Budget - £5000 Use case - Work and play, smidgen of streaming. largely in that order. Extras required - Monitors, 2 of... 27", on of which is pro...ish... spec. HDMI capture card. So... let's spend £5k of someone else's money... CPU - Threadripper 2920X Motherboard - ASUS Zenith Extreme Alpha [i know, it's the zomg uber e-peen board but there are reasons for choosing it over cheaper boards] CPU Cooler - Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 + 2nd fan. RAM - 64GB [4x16] of either 3200 MHz Corsair Vengeance or Crucial Ballistix Storage - 1TB 970 Evo Plus, 8TB Barracuda Pro GPU - EVGA 2080ti Cap Card - Elgato HD60 Case - Phanteks P600S PSU - Corsair RMx 800W Current choice of monitor - Dell UP2716D x2
Woof, £5k is a lot of money. What exactly do you need it for, because it feels like you could spend a fraction of that amount and still have a monster PC? In particular, a £500+ motherboard seems bonkers (although all TR4 boards are brutally expensive, to be fair). Also in fairness, I guess £1k+ of your £5k budget is going on monitors, but £4k for a PC seems like silly money (depending on exactly what "work" is, of course). At the end of the day, though, it's your cash and you can spend it however you like. Oh, and @Bazz is selling an Elgato HD60 Pro in his for sale thread, if you weren't already aware.
It's not my money [i wish i had £5k to blow on a pc... of £5k period], I've been tasked with putting this spec together for someone else. I've just been staring at it so long now i'm starting to doubt my own choices. The work is a combo of 3d modelling, photogrammetery and video editing... stuff that warrants/benefits from a threadripper [and 64GB of RAM]. Could they get by with Ryzen? probably... but if they want to splurge £5k on a PC i will oblige them.
Maybe not lump everything onto 1 spinny disk just in case? Also maybe throw a touch of watercooling in there? It is a monster build and a monster cpu after all. Watercool make some outstanding TR4 blocks. Just look at the size of the cold plate compared to the standard block!
The person it's for specifically requested no internal plumbing/AIOs. And i had considered multiple smaller rust spinners rather than one big one.
So, having just built the above [more or less]... a mini review... The board - solid, though you'd bloody hope so for £520. Not perfect though - molex need to die [more on that later], and the the placement/orientation of a couple of the connectors, combined with the case made hooking thing up a bit of a mare. Also caused windows to blue-screen during install, nothing RTFM couldn't fix though. The Case - Some good ideas on show, even if some aren't that well executed. Main gripes were the velcro cable ties being too short, and the cable routing holes being too small. The integrated fan controller is a nice touch, but the cable that goes to the mobo could do with being longer [an issue made more noticeable by the fan header locations on the mobo]. The magnets holding the side panels closed aren't the strongest, so the side panels have an annoying habit of opping open when you're moving the case about. The PSU - 90% of the ballache in this build was this fecker. The cables were a pain to route on account of being so inflexible, the ATX 24-pin particular was so... girthy... in exactly the wrong place that it made fitting it through the cable routing holes in the case impossible. The clips on the molex [seriously, **** molex] connector meant i also couldn't fit them through the hole and hook it up to the board. CPU - Ended up with the Threadripper 2950X in the end... not sure what else there is to say here... Cooler - Kept the CPU at 50 [according to the on-board readout] during an OCCT run. Didn't have to the chance to stress test the as much as i'd have liked, but nothing caught fire. RAM - 3200MHz using the settings provided with that Ryzen DRAM timings widget, no fuss. [The kit was Hynix A-Die apprently, fwiw] GPU - some small issues getting it to line up with the case, not sure if it was the card or the case. Would build again? Maybe not exactly as above. I'd seriously consider a different PSU or a set of custom cables. While the Zenith Alpha will fit in the case it's not ideal. It doess really feel deisgned with with a normal sized ATX board in mind.
Gotta love those inflexible Corsair PSU cables. Not entirely sure what they make them from but it's a royal pain in the jacksie. And you have to love a super-modern and high end motherboard that needs a bloody Molex power connection! What, is a 24-pin plus two 8-pin connectors not enough for ya?
It is down to a combination of things, first off you have the problem that you can't just use spare power from the 2x 8 pin to power random junk. And then you have the other problem that the random junk uses forever more power (all the RGB, Pump headers, fan headers that can handle actual fans, m.2 slots etc) and with that stuff eating into the power budget for the pci-e slots, stuffing some extra power connectors on the board makes actual sense, of course there is only one correct approach (angled pci-e connector at the edge of the board), unfortunately Asus + MSI haven't gotten that memo.
