x2
Noctua NH-D15
I’ll be keeping my case, power supply, and fans, but WOW, that’s a build list right there. How about my choices?
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X: AMD for the longest while was the underdog, but with Zen 2 AMD started becoming considerably more competitive. Compared to Intel, Intel still leads in the single core performance game, but for the margin is extremely close. When you look at multi core, there’s no competition at the price point – 12 cores and 24 threads is an extreme amount of processing grunt. With my workloads tending to be fairly multithreaded, this should be a huge benefit over the lesser core count Intel offers. From a games perspective, the new game consoles are built around AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, being 8 core 16 thread APUs. Going with a higher core count should ensure that a lot of future game titles run better on my PC as practically every platform is coded similarly now – Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X/S. This may in the future be upgraded to a 3950X, or perhaps a Zen 3 equivalent – Zen 3 providing around a 20% IPC boost over Zen 2.
MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon MAX WiFi: Full ATX board, minimal RGB, lots of fan headers, 2 NVME slots, premium audio codec (ALC1220), Intel WiFi (1.73ghz max) and Bluetooth 5.0. B450 is slated to receive a BIOS upgrade in the new year to enable support for the Zen 3 chips, so slotting in a Zen 3 chip in the future is easy. Yes there’s no USB4, and it’s missing out on PCIe 4.0, but these are features that aren’t really relevant to me currently, nor do I see them as being relevant in the next 5 years considering my reliance on cloud file transfers for the majority of file sharing. WiFi is a huge requirement as we’ve moved to pretty much exclusively wireless connectivity in the apartment, so the best WiFi chipsets are definitely required.
64GB Crucial LPX 3200mhz DDR4: Well, the board needed DDR4, the heat sink requires low profile memory, and I really didn’t want to get stuck at 16GB. 4x the memory will give me plenty of room to play with photoshop and Lightroom simultaneously, spin up VMs, and forget about Chrome tabs being open. 3200mhz should be a fine spot for my requirements.
ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB NVME SSDs: 3500mbps reads, 3000mbps writes, why not? These things are blazing fast and should work great for my needs. I don’t plan on RAIDing them. If 1.25TB of SSD storage got me through fine for 5 years, I think 4TB should be plenty for the foreseeable future.
Noctua NH-D15: I’ve been a Noctua guy forever. I love the quirky color scheme, and the fans just plain sound great even at full speed. My NH-U12P has been with me since 2008, and although it’s likely up for the task, I want to go with something potentially even quieter for the beast that is the 3900X. Here’s hoping I can keep my 300rpm fan speed for the foreseeable future with one of the giants (both in size and performance) of air cooling.
For all that, the build was surprisingly less than I was expecting. I’ll be carrying over my exceptional EVGA 650W platinum power supply, my case, and my fans. I’m still waffling on the video card – I don’t really play as many games as I did before, but I’d really like to try changing that. On top of that too, I managed to score a Dell U4919DW for extremely cheap. A 49” super ultra wide monitor with a resolution of 5120x1440 might be a bit rough to push with a 1660 Super. Even scaling resolution back to 3840x1080 for games is a lot more pixels than my existing 2560x1440. The RTX 3080 has been tempting, and I have a pretty good feeling that could be a 4-5 year video card… Provided I can find one. The U4919DW will get a lot more use for productivity however, considering how much we’ve been working from home, having it connected for work will be like having 2 of my current monitor setup again.