Managed to buy a 3080, now I need the rest of it

Jeff_Nevington · 3 Jun 2021 at 22:16

I haven't had a proper PC for going on 6 years now (slowly moved over to just using a laptop). I've been looking for a GPU recently though as I now need a more powerful PC for work (specifically I need to record in-game footage at very high quality and at at least 30fps (ideally 60) consistently and the laptop can't handle it).

I've had no luck getting anything at a reasonable price but was hoping I was in with a chance of a 3080ti today. While refreshing various pages, I got a notification of some vanilla 3080 stock and somehow managed to grab one - perhaps the bots were distracted.

I hadn't really expected to get a card so I haven't planned out the rest of the system. By the look of things, a 5800x/5900x seems like a good place to start (for the games I work on, the CPU is likely to be the bottleneck). Other than this, I don't know what motherboard to put it on, what ram, cooling solution, case, PSU and storage I need.

I'd like to get 64gb of ram, as I do use up the 32 in my laptop (rendering stuff, using memory-hungry software, and too many tabs). I don't know how fast it should be or if I'd notice any differences with different speeds.

I need around 3-6tb of storage and that needs to be fast too for video editing and loading large projects quickly. I think ~3000MB/s speeds that you get on the PCIe 3 NVMe drives is enough and I could probably settle with half of it being on a SATA 500MB/s, but it might be nice to try out the really fast PCIe 4 drives at some point.

The upper limit on budget would be about £2500 (just tower, no GPU) but I don't want to waste money so if I can do it all for less than £2000, that'd be ideal.

Any tips / suggested builds / warnings would be appreciated

Jeff_Nevington · 4 Jun 2021 at 13:22

Ace, thanks.

That Motherboard has covers for the M.2 bays and the Corsair MP 600 has a heat spreader stuck onto it - is it okay to leave the motherboard M.2 cover off? Otherwise I guess it won't fit.

The case is nice. Never had one with holes on the top for airflow.

Jeff_Nevington · 5 Jun 2021 at 11:31

Thanks, but the order's already arrived. Before the GPU, they must have flown it here.
I'll be using this system for 4-5 years so the extra PCIe4s can't hurt. I might want to fill them at some point.

Jeff_Nevington · 8 Jun 2021 at 20:31

mickyflinn said:
Cool post a pic or two when youve built it, what m2 drives did you get ?

Also you may have to update the bios on the motherboard for the 5900x to work, does it say 5000 series ready on ths box ?

Bios update Tutorial using bios flashback no need for a cpu

I got an MP 400 2TB, an MP 600 2TB and then decided to do the rest with a mechanical drive.
Thanks for the tip - the motherboard is not 5000 series ready but I've got my usb with the latest bios now.
The GPU arrived today and so I've got everything. Should build it tomorrow.

Jeff_Nevington · 21 Jun 2021 at 21:22

mickyflinn said:
Cool post a pic or two when youve built it,

Did a video instead

Jeff_Nevington · 29 Jun 2021 at 21:21

CvrPaddyCvr said:
How's the temps on the 5900x? I used a negative PBO offset of -30 to get my temps down on my 5800x, would randomly spike to 1.45v+. Max I've seen now is 1.35v and temps have been reduced a great bit!

The temps seem okay, it idles at around 40-45 degrees, and the max I've had it is 82 degrees. The cores will often spike to 1.45v when idling and stay around there when under load - is this not normal? I'm not really sure what I'm looking at tbh.

The memory on my 3080 went over 100 degrees while using NVIDIA shadowplay to record some game footage which concerned me a bit. But I've got a 3 year warrantee apparently so if it melts, hopefully I'm ok.

mickyflinn said:
Dont forget to set the ram speed speed to 3600mhz using xmp profile.

Yeah I did this, I should probably benchmark it with it on and off to see the difference. The machine feels really fast in general though, editing that video was so much easier than it would have been on my laptop - it can play those super fast-forwards in the timeline without hanging or having to pre-render.

BTW, this case has a switch on the front to control fan speed, there's low, medium, high and a 4th setting which I think should be controlled by the motherboard. The 4th setting is always the same as high, so I find myself manually adjusting the speed depending on what I'm doing. Any idea how to set this up so it's adaptive?

Jeff_Nevington · 29 Jun 2021 at 21:24

PaulStat said:
Looks great, how much did you pay for the 3080 out of interest?

I got it for £650. A friend of mine just managed to get one for the same. I can't say where, but I've started to notice more frequent stock drops and the crazy second hand prices are starting to come down so hopefully that's a good sign.

Jeff_Nevington · 29 Jun 2021 at 21:29

Quartz said:
You are very lucky you didn't destroy that motherbooard. Never power it up on top of an anti-static bag. They're designed to let electricity flow around them.

I didn't realise the bags were conductive, it looks like the outer coating isn't though so that's maybe why it was fine. Won't risk it again though, thanks.