Alright, initial build complete and man this thing is quick! Couple things to note about the process.
Still some work on cable management to be done… That can wait a week as I’ll be adding more cables.
The D15 is tight, even in a nice spacious case like the Define R5.
Memory was all detected perfectly and running at XMP profile after a bit of tinkering with placement on the board (had to start with 2 sticks in slots 3 and 4, then add the rest).
It doesn’t seem I can disable the RGB lights on the MSI motherboard through the BIOS, but that’s minor in a windowless case.
The thermals on the 3900X are real! I currently idle high 30s low 40s and seem to top out at about 73 degrees under Prime95 Small FFTs. Single core load seems to spike temps more, but still manageable. The 3900X runs hot due to the density of the chip, and under regular load I should never see any issues.
I finally got a decent fan curve where all fans in case operate at about 500RPM until the processor hits 65c, then they’ll ramp up to 100% at 85c. There’s a delay in ramp up and ramp down too, which smooths things out a bit.
NVMe SSDs are definitely faster than the SATA I had in there before. Windows install took no time and I’m having no problems with system responsiveness.
With that said, initial thoughts are this thing is going to be fine for 5 years. If a sale comes up in the next year for a 5900X or 5950X, I might switch over to that, but that’s only if I can come across one for about the same price I paid for the 3900X.
Oh yeah, that’s a winner. Not sure why I like that beige and brown color scheme.
As for further upgrades, I’ve got 2 coming in:
4TB Western Digital Blue SATA SSD: This one seems a bit weird since I just grabbed 2 2TB NVMe drives and mentioned how much faster they are. I do however have a 6TB Seagate external hard drive that’s quickly become the loudest thing at my desk… And well, we just can’t have that. I use large format storage to hold my Lightroom Classic library and other various software and media, so having a 4TB SSD in place of an external spinning disk will improve Lightroom Classic responsiveness 10-fold. This is useful for working and managing older images that I don’t store on creative cloud. This should also be useful as a working drive for some low-use VMs that I may want to run. As of now though, it’s primary purpose is storage! I can’t complain about the price either, as Newegg had a special running the day I was looking. 35% off made for an all time low for 4TB SSDs.
Zotac RTX 3080 AMP Holo: I caved. Also I managed to FIND one out of sheer luck. Best Buy had listed a SKU recently that wasn’t being tracked by any of the bots or scalpers, and I managed to get an order through on it. This will be my first higher end GPU, as I usually come in around the xx6x/xx7x series historically (8800GT, GTX 260 Core 216/GTX 275, GTX470, GTX 670, GTX 970, 1660 Super, etc). I haven’t been playing too many games lately, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to, and with the global pandemic, it’s even easier to find time to do so. With the U4919DW clocking in at 5120x1440, the 1660 Super really wasn’t going to cut it. After seeing benchmarks on the 3080 and seeing it smashed just about any title on the market at 4K with 60+ FPS, I was convinced to go up a tier this time around.
I’ve inverted the power supply as it’s sitting on carpet now, but checking inside the thing was clean - I’m not sure the fan has even come on since I bought this unit. Would have liked it if this motherboard came with a second NVMe heatsink.
The Holo doesn’t appear to have many reviews, and the little there is on the internet seem to indicate it isn’t the quietest/coolest card out there, but my plans are to under-volt a bit anyway. This should also help assuage my fears of my 650W PSU being too little. Everything I’ve read online says I should be fine with the 650W, but Nvidia’s recommendation of a 750w has me a bit worried. I feel the EVGA P2 650w should be super solid though being based on the Super Flower Leadex platform, and worst case scenario I grab something a bit beefier and sell this premium unit to make up for the cost.