So eventually I ended up going over budget... cost me around 2500... seems daft with new CPU releases around the corner, but thinking that I only build one PC every 10 years and I needed this one now, and I can't be bothered much with upgrades... made at least some sense... I thought why limit this CPU by the watt power? so I wanted a bigger power supply, which lead to a bigger case, by which point I thought, well I can fit a dGPU here now... and get a fully fledged CPU with all its cache...
I ended up using a case similar to the one suggested above by Craig, but quite cheaper, the Coolermaster NR200 - no glass variety, as I don't care much about visuals and I prefer the better airflow that the mesh model has. Below is a description of what I build together with the parts list and I will add some photos of the performance stats later when I find out how, I will add box photos later when I get some time, hopefully this will help anyone looking to do a similar build in the future.
It's still early days but the build looks good. I wanted something future-proof, small and quiet, mainly for work with the option for some gaming every now and then.
I was not sure about the air-cooling, but I wanted something quiet so I dropped the liquid cooling idea. Copes quite well with the case open, Cinebench R23 full load at room temperature 23 C, I get around 63 C, Max 67 C haven't tried closing the box yet, though it has enough breathing space on the sides, so it should work well.
I don't care much about RGB, so the motherboard has a few lights but that's all.
The 3060 was a good compromise, found the 12 GB OC model for decent price by total luck, I was going for a 1050 Ti for 200 pounds at that time but I thought for a bit more I can actually get a modern card, can be used for some medium gaming and AI projects that need Cuda cores, it takes less space than a 3080, and produces less heat and hopefully won't reach the 300W that starts the PSU spinning, and produces less heat. Happy with this choice.
Went with only 1 intake fan at the bottom because I bought a pack of 3 arctic P12 the Black PWM PST variety with extra splits! so I daisy chained all of them, I am not sure if the motherboard has enough fan power connectors otherwise - I got the 3 pack on amazon, they would not allow 4 in that order /facepalm
Originally I was planning 2 intake at the bottom, but finally the bottom fan sits a bit to the side of the 2 built-in card fans (as the card is rather short and doesn't go the full length), the idea here was to help with intake case airflow from below (I will add pics later)
2 exhaust fans at top, and then the CPU cooler has 2 fans, intake from the back. The PSU fan is to the side next to the base of the motherboard, though I am not sure it had to do any work yet. PSU will not spin when system load is less than 300W, for example it didn't even spin during the Cinebench test that had all CPUs at 100% for 10 minutes. That was the idea for choosing this PSU, to keep the system quiet by having as few fans spinning as possible.
Did a bit of undervolting by 10 units on the 5950 to give me about 100MHz for free (same TDP of 125W max). That was fairly easy to do in the Asus BIOS, there might be room for more here but frankly the CPU usually sits at 5% so there's no point getting greedy with this.
I was more interested to overclock the RAM though. Managed to stabilise the Crucial RAM at the advertised 3600MHz [16 18 18 38] - had to up the RAM voltage a bit for that at 1.37V rather than the rated 1.35V, and about 1.1V for the SoC if I remember correctly - I will post the exact number later. This was important, RAM very unstable with SoC at Auto which was like 0.9V. Default RAM was running on 2667MHz. Haven't tried to go over 3600, this is fast enough for me for now, but I might take a closer look in the future, not sure if there are any issues with the infinity fabric clock speed conflicting with the RAM clock, need to do some more reading on this when I get some time, if anyone can point me to a good link or post some opinion, it's appreciated.
Note that when I try multicore memtest86 it crashes after a few minutes, single core it passes fine, and in normal use it's been fine for a few days. I read on the memtest site that this is a known bug with multicore CPUs /shrug
Used the stock paste that comes with the fan, the motherboard was easy to work with and fit fine in the case even though it's slightly bigger than the standard ITX form factor (I think it's DTX), the M2 drives fit fine as well in the expansion card that comes with the motherboard for this purpose, and at idle they are on 41C so it's a good temp.
Did some cable management to tidy up, only issue was missing screws for the 3 case fans, I used the plastic stripes to secure them in place - 4 on each fan and seems OK. Fans when the system is idle are at around 800 RPM, quiet. Under load around 1200 RPM.
I haven't done heavy stability tests with this config and prime95 for example, but TBH this CPU runs at 5% most of the time anyway, so unless you are doing some mining or heavy video editing, not sure if you'd have stability issues with this build
In retrospect if there is one thing I could easily change to save money with my current use pattern, could have gone for the 12 core CPU or even the 8 core one, as I utilise it so little most of the time, but then again it's good to know you have the headroom in case you decide to run something really heavy on this like a kubernetes cluster with lots of containers doing stuff for example I guess... or some heavy AI training model or some video work or some parallel compiling. And by the moment you end up spending just over the 2000 mark, the extra 300 for a few more cores seems not so huge at that time... especially considering I won't be upgrading this...
Here is the final parts list:
- CPU AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3.4 GHz 16-Core £700.00
- CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12A 60.09 CFM £89.95
- Motherboard Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Impact Mini DTX AM4 £328.55
- Memory Crucial Ballistix 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 £323.99
- Storage 2 x Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME SSD £163.00 each
- Video Card Asus GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB DUAL OC £540.00
- Case Cooler Master MasterBox NR200 Mini ITX Desktop £67.42
- Power Supply Corsair SF 750 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular SFX £124.98
- Case Fan 3 x ARCTIC P12 PWM PST 56.3 CFM 120 mm £7.47 each
