New AM5 build just over $2k

Forums › Desktop computing › New AM5 build just over $2k

Swamphen

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#306048 23-Jun-2023 15:25

I definitely paid an "aesthetic tax" to get white components, but I'm happy with it. I know I could have saved a bit of money going with am4/ddr4, but I was upgrading from a 10-year-old am3 motherboard I had upgraded incrementally until the end of that socket's life and I'm hoping this time I can do the same without running into EOL parts. Comments (even if you think I made bad decisions) welcome. I wasn't sure about the GPU but prices seem so weird right now and it seemed like good value compared to Nvidia's offerings (at NZ prices, at least).

Case: Lianli Lancool 216

PSU: Coolermaster V Gold 750W

GPU: Rx7600 8gb

Mobo: ASRock B650 ProRS

CPU: Ryzen 5 7600

Ram: G.skill 2x16gb 5600 DDR5

sd: Crucial 500gb pcie 4.0

$2078 all up, $1499 before the gpu (I was upgrading from a GTX 970 lol). The processor/gpu also came with two free games (RE4 and Jedi Fallen Order), which I probably would have paid full $$ for anyways but are nice to have.

The only annoying this is I have 3 old fat hdds and the lian li's cage only holds 2, despite there being mountains of space, so I should probably figure out a better solution than just tucking the other one into the bottom of the case.

I am also now only realizing how much of a headache all those different RGB devices can be. Any advice besides "turn them of" (current solution) and "Wait for OpenPleb to fix it"?

timmmay

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#3094132 23-Jun-2023 15:52

That's pretty tidy, airflow and temperatures should be pretty good. I have a solid case with no glass for my 5600 AM4 because the flashing lights would drive me crazy.

Qazzy03

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#3094140 23-Jun-2023 16:33

It looks nice, white isn't my favourite but it looks tidy as and works as a theme.
Personally I dislike RBG but that's because my PC is in the bedroom.

The GPU is a great option and a solid upgrade from the 970.
I got the 6600xt back at launch in 2021 for $699 and your 7600 is cheaper and out preforms mine as an FYI.

Edit, I can't read good lol.

cruxis

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#3094194 23-Jun-2023 17:59

In for another 10 years that AM5 👍

fe31nz

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#3094262 23-Jun-2023 23:28

Was it just for cost reasons that you went with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD? The speed difference between the good PCIe 4.0 SSDs and the good PCIe 5.0 ones is huge!

The obvious answer to having three 3.5" hard drives and only two slots for them is to replace one of them with a new HD that is bigger than both (and preferably also faster). When you can afford it. There are some very fast enterprise class drives out there, and the Seagate Exos ones I have been buying are actually cheaper than their lower performing Red drives. I love watching data copy between two of these enterprise class drives at over 200 Mbytes/s. In the mean time, there does look to be lots of space at the bottom of the case, so if you can feed some cable ties through the grillwork over the power supply, you could tie a drive in place there. It would affect the airflow though, but given all the other fans it should not be a worry except for the power supply itself.

Another option I use on my PVR case (3 internal drive slots only) is to put three more drives out the back of the case standing on the wooden table it sits on - I just left an empty slot in the case open (no PCIe on the motherboard behind it), and pulled out a SATA power cable and three longer SATA data cables and plugged the drives in. I have some cloth underneath them to dampen out the vibrations. That same system also has several external drive mounts connected to it - a quad mount on eSATA, a single mount on eSATA, a dual mount on USB 3 and a quad mount on USB 3. So in total I am running three drives internally and 14 externally. The external mounts can be powered off most of the time and powered on only when needed. I am using Ubuntu on that box, so it is easy to unmount drives before powering them off. It is rather more difficult to do that in Windows, but not impossible.

Swamphen

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#3094293 24-Jun-2023 09:55

Thanks! I feel way better about my decisions, especially the gpu, seeing everyone's comments. With the crypto stuff, I feel like I waited SO long for gpu prices to come down, by the time they finally did I was tired of waiting.

fe31nz:

Was it just for cost reasons that you went with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD? The speed difference between the good PCIe 4.0 SSDs and the good PCIe 5.0 ones is huge!

It was completely for cost reasons. The cheapest 5.0 NVMe drive I looked at was something like $350, compared to the $60 for the one I bought. When(if) the prices come down, or one of my other drives craps out, that's definitely a good upgrade option! I did originally have a 2.5" sata for the OS, but I kept it in the old build so I had a "complete" computer I swapped for a crate so his kid could play minecraft/fortnight/"school". I'm definitely noticing a huge jump in speed between the NVME 4.0 and the old one already! (though that might also be coming from an fx cpu or ddr3 ram. it's upgrades all around lol).

I could imagine keeping track of 14(!!) external drives. I have a hard enough time finding what I put where and my 7TB of drives are maybe 50% backups of each other (and 10% random folders named "sort this later").

(Geekzone logged me out and ate my reply, so I had to retype it, and may have missed information, sorry).

Jase2985

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#3094308 24-Jun-2023 11:01

fe31nz:

Was it just for cost reasons that you went with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD? The speed difference between the good PCIe 4.0 SSDs and the good PCIe 5.0 ones is huge!

when would you notice that speed difference?

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fe31nz

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#3094563 24-Jun-2023 21:50

Jase2985:

fe31nz:

Was it just for cost reasons that you went with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD? The speed difference between the good PCIe 4.0 SSDs and the good PCIe 5.0 ones is huge!

when would you notice that speed difference?

Double the speed? Yes, you would notice that. Less so on Windows though, as it still waits for strange things other than the disk at times. On Linux you see the full speed of your SSD and it is wonderful to run from a PCIe 4.0 one at full speed as I am now doing. I am sure that PCIe 5.0 would be even better.

Jase2985

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#3094588 25-Jun-2023 07:44

fe31nz:

Double the speed? Yes, you would notice that. Less so on Windows though, as it still waits for strange things other than the disk at times. On Linux you see the full speed of your SSD and it is wonderful to run from a PCIe 4.0 one at full speed as I am now doing. I am sure that PCIe 5.0 would be even better.

when would you notice it, give actual examples? maybe when copying large files, but would need a second device on the same machine to achieve that. almost everything thing you do except very niche stuff you could never tell if you were on a pcie 3 ssd or a pcie 5 drive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD2pn1_jWPU

There is barely any difference in load times and certainly not 2x the speed as you claim, a few seconds at most, which you would hardly notice in most instances.

https://youtu.be/jnMMtbVP0ps?t=240

Has a more in-depth rundown on performance and why

Certainly not worth 250% the price at this point in time

fe31nz

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#3094875 26-Jun-2023 01:42

I do not do gaming, so speed tests for Windows games are pretty irrelevant for me. It looks like you do not get much speedup with Windows games by doubling the SSD speed. But when I compile the kernel or the TBS drivers I use for my DVB cards, I do see the full speed of the SSD. In those cases, the CPU is using all cores and even then it takes a decent CPU to outrun the SSD speed with my fast PCIe 4.0 SSDs (WD Black SN850 1 Tbyte). Watching a kernel compile does show that all cores are not at 100%, so it is I/O bound, and the build times are directly proportional to the SSD speed. So it looks like the Windows game software is waiting on other things than using the SSD drive, and hence is not actually benefiting from the faster SSDs. Windows itself seems to also have the same problem - Ubuntu seems to speed up in proportion to the SSD speed, but Windows does not. Windows is faster on faster SSDs, but not nearly as fast as you would expect. Which is annoying as I was hoping for more when I upgraded my Windows PC recently to a slightly higher specification than my Ubuntu box.

Swamphen

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#3096201 29-Jun-2023 13:01

For what it's worth, my heaviest non-gaming use of my PC is in R (large amounts of data but individual tokens/files are small). I noticed a huge difference in start-up time with the new ssd drive (as expected), but code that does a lot of reads/writes to disk doesn't seem to run noticeably faster compared to the older samsung 2.5" ssd.

I don't actually use the ssd for games, either, because I can't be bothered deleting/redownloading things to conserve space.

I appreciate the discussion here, I'm learning a lot!