Perhpas time for an upgrade ?

[Fathr]

After having had major issues with windows on my present build, I think it's about time for me to shift to newer components that are probably better supported in windows 10. I installed Ubuntu for work on the machine after having done mem tests, cpu tests and everything else I could throw at it, and since then I havent had a single out of the blue reboot (which happend 3 times a day on monday untill I said f... that) so the machine is still functional and it isnt a hardware error which I feared, as Ubuntu has been rock solid since then.

Presently the machine is running with:

I7-4970K

16 GB 2400 Mhz DDR3

Asus Rog VII Gene

A couple of SSD's

MSI 970 GTX



Now since the machine is about 66 months old since I purchased it and since, there's been a pretty hefty development since then, I am looking at getting this build:

Ryzen 9 - 3900X

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero (x570)

G.Skill Ripjaws V 2x16 GB DDR4 3600 Mhz

2x 970 EVO Plus mm2 500 gb drives to be setup in a raid0 config for a total of 1TB

Noctua NH-D15 black edition cooler

MSI 970 GTX (I mostly play stuff like wow, ESO or perhaps the new MMO by Amazon comming out in about a month, so I dont think I'll need a beefed up GPU but the age might be showing, since Im running with a 4k 37" display 100hz as my primary monitor, so perhaps a 5700 Radeon or 2060/2070 GTX card might come in handy down the line).



The new machine I'll use for a bit of gaming and regular pc work, so yeah the CPU is a bit over the top, but I also long for having the necesarry ressources to do what ever I feel like including Hyper-V setup, and using it for my new test environment, for mass deployment of VM's etc.



My question is this:

Should I go for 4x 16Gb rams for the get go, so I get a 4 channels setup from the get go or will 2 channels be sufficient for starters or will it negatively impact the 3900X ? Also I'm not sure about the Raid0 thing how much that will bring in terms of performance increase, but the nvme's are not that expensive, and the board supports it so I figure why not ? So any comments or suggestions for this new build would be greatly appreciated.

[Temp name]

What do you actually use the PC for? "Regular PC work" isn't super descriptive. How many VMs would you run? How often?
What's your budget?


I can tell you right off the bat, that you shouldn't get Samsung drives unless you're doing mission-critical stuff, as in, your job depends on it. Sabrent/Corsair/Intel all make cheaper options. As for Raid0, just.. Don't. NVMe drives are already way faster than you could need for anything other than high-res/High-fps video, or if you regularly find yourself moving around singular files in the 10+gb range between drives/computers. So the speed gains won't be noticeable, and you'll have twice the chance of a drive dying, and then also taking all your data with it.


As for running 64gb RAM.. You're currently on 16. If you aren't running into bottlenecks now, just stick with 16. If you are, then find out how much RAM is recommended for your use case and go from there. I can imagine VMs would need a bit more, but I can't say how much more until we know how many VMs you'll be running.

[Fathr]

What do you actually use the PC for? "Regular PC work" isn't super descriptive. How many VMs would you run? How often?
What's your budget?


I can tell you right off the bat, that you shouldn't get Samsung drives unless you're doing mission-critical stuff, as in, your job depends on it. Sabrent/Corsair/Intel all make cheaper options. As for Raid0, just.. Don't. NVMe drives are already way faster than you could need for anything other than high-res/High-fps video, or if you regularly find yourself moving around singular files in the 10+gb range between drives/computers. So the speed gains won't be noticeable, and you'll have twice the chance of a drive dying, and then also taking all your data with it.


As for running 64gb RAM.. You're currently on 16. If you aren't running into bottlenecks now, just stick with 16. If you are, then find out how much RAM is recommended for your use case and go from there. I can imagine VMs would need a bit more, but I can't say how much more until we know how many VMs you'll be running.

My plan is to run around a full setup, with about 5-10 2019 server vms with a few linux machines thrown in, so well be talking about a DC, A SQL server a small cluster of remote desktop servers. Basically it will be for testing a lot of things that I dont have the time for at work, and off hours I want it to happen as fast as possible without going nuts with a fullblown storage system etc. that is where the NVME's and perhaps raid comes into play, the faster the better (while keeping it within a reasonable amount = affordable). My 16 GB is only for my day to day things, with no VMS running.

[procne]

From what I read raid 0 on SSDs gives only marginal improvements.

Also... did I miss something or has 4x channel been added to consumer CPUs and motherboards? Last time I checked this worked only for server hardware and was not available on AM4 socket

[Thunderball]

From what I read raid 0 on SSDs gives only marginal improvements.

Also... did I miss something or has 4x channel been added to consumer CPUs and motherboards? Last time I checked this worked only for server hardware and was not available on AM4 socket

You didnt. Still going to be 2 channel, even with 4 slots populated.

[Blackmist]

Don't bother with RAID0 SSD setup. You'd have a fragile system for no benefit. Just get a 1TB drive and be done with it.

16GB (2x8GB) total is probably fine for now but you do you. You can see how much it costs. PS5 and Xbox SX have both got 16GB. Games are unlikely to need much more than that, and you've got a 970 and are willing to scale new games down to it so I reckon 32GB will be overkill there. If you want more, just fill the other slots later. Wouldn't worry about dual vs quad channel as it makes no real difference in the real world.

[Shakadam]

Raid 0 with NVME SSD's is a bad idea. Raid 0 is only gonna give you higher sequential write speeds and due to the overhead of software Raid it's gonna be lower performance for pretty much everything else.

Also, your choice of motherboard is overkill and doesn't natively support a m.2 NVME Raid 0 setup, as I'm fairly sure you can't make a bootable Raid 0 between 1 drive using the CPU pci-e lanes and 1 drive using the chipset pci-e lanes. The specs on Asus site shows this to be the storage setup:

3rd Gen AMD Ryzen™ Processors :
1 x M.2_1 socket 3, with M Key, Type 2242/2260/2280 (PCIE 4.0 x4 and SATA modes) storage devices support

AMD X570 chipset :
1 x M.2_2 socket 3, with M Key, Type 2242/2260/2280/22110(PCIE 4.0 x4 and SATA modes) storage devices support
8 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s)


You'd have to bifurcate the pci-e lanes for one of the x16 CPU lanes and use some kind of adapter from pci-e x16 to 2x m.2 slots, or install the OS on some other SSD if you want to use the motherboard m.2 slots for that Raid 0, but that's just making everything more complicated for pretty much 0 gain.

[Temp name]

16GB (2x8GB) total is probably fine for now but you do you. You can see how much it costs. PS5 and Xbox SX have both got 16GB. Games are unlikely to need much more than that

But he's not just gaming.. Did you even read what he was doing?

My plan is to run around a full setup, with about 5-10 2019 server vms with a few linux machines thrown in, so well be talking about a DC, A SQL server a small cluster of remote desktop servers. Basically it will be for testing a lot of things that I dont have the time for at work, and off hours I want it to happen as fast as possible without going nuts with a fullblown storage system etc. that is where the NVME's and perhaps raid comes into play, the faster the better (while keeping it within a reasonable amount = affordable). My 16 GB is only for my day to day things, with no VMS running.

At that point I can see going with 64 gbs of RAM.. But try 32 and see if it maxes out first. There's no real harm in trying. Depending on where you live you might even be able to return the 32gb kit for store credit/A full refund so you can get a matched kit for 64, but if not then just buy the same 32gb kit again.

As for the raid, again.. NVMe drives are basically not any faster than normal SATA SSDs if you're loading lots of small files, they only shine in big file reads/writes of a couple gigabytes in size. A SATA SSD can do 550MB/s, so a file of 5GB will take ~10 seconds. A decent NVMe can do 3500MB/S, so it'll be done in ~3 seconds. And that's for a singular file. If they're split up then it'll have to search for them, which will take about the same time as on a SATA SSD (Since their controllers are the bottleneck there) and then read a tiny file and then search for the next one. And again, with raid 0 you'll be twice as likely to get a bad drive which then costs you all your data. However as it does seem to be job related, get a 1-2TB Samsung drive and call it a day.

[Fathr]

Thank you all for your suggestions, they are most appreciated in seeing any caveats I havent thought about, so again Thanks!