Planning my first AMD PC

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I've always used Intel CPUs in my computers. AMD has now taking the one last hold Intel has had in the industry, single core performance.

I've always put a lot of stock in single core performance as most Apps & Games are highly affected by it due to poor threading. For the first time, AMD has put out a CPU that not only has more cores, but faster cores.

I've been wanting a CPU with more than 4-cores for a while, and now is the perfect time to make the switch. On November 5th, AMD releases the Zen 3 CPUs and I plan on scooping up at least two of them (more on that later).

While it's hard to plan a computer around a CPU that doesn't exist, here's what I am thinking.

My current system:

Intel 7700K
32GB DDR3
Samsung 960 NVME 1TB x 2
Samsung 860 SSD 1TB x 2
Seagate 5TB x 3 (Backup - Only one present at at a time, rest swapped and rotated offsite)
Dual Nvidia 1070 (One sold off)
Fractal Design R5 Case
EVGA 850W Bronze Power Supply
ASUS XG-C100C 10GBit Ethernet (Linked directly to NAS)

CPU - $749


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AMD 5950X

This will be my first "Extreme" grade CPU, I always go for the top consumer CPU at the time, but I believe this system will outlast most others I have built. I hope I can get at least one for day one.


CPU Cooler - $90

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Considered the best air cooler in the PC industry, Noctua never fails to deliver. I may switch to an All in One self-contained water cooler for looks and RGB goodness.


Motherboard - $350

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The Gigabyte Aorus Master is an absolute beast of a motherboard. I really want the Extreme edition that removes the fan off the motherboard in favor of passive cooling and built-in 10Gbit but $1,300 for a motherboard is insane.


Power Supply - $150

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The power supply is not a place to skimp on, and I always recommend checking out the latest "Power Supply Tier list" before purchasing one.


Memory - $360

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RGB is the theme for some of the components. These sticks are 16GBx2 RGB 3600 CAS16 DDR. I plan on getting two sets to bring the total ram to 64GB. There are faster 4000+ MHz memroy sticks but from what I hear the best performance is 3600 MHz if you match the speed with the fabric. I am looking for a CAS14 version but I haven't found something better yet.


Case - $140

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The Lian Li 011 Dynamic is currently the most popular case for high end PC builds. It's very attractive, supports water cooling, and shows off RGB very well.


Storage - $720

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The Corsair MP600 is the fastest PCI-E 4 NVME drive for consumers right now, coming in just shy of 5,000MB/s. I plan on getting two bringing the price up to $720. Drive speed to me is one of the most critical aspects of a PC and I always go for top drive performance.


Nvidia 3080 - $699

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The 3080 is the best performance you can get right now without spending a massive premium on the 3090 which is only marginally better for more than twice the price. It's been proving difficult to get my hands on one.

Out of all the 3080 builds, the Asus Tuf has the most high quality capacitors, which has proven to be a big factor in the reliability of the 3080 cards.


This puts the grand total around $3,259 but should last quite a wild before it needs to be replaced.

As mentioned above, I am considering getting a few 5950x CPUs.

My primary reason for a second one is to potentially replace my NAS Build with even faster CPU/Ram so I can use it for virtualization. I have been very happy with my high performance low budget 16 3Ghz Xeon Cores, 64GB Ram, 62TB 16 Drive system for $1,700. So I am not 100% sure I will do this.

The 2nd reason is I want to see what performance I get mining KOIN on it, if I can get at least 30MH/s, I will build a few barebones CPU, motherboard, minimal ram, flash drive systems to mine KOIN.

This is the most extreme build I have built, but I very demanding of my CPU and it is critical to my business operations. I am looking forward to building a system with lots of RGB lighting, will be the first time I built something for fashion.

I am considering skipping the case all together and building a wall mount PC like this.

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25 comments
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I'm planning on building my first pc soon (hopefully soon after tax season) and am either going to use an previous gen Ryzen 7 or the new Ryzen 5 depending on how the prices are around when I'm buying. I like how just your CPU + GPU are more expensive than my whole setup idea.

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It’s easier to justify due to it being a work expense.

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You're getting you some sweet $400 Snap-On wrenches lol.

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Marky ain't broke.

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Not rich either just refuse to wait on a computer and it is my livelihood.

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Fair enough. Makes sense if you're using it in that way. I'm still rocking a 5yo box and it's doing just fine. 😁

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(Edited)

My box is 3 years old now, for me that is a lot. I used to upgrade every year (strategically, not recklessly) but it got to the point new systems were such a small improvement.

But my system is currently a mess from the Windows 2004 upgrade I did to get Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 and I really want more cores so it's really a perfect storm of massive hardware improvements this year and me needing to reinstall my machine.

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Very nice! I love my Aorus motherboards. I have two of them. One is in my main machine that has an i7, 64 GB of RAM, an EVGA liquid cooling system and a Geforce GTX 1080 Ti. I have all of that in a Corsair case that I really like. My other motherboard is in the same case, but it is a AMD ThreadRipper build that I built. It is a pretty sweet machine as well. I mostly use it as a server and for CPU mining so it doesn't have a huge video card in it at all. This is going to be a pretty sweet machine when you have it all together. I am pretty jealous!

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I like the wall mounted version. My PC never goes anywhere, so why not have it as art? My last build was a few years back and I tried to make it quiet. Unfortunately the passive CPU cooler just didn't work. You do save a lot by going a couple of steps down from the latest and greatest. It is fun putting a system together. Enjoy!

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(Edited)

Can you actually get your hands on a 30xx nvidia card yet? Good luck with that... Although, maybe it will be easier once the AMD CPUs are available!

AMD have been looking pretty damn awesome this generation... But I was looking for a decent laptop that could double for gaming and productivity that didn't look like a boy's fantasy. Sadly,there were no laptops in this generation that fit the bill... So stuck with Intel... Again!

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mp600's are nice, we use them on our 3xxx series Ryzens (sometimes striped for even more speed).

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I did a bit of research and they seem to be the king for PCI-E 4 drives. I’ve always been a Samsung fan for SSD/NVME.

I hear a lot of the PCI-E 4 drives have some issues but the MP600 are great.

I really hate waiting for disk IO so I always keep my drives top of the line.

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(Edited)

I've also bought the Sabrent gen4 drives, they're also good, but at the moment the mp600s are offered at a much better price, especially with current discounts.

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(Edited)

Looks like the Samsung 980 Pro is launched and blows away the MP600.

MP600 does 4950 MB/s and the Samsung 980 Pro is at 7,000.
IOPS on the MP600 cap at around 680K where the Samsung is 1M.

The Samsung only comes in 1TB though and is a bit more at $230/1TB compared to $175/1TB with the MP600.

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That's an impressive build list, I do like the wall mount idea but I never really got liquid cooling - I mean I know it's popular but the whole concept of running pipes with liquid running through them over expensive delicate electronics just seems like a disaster that will happen. I always thought it was a motherboard manufacturer sales scheme - you know motherboards last way longer then we want them to - how do we get people to replace them more often? How about we get them to cool everything with liquid - genius!

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Funny how things change. My son just built using AMD and I was joking with him about it. Of course back in the day, like the 90s, AMD was considered to be crap and Intel was the top dog. As lately as 2016 AMD stock was around 2 bucks a share! Now intel cant get their crap together and are seeing delays quarter after quarter SMH.

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We've built a few PC's over the years, always opting for AMD, and they've never steered us wrong, we also chose Balistix ram , they had to had enough oophm to video edit, yet be cost effective. Since these we've moved to laptops primarily as they are easier to use on location.

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(Edited)

Excited to see your system benchmarks when you get it running!

Welcome to the AMD family. :)

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I have a 2014 AMD build and it has run at 84 Celcius during large mining loads when I didnt notice bad airflow, to this day I can still overclock my FX-4600 over 4.5GHZ, with a modern GPU I get bottom 5% of 40 Frames Per Second on Even crazy demanding games like Gears of War 5.

I love my AMD build. Going forward I look forward to the improvements AMD has made.

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