Gadgetory

look at this graph look at it do you feel the pain this is the trendline price of a kit of memory and this graph alone is the killer of our PC build lists these bills guides used to be a staple for the website and we occasionally bring them over to video format but memory prices and GPU prices had months of simultaneous insane inflation so to speak they were ballooning like crazy from supply shortages on both sides this made PC building difficult to afford with GPU prices stabilizing and memory on sale still higher than what it used to be but we thought we'd put together a high-end thread river system and see how it does this is the first PC build we've published in months aside from the gift build we did for the zdg the patreon backer but we're trying to publish a few during the holiday season links where everything will be in the description below as always this coverage is brought to you by ifixit.com and their protec toolkit i fix it as refreshing their protec toolkit in time for the holidays you can find a link in the description below to the protec toolkit and other toolkits that iFixit sells we find the protec and essentials kits to be the most useful for DIY enthusiasts so a couple things here this is a pc build pc builds are a minefield of everyone being smarter than you that's just how it is all the cuy seen the comments I've seen what you people say to Paul and Kyle and all of them and it's not new to us either you we've been posting PC builds on the site for I don't know five years at this point and the thing is for this build it's a couple items of note one we're only using parts we have to its build that I'm going to use for some production rendering and that we can apply towards things like for example blender rendering and animations things like that video compression h.264 compression of our video library that we store for b-roll these are real use cases that we have so I don't care what you would put in the system instead that's not really the point the point is this is what we built and I'm going to show you how it performs and if you can do it better great do it I guess so yeah PC builds this one is a system that we actually have used for it's got a thread over 1958 go through all the parts and some benchmarks in a minute and originally I was going to include the 1920 X but the price is right when we were looking at starting this build the prices fell to where the 1950 X more-or-less became 1920 x in price drop $200 to 800 bucks and I we we own these parts already about for purposes of creating a list within a certain budget originally the goal was 1920 X we went with 1950 because the $800 is now the motherboard is a gigabyte X 399 des ignore e board or designer if you prefer the bastardized version and it's got a kid of g.skill 30 200 megahertz memory at 32 gigabytes because you need the memory for this type of workload we threw in the Asus 1080i Strix it did just win one of our awards in the GPU award show we did for Best Overall cooler design on a 1080i and then there's plenty of options for other things as well but this is what we went with so to address a few obvious points straight away yes you can do a cheaper power supply we have a/c Sonic Prime in here I like the power supply and it's reliable it's not going to have any problems as all kinds of protections in it so we used it it's going to do production so it needs to be reliable but yeah you can definitely cut cost in a few places we're aware but let's go through the benchmarks and then you know if you want to shave off couple hundred bucks by choosing cheaper parts you could absolutely do that and in the article that's linked in the description below I will include suggested alternatives if you would prefer to use something cheaper than what we did because there are cheaper options but we might not have had them here or for my purposes I didn't want to use them in a system that I was building for whatever different reason than you might be so the first part is the 1950 X we originally were going to do this with the thread Ripper of 1920 X as noted but this was a good deal so it didn't really increase our budget target but it got us a better CPU for our intended render tasks for blender workloads on the CPU all that really matters is threads frequency definitely helps but high thread count is our first priority the 1950 X solves this it's also power of fish so that's a bonus and it's pretty easy to cool in general $800 the 1950 ex is an especially good deal for a high on production PC right now this isn't something that's built for games really you'd be better off with insult for that still even the i9 platform if you're really serious about regular gaming that high frame rates for example but that's not why you buy thirty-two thread processor so to catch everyone up on thread Ripper in its use cases with this amount of threads one of the issues around launch with communication with AMD was we basically asked them hey we can CUDA accelerate all of this stuff and it's faster so what's the use case here why should we care and they didn't really have an answer for us but we found a couple on our own one of those is with rendering blender files there's another type of rendering that we started doing where if we design for example a high quality 3d model to eventually turn it into an orthographic image to put on a shirt like that's convenient like this one exactly like this one so we designed stuff like this in blender and then it's 3d model but you do an orthographic view and you basically get what appears to be a two-dimensional image so for something like that we've found that the CPUs actually make a lot of sense in blender and that's because the tiles render so quickly that you basically just want as many tiles in a flight at once as possible and so the 32 thread CPU helps there so that's a real use case where the CPU can start to edge out the cuda accelerated stuff another use case is h.264 so we talked about this previously where our video compression scripts to shrink down all the b-roll and stuff like that is done with h.264 encoding we use handbrake which is like a wrapper for ffmpeg and you could do that with CUDA as well but I mean our script works great it's fairly lossless as far as the human eye can tell and it runs on the CPU you could do to accelerate it again but I mean if it's reliable and it works and it's like a business critical operation you really don't want it screw with it so that's another good use case for thread Ripper though is stated in terms of benchmarks we previously tested the 1950 X blender and found the performance results that we can put on the screen now these are not surprisingly just outside of the 79 to 80 X Y performance range at $2,100 but the 19 to the X is among the chart-topping CPUs it's fairly affordable and while comparatively to the other h EDT stuff anyway and it's doing well here we're also using in terms of video cards the 1080 TI Strix for this build specifically but the plan is to put a couple more cards in here and then you could use it as a render box for GPU rendering if you want to do that instead this 1080i Strix one our best overall award in the 1080i category to briefly recap the Strix version of the 1080 T is has the best noise to thermal performance that we've found on an air-cooled card this year and it manages to maintain proportionally lo MOSFET theorem and G V temperatures even with the noise normalize output a 40 DBA the Strix card was only ever beaten by liquid cooled cards and the Strix requires less overall real estate internally while still maintaining competitive temperatures this means higher clocks Pascal does drop clocks once you go above 60 C and it also means that we can keep the operating noise levels a bit more reasonable on the build we're using the gigabyte X 399 does ignore a board for this build this is the first time we've used the gigabyte board for thread Ripper up until now it's all been done on the $500 Asus Zenith extreme gigabytes board comes in $100 cheaper but sticks with an eight phase-- vrm that uses 50 amp IR 35:56 power stages with a familiar ir35 201 voltage controller gigabyte is using a three plus two phase memory via Rama with 40 amp power status for the ddr4 voltage which is more than enough for what we're doing the heatsink is somewhat thin so that's way better than most the artsy heat sinks that are out right now sadly so we can give some credit for that it's not my deal Finn density but it's better than a fat block of aluminum so whatever give-and-take I guess the airflow afforded by the top mounted CLC amply cools the vrm anyway and ignoring the more obvious BRM features we also like the insane amount of fan headers that go I put on this board because you put them to use there are seven total fan headers all four 10 PWM and all seven are on the border of the motherboard which makes them a bit easier to hide and route the cables behind things rather than over things the other boards on the market a lot of them do have headers crowns between EPS 12-volt headers or behind the video card which is a pretty small and insignificant but otherwise noteworthy feature where gigabyte makes those more accessible the gigabyte BIOS needs a serious improvement though it's mostly navigable but we'd like to see your goodbyes add more options at a top level rather than bury everything in sub levels and we'd like to see them move away from the slide in menus on the bottom and the sides which really just get in the way more than anything memories next this is a bit rough right now we want to use quad channel for this machine so we need at least four sticks and we're gonna be going with 32 gigabytes unfortunately there's no good way to get around spending $400 or more on a 32 gigabyte kit of memory from retailer we're using stuff we already have as noted but for a new build you're really getting kind of screwed on the memory rather than thinking of the $200 discount on the 1950 X as savings think of it more as your extra budget for memory that'll help neutralize the feeling of being raked through the coals for overpriced DRAM 3200 megahertz is enough for what we're doing and going beyond that will largely net diminishing returns given the tremendous price increase so here's the power supply this is admittedly where we went a bit higher end than necessary on the system we recently started developing a serious appreciation for the high end power supplies like the EVGA T 2 that we've been using and in our own production machines high NPS use have four years now saved us from short circuits over current power surges bond runtimes are afforded by the high NPS use even under abusive loads so for anyone who needs reliability it is actually worth the investment to go with something higher-end sure you can drop down and get a 80 to 100 dollar power supply and be fine yes we know you're way better as a system builder and everyone applauds your comment but this is what we wanted to use specifically for a high end build production machine sees onyx prime series has good options between 80 plus gold and titanium at depend on how crazy overkill you want to go it's got options in the 850 to 1000 watt range we'll be talking about power numbers in a second though 850 watts would be enough for this particular build and would let you operate within on 115 volts from the wall you'd be well within your 50 to 60 percent peak efficiency range if you wanted that and if you're doing multi-gpu for rendering configurations you'd want a higher power supply wattage obviously well let you make that call though this will particularly hinge on whether or not you're using the 19 to the X and 1080i is simultaneously to render or do whatever or whether one is doing all of the work on its own for power consumption and using the titanium Class C sonic unit just because that's when we have it's going to be a bit more efficient obviously but perhaps needlessly so when compared to the acceptable efficiency of gold we found these numbers for Power on the screen because they are titanium rated they're pretty close to 1 to 1 draw in terms of efficiency with this build and a high performance mode and with stock clocks we're drawing 115 Watts idle that's again high performance mode you can drop it down to 72 watts multi-threaded Cinebench 128 wise single threaded to 74 watts with a single CPU instance of blender and spinning off to blender instances one on the GPU and one on the CPU rendering from both ends of the animation that gets us to 425 watts so say you've got 300 frames you're under 1 to 150 and 151 to 300 and that's what we get there we've done things like this in the past when we needed to get things rendered as quickly as possible but couldn't fit more cards in the system and we would set the CBT render some of the frames and let the GP has handled the rest at 425 watts for peak load we have more room to work with for the overclock so later overclock in the CPU it's a 4 gigahertz all core at one point 3 5 volts and then the GPU to a plus 75 mega Hertz offset plus 500 megahertz core with power target maxed we ended up at 580 watts for the dual CP plus GB render and that increased us by 40 watts for the gaming test with total war Warhammer and increased us by 130 watts for Cinebench keep in mind that a 4 gigahertz overclock on the 19th of the X will sometimes deliver worse performance well and that would be in cases like gaming because games can leverage XFR that goes beyond 4 gigahertz so the 4 gigahertz all core we actually have worse single and quad thread performance but better all thread performance just depends on what you're doing we chose the thermal take view so d1 for the enclosure we've worked with a few full towers this year like the be quiet dark Bass Pro 900 white edition what we liked the view 70 wanted for this build the case is surprisingly well ventilated - thanks to the large gaps around all the panels and accommodates our ni max like three sixty millimeter radiator pretty well you wouldn't think that it's good in terms of cooling but if you look closely you can see that there's giant 1-inch gaps between every single panel including the side panels so that solves that problem we also relocated some things in this case so although it's mostly sufficient for airflow with the stock setup we had up moving the fan from the rear over to the front relocating it so we could have 2 140 millimeter rain fans in the front it would be a bit more symmetrical that way and then we install the blackout on zxp fan in the back that cost you a couple bucks this was for three primary reasons one it looks better so that's easy - we want it to feed more air straight into the GPUs as if you're planning to add multiple cards for rendering for example to accomplish them more quickly then the extra fans of the front will definitely help with that three we've got three exhaust fans set up with the wick tech unit so we needed to make sure that there was no suffocation in terms of the unit's ability to pull air in from the front and also make sure it doesn't steal the air from the GPUs so the case makes it a damn heavy build thanks to all the tempered glass but this thing shouldn't really be moving once it's in place anyway it's gonna be doing work for the cooler we're using that 360 millimetre lick tech unit we could have gone with the Noctua Nhu 14s but we wanted two things one the ability to scale up the GPU configuration to fit as many cards as possible for rendering which means needing slot clearance and two lower noise normalized performance the lake tech cooler is expensive though so anyone who can get by on air or its going for a single card config would do pretty well actually better off with the Nhu 14s from nock - it's much cheaper it performs not that much worse and it's a perfectly good cooler just a matter of does it work for your use case as our thermal test results show they're both good coolers they can adequately cool the CPU even when overclocked lynktec though is high-quality we took it apart and it's got a well-built block that's easily refilled so we've liked it thus far we've been pretty impressed with the lake taxi our fours overall quality and honestly speaking frankly here we really don't really attribute quality to enter max units but the tr4 ones are pretty good they've this is the best that they've done in a long time and they're outperforming their competition who want with smaller cold plates plus the go blade actually has micro fins all the way across so animatics job well done on this one here's a thorough Oliver's time chart for the leaf tech cooler under an intense load in this abuse everyone case for this workload we were torturing the system with a simultaneous prime95 ABX load and a moderate GPU workload mean we're throwing off pretty close to the maximum heat potential in this case even still we're at around fifty six point eight degrees Celsius forty die and the GPU again was running a workload as well so it's not just the CPU here and the CPU is perfectly fine in terms of thermals it has no problems whatsoever we're actually going to be using network storage for this so talking about storage your options would probably be something like a raid configuration you might do with something like a 3-way WD red raid setup for something smaller and cheaper data redundancy and speed requirements vary entirely based on the user so that's up to you but we've used WD Reds for raid 5 in production systems in the past and are currently actually and that works for a limited drive bays or a limited cost setups raid 10 might be good for a machine like this though we're just gonna be running off of an SSD for the OS and then run a 10 gigabit cable to our local server so that solves all of our storage concerns instantly so that's the build there's some of the benchmarks we have a project of converting the office basically to a 10 gigabit set up it might make a video on it the plan there is going to include compressing a bunch of videos on the NASS remotely from another system so something like this it'll actually utilize the threads on this machine and then access the files over Ethernet compress them we delete the old ones and it really improves our process the machine will be torn down after it because I need all of these parts for actual benchmarking that's the reason we keep them around it's not to make a bunch of computers it's so that we can benchmark them as things iterate and drivers come out and new tasks emerge and things like that so it will get torn down but that's kind of that intended to use case for this there are lots of things to improve if if you really were going to go buy and build something yourself from scratch I would for example the fan setup I like with the two intake and one exhaust so you'd want to buy a fan for the exhaust if you do the liquid cooler setup then probably I just run it out of lower rpm you could save money by going with a 240 millimeter if you want to keep the liquid cooling but the 360 looks pretty good in this case so and they're not that distant in price and it is technically better if you want with air you might run into issues with blocking off the top PCIe slot but if you're only doing a couple GPUs that can be lowered down then that's not a big deal one concern is with MDOT 2 devices if you're running multi-gpu here and there under heavy load from blender rendering on all of them the problem is with MDOT 2 devices you're gonna have them buried under those cards so they will incinerate and the flash doesn't care the flash actually likes to run at a higher temperature when it's active it should be stored at a cold temperature but run at a higher temperature the controller cares controller might throttle you if it really starts burning from the video cards so that's a concern that might be a legitimate reason to I don't know go with you dot well can't really do that you just go with different interface basically or try and figure out how to get a fan on those it would be my concern but yeah power spot can be a bit cheaper the the motherboards fine he could do a little cheaper but this I wouldn't want to you're buying a thousand dollar CPU what's another 400 on a board at this point and yeah I think that's most of it really just storage is up to you so that's it for this one if you want to see more subscribe because we're gonna be doing a bit more work around holiday seasons when I try to do a bunch of logistics and office-like upgrade or web server upgrade things like that as always patreon.com slash gamers nexus helps out directly store dock Cameron's Nexus down at the paper shirt like this one now that you know how it was made and blender and I'll see you all next time