Roast my ProArt / DaVinci Resolve / PUBG / hopefully very quiet build?

[eltname]

It's time for a new build. Largely to get it in before a VAT quarter ends.

Am fairly settled on using 2 x 4080s and very settled on ProArt because of teh looks, just finalising storage options and looking for some advice. Cost not really an issue. Currently around £7000 in the UK but that's with some silly storage options. I don't REALLY want a threadripper even though I'm absolutely peak use-case for them. (Threadripper build I could tolerate is coming in around £12,000 which negates the tax efficiency)

Here's my current front runner:

9950x 4.3 16 core
ProArt LC 420 107 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
ProArt x870e Creator mobo
Teamgroup T-Create Expert 96GB (2 x 48GB - ddr5-6800 CL36)
Crucial T705 M2 (2280 size) 4TB in the first PCIE5 slot
Crucial T705 M2 (2280) 4TB in the second PCIE5 slot
WD Black sn850x 8TB M2 in the first gen 4 slot
WD Black sn850x 8TB M2 in the second gen 4 slot.
ProArt 4080 Super OC x 2 (one in each 16x slot running at x8)
Asus ROG Thor 1600 Titanium 80+
All housed in a ProArt PA602 (or potentially the new wooden trimmed one)

Then 4 x 6GBPS sata slots to cram with as much storage as possible - potentially 4 x 2.5" 8TB ssds (looking at samsung 870 for no real reason) but am open to anything that isn't a spinning drive (mainly for concern about noise as well as speed).

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Not necessarily getting all of this storage, but just want to ask if those slots were all occupied, where would it be hobbled in terms of lane bandwidth?

My understanding is that I could fit 2 x 4080s in at x8 speed in the gen 5 x 16 slots (so basically fine in terms of not being throttled but at an increase in temp and noise (hopefully small increase in noise as I do want the thing to be quiet, but hoping the 200mm fans will help here - noise may in the end come down to judicial use of fan curves and a shorter lifespan - 3 or 4 years would be fine for me). Then I could fit 1 x m2 gen 5 into the top cpu slot, another one into the other slot, and have 2 on the chipset at pcie 4 x4 mode.

So 2 very fast drives and 2 fast but not killer fast and this wouldn't hobble performance rendering with two GPUs in Resolve no matter where the source material was stored?

Not sure what would be the best use of 4 m.2s (apart from keeping gas central heating bills down over winter).

I guess I would want one very fast drive for system and games (4TB gen 5?), 1 very fast large drive for video footage - render caches etc which get big, fast (ideally 8TB but that will mean going back to gen 4 I think, so am open to a 4TB for current projects only), and ideally 2 more 8TB drives (probably the gen 4 WDs) but not sure how DaVinci works when drawing footage from multiple destinations simultaneously (probably fine but if anyone knows the most efficient pipeline feel free to chime in - would I have a big performance hit for example if my rushes (raw footage) were on pcie5 4TB and my render cache was on an 8TB gen 4?)

Then sata... I'd like the option to use all 4 of the sata 6gbps connections as 2.5" bays. Will this be another pcie lane tax (i.e. will this hobble speeds if using multiple things at once - e.g. rendering and then also, say, copying another project from a portable drive at the same time).

I'd like a minimum of 32TB useable storage in the sata bays. Ideally this is in RAID 10 (so actually need 64TB capacity, so 16TB x 4).

Presume my PCIE4 slot on the mobo is going to be covered by the second GPU and I couldn't fit a hardware RAID card in there for them to connect to? And even if I could, I think by that time I'd be **** out of lanes/bandwidth?

I've always been worried about software raid as an unreliable/sluggish thing but maybe that's rooted in the past and it's fine these days? RAID or not, what would be the fastest non mechanical drives (i.e. ssd or nvme in a 2.5" housing if even possible?) with longest life span. My intention wouldn't be to edit straight from these drives but to copy (quickly) onto the faster NVMEs on the motherboard when needed, then put it back onto the sata drives when finished.

But I don't want to spend 18 hours copying 4TB which is what it feels like is currently happening.

Everything gets backed up to cloud every quarter and to a hardware RAID once a week.

If internal RAID isn't necessary / practical (I'm interested in it for speed and redundancy in case of failure as it'd take some time to recover things if a drive died) then I guess 4 x 8TB is going to give me more options (can't see many 16TB 2.5" ssds...)

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Will be upgrading from a 3090/B550D/3950X/64GB (2X32 @ 3600) so I'm sure wherever I end up will be a big improvement. If Asus come out with comparably sized ProArt 5080s then I'll swap them out in the Spring. But right now that's what's available, and I'm looking for a project to throw money at.

 

[Tetras]

FYI: the manual is not yet available for this board (that I can see). Ideally, I'd wait until it is rather than relying on the tech specs.

Not necessarily getting all of this storage, but just want to ask if those slots were all occupied, where would it be hobbled in terms of lane bandwidth?

The second M.2 slot is shared with the graphics lanes, which means 1x slot will be 8 lane and 1x slot will be 4 lane.

I guess I would want one very fast drive for system and games (4TB gen 5?), 1 very fast large drive for video footage - render caches etc which get big, fast (ideally 8TB but that will mean going back to gen 4 I think, so am open to a 4TB for current projects only), and ideally 2 more 8TB drives (probably the gen 4 WDs) but not sure how DaVinci works when drawing footage from multiple destinations simultaneously (probably fine but if anyone knows the most efficient pipeline feel free to chime in - would I have a big performance hit for example if my rushes (raw footage) were on pcie5 4TB and my render cache was on an 8TB gen 4?)

The easiest way to know what kind of bottlenecks you're facing would be to monitor your current system while you work and see exactly where the holdups are (i.e. 100% utilisation) while you're waiting. In many circumstances there's little performance difference between a PCIE 5.0 and 4.0 drive, so I'd be surprised if you find that the bottleneck justifies the expense.

Note that I'd expect a 8TB drive to be double sided.

Then sata... I'd like the option to use all 4 of the sata 6gbps connections as 2.5" bays. Will this be another pcie lane tax (i.e. will this hobble speeds if using multiple things at once - e.g. rendering and then also, say, copying another project from a portable drive at the same time).

I can't see anything that says they're disabled, but you're right that they do share the chipset uplink to the CPU. If you're primarily using CPU-connected M.2 slots then this should not be a problem.

USB portable drive: I'm not sure how the USB ports are distributed between CPU and chipset, you'd need to look at a CPU/chipset block diagram and then determine from that what Asus have done on the Creator.

Presume my PCIE4 slot on the mobo is going to be covered by the second GPU and I couldn't fit a hardware RAID card in there for them to connect to? And even if I could, I think by that time I'd be **** out of lanes/bandwidth?

It will be unusable, yeah (due to size of graphics card cooler). I can't see any lane sharing listed for this slot.

 

[eltname]

Thanks for this, really helpful including some thought on USB I hadn't considered and good point re. double sided 8TB. Have seen a video of someone in Singapore installing double sided onto this particular board and they had to remove the bottom heat sink to get it to fit (if in the CPU slot at the top, fine in the bottom 2).

Will absolutely be waiting for the manual - just need (would prefer) to order before end of December. Would be nice if PC Parts Picker had some note on bandwidth varying between configs. Currently it's hard for me to test bottle necks as I use a single 4tb gen4 nvme and then usb 3.2 and thunderbolt 3 (actual thunderbolt from the Gigabyte B550D) to thunderbolt 2 converter. I find copying things to the thunderbolt raid achingly slow (hence wanting an internal raid instead with the 4 x sata ports). I probably wouldn't need to copy files at the same time as rendering, that's really just a worst case scenario. My renders are probably a few hours absolute max and that's on a fairly middle of the road build with a 5 year old CPU. I also find if using a 3.2 portable drive to store rushes, timeline scrubbing is almost unusable (typically 6k braw footage - often 'don't have time' to transcode all to prores and a more suitable container for editing).