TR Forums

Comrade Gerbils

Time has come to replace my beloved Sandy-build, still running happily at 4.8 for eight years now, definitely the best PC I've had in twenty five years of builds. Alas, more cores beckon.

Usages; Adobe CC (Lightroom and Premiere), gaming. I just bought a Nikon Z7 and those 45mp raw files are crunchy, as will be editing 4k ProRes video.

Question #1 - i9900k vs. Ryzen9 3900x. I'm leaning Intel, despite the fact that Ryzen has more cores. I must admit that I am still spooky about AMD chipsets (ever since crappy VIA Athlon chipsets), and I am eyeing a possible Thunderbolt drop-in card to attach a DAS to. I've read lots of reviews and it seems like I can't make a bad choice here. Anyone have any reason that I should go AMD?

Question #2 - I've been running Asus Mobos for years, but this time I'm thinking that the Gigabyte z390 Aurus Ultra gives me an extra M2 slot over a comparable Asus z390. In general, I've found the proliferation of Mobo's to be overwhelming. Is there a better board?

Question #3 - I've got a cooler master Hyper212 with a couple of good fans on the i2600k. Is there any reason I can't just put it, and some good paste, onto the new build? I have no current plans to O/C.

Question #4 - Ram speeds. DDR4 is coming down and I can get 64gb of 3600 GSkill ram for a decent price. I have fetishized faster spec Ram for a while now, and I figure it gives me some room for an O/C in the future. Is there any reason not to? Does faster Ram give 'snappier' general performance? How much do timings matter?

I spec'd some components at Newegg and it is a lot of money. But if I spend that much and get another 8 years of use it will feel like money well spent..

Appreciate any recommendations from folks wiser than I.

Thanks in advance,

-(A)-

Plazmodeus wrote:

Question #1 - i9900k vs. Ryzen9 3900x. I'm leaning Intel, despite the fact that Ryzen has more cores. I must admit that I am still spooky about AMD chipsets (ever since crappy VIA Athlon chipsets). Anyone have any reason that I should go AMD?

"More cores beckon." This is especially true if you can wait a few more weeks for Ryzen 9 3950X (16 cores / 32 threads) or for Threadripper 3. Also, AMD 7 nm CPUs cost less and use less power than comparable Intel 14+++++ nm CPUs. The good news for your fear of VIA or ASMedia chipsets is that the new X570 is an in-house AMD design. The bad news is that its priced higher than the older chipsets for socket AM4 and it needs either a small fan or a large heatsink to cool the chipset.

I did lots of photos editing with my 2700k when it was running at 4.7. it's been running 99%< since I bought and and has degraded a decent amount.

In my experience, 4 cores wasn't enough for editing photos, and doubling it to 8 would still not be enough. I would look forward to the 3950x coming out in September or wait awhile longer for the next gen thread ripper.

Remember, you may think 8 cores is ok now, but in 8 years it's not going to hold up like Sandy bridge has. Also, don't forget the i7 980/990 were the 6 cores out at the time. Buying 8 cores when you can likely get 24 for around $1000 with the new thread ripper should bring a value perspective. Recall the CPU in 2011/2012 that was 1/3 of a 6 core CPU.

The next gen thread rippers are rumored to be 16 and up to 64 cores.

If you just gamed, 8 would be fine. You should consider 16 the minimum if you plan to have the computer for 8 more years.

I personally am looking at the 32 or 48 depending on clock speeds.

Dup post

AMD is really on their game right now; you should seriously consider Zen 2.

Personally I would be inclined to stick with Asus for the mobo; they have rarely let me down. That's something I can't say about other mobo vendors. If you decide to go AMD, ASRock's AM4 boards also seem to be popular.

AM4 heatsink retention mechanism is incompatible with previous HSF mountings; this could be an issue for re-using your existing HSF. There may be an adapter kit available for your cooler (check the Cooler Master web site).

just brew it! wrote:

AM4 heatsink retention mechanism is incompatible with previous HSF mountings; this could be an issue for re-using your existing HSF. There may be an adapter kit available for your cooler (check the Cooler Master web site).

... but also remember that all of the RyZen 3000 series chips come with a cooler, so you may be better off just using that instead of trying to migrate the old 212. (If you had a Noctua D14 or equivalent I would say find an adapter, but the stock cooler should perform similarly to the 212 afaik.)

K-L-Waster wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

AM4 heatsink retention mechanism is incompatible with previous HSF mountings; this could be an issue for re-using your existing HSF. There may be an adapter kit available for your cooler (check the Cooler Master web site).

... but also remember that all of the RyZen 3000 series chips come with a cooler, so you may be better off just using that instead of trying to migrate the old 212. (If you had a Noctua D14 or equivalent I would say find an adapter, but the stock cooler should perform similarly to the 212 afaik.)

Yes, AMD has also stepped up their game on the stock coolers. Back in the AM2/AM3 days my SOP was to toss the stock cooler straight into the spares pile and mount a 3rd party HSF; the stock coolers were pretty bad. Since the waning days of AM3+ their stock coolers have been much improved.

Plazmodeus wrote:

Question #1 - i9900k vs. Ryzen9 3900x. I'm leaning Intel, despite the fact that Ryzen has more cores. I must admit that I am still spooky about AMD chipsets (ever since crappy VIA Athlon chipsets), and I am eyeing a possible Thunderbolt drop-in card to attach a DAS to. I've read lots of reviews and it seems like I can't make a bad choice here. Anyone have any reason that I should go AMD?

Speaking as someone who has been running Intel almost exclusively for years... if I was building a system today, I'd be going RyZen. The only areas where Intel has a clear advantage are ones that rely on pure clockspeed. For the types of work you describe, having more cores is likely to be much more beneficial than a clockspeed advantage. Since you can get 12 cores from AMD for the same price as 8 from Intel, frankly I think choosing Intel for Photoshop and Premiere work would be doing yourself a disservice.

Thanks very much for the responses. I must admit that I'm being swayed to Ryzen. There is pretty much a critical consensus in its favour. This article from Puget suggests that Intel's Quicksync H264 acceleration makes it a bit more competitive.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... ries-1535/

But beside that, Ryzen seems like it might be the way to go. Does anyone have any recommendations for decent, workstation-ish mobos? What about RAM, do timing or RAM speeds matter as much with Ryzen?

Gamer's Nexus had some good content on motherboards, check out this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuyuS04lD4o

And there was a discussion on memory speed in the Overclocking forum here earlier in the week.

https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic ... 6&t=122125

just brew it! wrote:

Personally I would be inclined to stick with Asus for the mobo; they have rarely let me down.

AM4 heatsink retention mechanism is incompatible with previous HSF mountings; this could be an issue for re-using your existing HSF. There may be an adapter kit available for your cooler (check the Cooler Master web site).

@jbi, actually Asus had X370 boards that could use either AM3+ or AM4 CPU cooler bracket positioning. Pretty nifty for bringing forward a working tower cooler from 2012. (In no way am I saying jbi is/was wrong, just adding on to the tidbits. I have no idea if Asus or others continued this with B450 or X470 or X570)

I recommend threadripper 2 highly.
I run linux mint 19.2, kernel 5.2.8, and nvidia driver 430.

I had a lot of expectations with my build and I got everything I paid for.

NOTE:
Beware the MSI gaming pro carbon ac motherboard. The BIOS is very poor. It will not post with a TR2 cpu installed without an emergency flash update (you need a 16gb thumb with FAT with the latest BIOS renamed to MSI.ROM. flash usb slot on back panel. flash button on back panel).
Also, it UNDERLOCKS the ram to TR1 speeds of 2133. This lead to non-stop crashing in linux, the TR2 must have a ram speed of 2933. You can go into the OC settings and set this manualy. There is no need to change the voltage, timings, or anything else. Just change the speed.
Because of this you MUST buy at least ram of 3000mhz or better for the TR2 cpu.

Here is my build:
Antec High Current Pro HCP-1300 PLATINUM 1300W ATX 12V Power Supply PSU
AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper 2920X 12-Core, 24-Thread
StormShield cpu liquid cooler with 2 fans
MSI X399 GAMING PRO CARBON AC SocketTR4
G.SKILL Sniper X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB)
Corsair air 540 case
XFX AMD Radeon Pro Duo 8GB R9 Liquid Cooled Dual GPU Video Card
Nvidia 980 TI OC 6gb
(2) 4TB 2.5” hard drives
(1) Intel SSD 1TB


why i upgraded:
1) to get rid of intel. MSI wont use anything else but intel on laptops
2) to do gpu passthru without all the hassle of rebooting into a special kernel/ramdisk which was caused by having nvidia optimus on a laptop
2a) get rid of nvidia optimus! I hated that ****!

4) speed. wanted to speed up the intense operations like zip, video encoding, and other things.
5) didnt want to spend $5000 on the next msi laptop which was poorer than a desktop build for $2500....by a mile
6) usb speeds were crap on laptops and hard drive speeds
7) laptop was always super dangerous hot. wanted cool under heavy loads for long periods of time



what amazed me so far:
1) compile speeds .. greatly reduced...minutes instead of an hour
2) zip/unzip speeds 5gb file with no internal compression zipped in 40 secs....
3) usb speeds - stunning improvement - used the “3.1 gen 2 type A port” with a thumbdrive
4) ffmepg blueray re-encode 4gb file h.264 mp4 format 22m15secs 118 fps
5) sata speeds - at least double from 105mb/sec to 250mb/sec and even 500mb/sec
6) cool - handbrake 80% usage on all cores for 22mins... temp =43c
7) QEMU: runs windows 10 and linux at the same time without any suffering on either side
7a) qemu:Nothing needed but to turn svm on in the bios. secureboot is off by default, legacy is set by default (i think), iommu is auto which works fine.
8a) qemu: windows 7 needs a driver for the ryzen cpu. windows 10 does not. i have switched to using windows 10 for qemu.