Any particular reason why you went with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D ?
I’m not saying that it a bad chip. But if you aren’t into gaming or HPC use-cases such as fluid dynamics, finite element simulations or such, I wouldn’t have recommended that CPU in case if it is just a workstation.
Based on the specs I tend to say that you’ve build a gaming rig that might be capable to deliver high refresh rates of a monitor with 244 Hz or more. 3D VCache might be definitely nice to have. But not every software package would benefit from it. But is the upcharge worth it ?
The best bang for the buck should still be the AMD Ryzen 7 8700F currently. Only Zen4 and not the latest Zen5. Same core count and clock speeds. For the third of the price. Or the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, that be 2/3 of the X3D chip.
Additionally, even if I had that kind of budget, I would have kept the old nVME. Already a 32GB RAM configuration in DDR5 does hurt the wallet quite badly. And that four digit number for a set of a total of 64GB is essentially only justifiable if you really do need and utilize it.
Reminds me to the case where a colleague of my sister advised her to by a top of the line Macbook Air of the last intel generation, including all the Apple taxes. And all she does is browsing the web occasionally and doing spreadsheet work. Base configuration with only a RAM upgrade would have been totally sufficient for all she does.
I ordered the new Samsung 990 Pro 1T as my main eos drive. The WD is now the timeshift/cache dirs
I will have to salvage another 1T SSD and use it to build my 12-years old PC.
As for the Video Card, true it is $750, but it is not as painful as the $1150 for 64GB DDR5 memory kit
well my 14 yr old laptop is fine even if it is really thrashed (vostro v131) and one of my netbooks from 2010 still has life but the hdd is broken on the netbook
Well, 14 years is a good age. My old PC is almost the same age (13 years old, considering the processor and motherboard), and so far it’s still holding up, even though it’s now a secondary PC.
At the end of 2023, I had to buy new RAM because the ones I had were defective. I paid about $200 (converting from euros to dollars) for 64 GB (Corsair). Today I’d pay about $460 for the same RAM sticks.
Had the same generation of Z77 motherboard (just different make). Replaced it 2 weeks ago with second hand board (including R5 3600 and 16 GB memory + 120GB SSD as a bonus) for 150$. No way I’m paying AI money .
I just retired my set of Dell Optiplex 9010’s from 2014. Luckily I bought a mother board, cpu and ram back in 2021 (when the prices were much lower) that had been sitting in a closet for five years because I forgot I I had those components. I now have brand new AMD Ryzen 5 and ASUS TUF board with 32GB of ram. What a difference! Still not current, but much newer than I had been using for the last six years.
I only reused, the chassis, the 1 NVMe (EndeavourOS /), 2 SSDs, added 1 NVM for timeshift backups, cache and temporary files.
Power supply was upgraded to 1KW Gold-level model.
1 NVMe (in NVme to PCIe adapter) and 3 other SSD will be reused to build the old workstation for my son. I have to replace the motherboard and get a new chassis.
Why use a NVMe solid state drive for backups and cache? I am not saying it should not be done or that it is bad. I am just picking your brain. Maybe it is something that I have overlooked.
A NVMe drive connected to a PCIe adapter is not going to give the same throughput as one connected directly.
NVMe for backup, etc… for speed. A full Timeshift Sync in less than 30sec
The old motherboard did not have an NVMe slot. So, I used the PCIe adapter and hacked the motherboard firmware to enable booting up from PCIe slot. That feature was disabled from factory, Asus, but it was functional.
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