Research diaries #20: Builing another PC

Nowadays I have some projects that require a bit more computation power than usual. So I had the nice opportunity to build a stationary computation horse. My current mindset is that laptops are not really that useful as something to do computations on from an investment perspective. It is much more cost-effective to have good mobile internet, a weak laptop with long battery-life and a stationary machine somewhere in the world into which you remotely login to for your heavy lifting. Another practical requirement for the laptop is that it is light and has a replaceable battery. I am a big fan of the ThinkPad X series. (The T430 or T530 will always have a special place in my heart. But alas it is too heavy for me now. Of course this makes them most suitable as a murder weapon if somebody insults your machine.)

For GPU stuff I do use windows. To avoid the problematic stuff of dealing with re-installations of generic software I stick to a fixed motherboard. Your windows then becomes plug-and-play. I settled on a Asus Prime B550M-A which is actually a bit different from my old motherboard but generally plug-and-play will work on motherboards of the same family. Of course if Linux had better GPU support this wouldn't be anything to fuss about :3

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is good enough for my applications (16-Core). The thermalRight is the only right cooler for your CPU :D Double fan will only set you back around 30 dollars. Great cooler for the price. I think a single fan is actually enough but I generally find that if you have 2 fans then they produce less noise than a single fan as the noise generation is not linear.

I was thinking about getting an A5000 GPU to match my CPU that but it seems a better deal to go for an A4500. An A6000 or greater is overkill and waste of research funds.

Generic source (Higher is better)

A4500 sits quite close to A5000 in terms of performance and is relatively much cheaper (at least here in Japan). A4500 has 20GB which is a couple of GB greater than the applications I plan to use it for. RTX 3090 is also not too expensive but it is quite power hungry. I matched the 20GB of the A4500 with 32GB of generic RAM which is more than enough for my level of computations.

I was thinking about getting an open case but with all the undergrads visiting my office I went for a closed case to be on the safe side. Cheap Silverstone cases are a pretty good deal. I didn't notice that the fan for my power supply would have to be located at the bottom of my case. But I just keep my machine side ways.

Don't judge my wires :3

The total amount spent was less than that the average prof over here spends on his/her Mac setup. :D