New main machine build

[Doug Coulter]

Due to the premature demise of a fairly new NUC, I needed (well...wanted) a new "main squeeze" for the living room, used for the day to day stuff around here, from entertainment to sysadmin to programming....
I found a long time ago that it's far cheaper to get the good stuff once, than get crap, then have less left over to buy it again when it fails or upgrade it. I wanted to add some better video editing capability along the way, and it seems like I might be able to support this electricity wise, if I'm careful. So I went for some really decent specs. Since Intel has browned me off, and not really made any serious performance improvement of late - my 4th gen stuff is almost as quick as the 7th was before it fried, and AMD has improved not only performance, but mips/watt - this is my first AMD box.
It's a ryzen 7 3700x, 16 gigs ram (for now), 1 terabyte nvme SSD, an RTX 2060 gpu, and a nice new case and power supply. Pretty high-woo stuff - there is room at the top, but double the cost for 15% more performance is not what engineers do.

A lot of the parts choices were influenced by "what can I get at all" at the moment - the new b550 chipset mobo's are scarce and so on - and in this case I was spared the crazy increase in power supply prices as I had one from a build long ago I never got around to...an EVGA 500 watt one does fine. I'll put links to the rest below. I'm not saying these are the best or the best per buck, just what I was willing to compromise on because even here, some of the parts took a month to get shipped.

TL;DR - it all works, it's a screamer, I can get the power from the wall down to ~55w at idle, and I'm only getting going on that, and I'm just now spending the couple of days it takes to get all my favored applications and basic stuff put in.
I'm used to having it all in this one domain, and by golly....it's gonna happen - it IS happening. Every cool tool will be here, and that's a lotta tools. For grins I just rendered a ~ 1 minute video, with a few minor efx, extreme compression (which definitely slows things down) - and it took 4 seconds. It would have taken 90+ on my 7th gen intel NUC. I can live with that.

This is going to be a work in progress for some days. I'm posting from it now. It's just going to take awhile to find and install all the cool stuff I use, a lot of which isn't in the repos for easy automation, but some guy wrote a cool tool and you get it from their website and deal with it....I should and probably will, detail a few of those in some software thread up here. Some of them are really useful to me, best in class, and not that well known out there, so I'll pass it on.
Some are probably just my quirky preferences, but you get whatcha get.





/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// The parts:
The Case: A corsair "quiet" model. It's not bad. Their fans are quiet, but the noise from the stock "wraith prism" cooler shipped with the cpu is quite noticeable.

The CPU: I got the lower TDP version of the Ryzen 7 here. More on peak clocks later, but those last few percent usually cost you both when using them - and at idle. This seems like the better choice.

The RAM: Crucial 3200 ddr4. "Only" 16 gigs for starters. What I could get just then, the faster stuff wasn't in stock anywhere. While I have had an SSD of this brand go up in smoke (literally, it did the latchup thing and fried), no issues with their ram. It works.

The GPU: An RTX 2060. I didn't really want an overclocked version nor do I have brand-tropism for MSI, but it works and is fine. I'm planning on putting the clocks down again, I don't quite need this performance level(!). I can't believe I said that, but damn, this thing is fast. I got it for the video encoder, I'm not a gamer so a lot is wasted unless I get into CUDA programming.

The all-important MOBO: Gigabyte b550 aorus master. HIgh dollar, again, what was going to ship soonest. I have to say, it's not actually a horrible value, I'm IMPRESSED. The thing weighs more than some of my earlier whole machines! No skimping here! An important feature is that this line has the most efficient and coolest running cpu power setup going.
I did have an issue with Mint Mate 20 not recognizing the ethernet controller, but that was easily fixed as detailed elsewhere here.

[Bob Reite]

I've always have had good luck with Gigabyte motherboards. Both the Intel and AMD flavors.

[Jerry]

My ild i7-3960x mobo and cpu died the other month. Ended up just getting a i5-9600k and a MSI motherboard to go with it with 16gigs of DDR4. Bestbuy had a package deal so it worked out. Still running my GTX1080 but it is starting to show it's age since I do game and picked up a 4k tv that I game on. Ill probably pick up a RTX2080 before Cyberpunk 2077 comes out this fall. It looks like the next gen cards are not coming out till next year.

[Doug Coulter]

Interesting difference in luck, Jerry. I've now had nearly 100% of the intel NUCs just crap the bed here - and in many years of PC's - since 286 boxes - that had never happened before. Sure, I've had drives go bad, and memory get flakey, but never "this is just dead". Since that amounts to a few K$...I thought I'd move on and try something else. My own experiences point to intel not really making any gains from 4th gen up to 7th - only faster ram and nvme, really - not that you'd know from pricing - and amd's gains touted by pretty much all reviewers - including mips/watt - said, let's give them a whirl. Early days but I'm very happy so far. Sadly, the included cooler works, but is noisy compared to the rest, and it bothers me. Sadly-er, is that the price of the noctua cooler has gone up hugely, day by day on Amazon. Hmmm. I thought we'd see inflation pretty soon, but..The price of Noctua bare fans is also going up, but not as dramatically, so maybe it's just that one vendor.

Let us know how the new intel stuff works out. As for the NUCs, I've rebuilt a couple where the issue was just the heatsink grease failing to be grease - but that doesn't always work, and one has just gone dead again. And that pretty new one - 2019 vintage, just failing to post at all...nope, no more of that - they don't give those away.

I've heard all kinds of crazy stuff about Nvidia's next generation, re timing (all over the place) and power consumption (huge). It'll be fun to watch. I chose the 2060 because that's the lowest power use one that has the fast nvenc encoder hardware...I'm downloading DaVinci right now, and we'll see how much use it makes of the other parts - see if I messed up.

Maybe I'll have to have a spin at CUDA programming. Even this one has quite a few cores.

At any rate, I checked in on this thread to upload the Realtek driver because, why not? I know this one works, and backup is backup - just in case.

So here it is.

r8125-9.003.05.tar.bz2

Driver for realtek r8125

(67.31 KiB) Downloaded 224 times

[Jerry]

The new card is higher, but thats mostly compared to the recent 10 and 20 series cards using very little power than the previous versions. I replaced my two 780's in SLI with a 1080 and got way better performance and saved a lot of power.

[Doug Coulter]

I've seen things like this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidi ... ll-we-know. 350w TDP.
My 2060 says it can hit 160. But doing mundane things like youtube it's more like 10-16 (claimed by nvidia-smi - not sure that's true given how warm it gets).
Copied from that program's output:

Code: Select all

    Power Readings
        Power Management            : Supported
        Power Draw                  : 14.57 W
        Power Limit                 : 160.00 W
        Default Power Limit         : 160.00 W
        Enforced Power Limit        : 160.00 W
        Min Power Limit             : 125.00 W
        Max Power Limit             : 160.00 W



Doing no video, just doing this post. I haven't measured it during the short time it's thrashing when I'm rendering a video edit yet.

350 is pretty stiff - cooking power or similar to that used by a big Marshall tube type guitar amp head.

The nvidia-smi program is supposed to come with their driver and also work on windows, this is from linux.

[Jerry]

Ill believe that when I see it. Its all conjecture at this point.

Either way I have a 1200W power supply so I am good.

[Doug Coulter]

Yup, all conjecture fer sure. Even with the lower one I've got - it's using a tiny fraction of the top power limit most all the time. If I'm to believe what it reports, the CPU is a much worse offender at idle.
Some people set up underclock/undervolt on them for that reason, but while this mobo allows for "something like" it seems that it's a choice between fixed manual numbers that apply all the time, and
the dynamic adjustment it has if you leave things alone (variable volts and clock speed). Which latter just about has to be better for my use-case.
I don't have power company power, so huge machine consumption is a problem for other than the power converter in the box! I do a lot of screen time just fooling around out there and finding learning resources. The sun isn't up for a lot of that time. When it is, not an issue, but then I should be running big machines, welding, charging the car and so on.

I suppose i could set up a raspberry pi or something for that, but switching all the peripherals around is a hassle. The pi4 is usable as a surfboard, I used one for that while I was waiting for these parts.

[Doug Coulter]

In the immortal words of Bill "Grumpy" Jenkins - purty don't make it run good.

Cable management? I've heard of it.

ProTip - the strings are on the fan clips on that huge Noctua cooler, it lets you R&R the fan when the fit
is too tight for fingers, as here. It was easy to do then. Overkill, but it's nearly silent as it's loafing.

You mean there are actually people who care what it looks like inside?

Running really stable so far, even DaVinci Resolve is super fast. NIce.
I added a couple more tb of laptop drive to hold raw videos and transcodings to make them work with various programs.
Just happened to have one left over from an old LOT pi replacement.