So I want a VR PC, and an education.

[richardjb]

Ok, so I want a VR/Gaming PC (with RIFT s) and I want to build it myself (....with some assistance from you guys)
As a little background, I used to build PCs and even sell them to friends and family, but that was almost 30 yrs ago now and KA9Q is no longer required to connect to the internet!!
Clearly a lot has moved on, and I've done a fair bit of research, but im sure that wont preclude me from the odd terminology gaff, so go gentle.

Project Decisions so far: (feel free to comment, but probably won't budge)
1. Expecting project cost upwards of £4000
2. I would like to OVERCLOCK (primarily for curiosity than extreme performance)
3. I Will use Intel CPUs (memory of too much pain in the late 1990's, early 2000's - I appreciate the Ryzen Threadripper are very very different these days. Perhaps in another build)
4. It must fit inside Corsair Crystal 680x (ATX mobo) as I liked it and already bought it
5. Low Noise is important, but doesn't need to be silent. (again, not looking for extremes)
6. RGB isn't required

Assumption (...Please correct if they're dumb)
1. I will simplify my life (and Cost) if I DON'T SLI - feels like the benefit isn't massive and the effort to tune will plus reduced gaming support outweighs the benefit (to me). My assumption at this time is to buy a single RTX 2080 TI 11GB (Probably Gigabyte)

Questions
1. Can I achieve 5GHz overclocked CPU with air cooling alone. -- Not certain so at this time I am thinking water cooled CPU with Corsair Hydro (or similar) and standard air cooled RTX 2080 Ti.

2. Should I go X299 or X390 - is there any real benefit for my VR/gaming PC given I don't want/need SLI.

3. I have a preference for mirrored OS disks and plan to do so with 2x M.2 NVME devices RAID1'd - Will this reduce performance, enhance performance or be exactly the same as 1x M.2 NVME (I dont want cost / MTBF taken into the consideration, just performance and impact on overall system

4. If I go one or two NVME (say 500GBs) is it normal to then have two tiers of storage using more traditional SSD (~2TB) as a second tier, and then third tier of storage (>4TB) for large volumes using spinning disks.

5. What have I not asked?

Thanks in advance and looking forward to you input.

Rich

 

[richardjb]

Apologies for the long waffling first post, too excited.
How about 1 question:

1. Can I achieve 5GHz overclocked CPU with air cooling alone. -- Not certain so at this time I am thinking water cooled CPU with Corsair Hydro (or similar) and standard air cooled RTX 2080 Ti.

TIA Rich

 

[richardjb]

Yes you can get 5GHz on air cooling, but it'll melt the air cooler Joking, temps will be too much for air, for 5GHz.
Best off getting, at the least, a 280 AIO cooler, if not a 360. Not sure what your case can hold.

Thanks subbytna, not at all obvious to me so your help is invaluable - my case supports 120mm, 140mm, 240mm, 280mm, 360mm so by the sounds of it, ill go for 360mm, and since the case is corsair, ill go HYDRO Series H150I

Mouse, Keyboard, monitor, Windows 10 etc needed too?
4k is probably overkill budget wise. £3k will do it.
No need for Threadripper, you should also consider Ryzen 12 core, or 16 core is a good shout too. INTEL may have the overclocking thing but overall Ryzen now is superior to INTEL in the majority of day to day use. If you're gaming, outside VR, on a high res monitor the GPU will be doing most of the work anyway. But Ryzen doesn't have the OCing headroom the INTEL stuff has.

I already have Screens, Mouse, Keyboard - although I do need Windows 10 as Windows 7 was the trigger for this project as the Oculus Rift S didn't support it.
So, i am looking to buy Motherboard (probably Gigabyte Ultra), GPU (RTX2080 ti 11GB probably Gigabyte also) RAM (TBD) NVME/SSD/DISK (all TBD) and most likely corsair PSU, 1200w

For CPU, If i looked to buy an Intel i9 9900KS, what would be the best AMD CPU for the same price, and would it be faster than the 9900ks @ 5GHz? (by faster, I mean for gaming/vr use)

Rich

 

[richardjb]

My opinion
With that budget Ryzen 3950x or even a thread ripper

Ok will do some research.

As they tend to support new cpus and not change socket every time

I didn't know that - you guys rock, thank you so much

 

[richardjb]

Sadly i was burned several times with AMD 20yrs ago, so find it hard not to go with the “defacto” intel despite evidence i see all around me when i look and ask for comparisons

 

[richardjb]

Oh and Intel cpus don't support pci~e 4.0

...Something else I didn't know.
Does this mean the entire PCIe sub-system on the motherboard is v4, and therefore there is potential for future graphics cards to be PCIe v4 compliant with almost double the bandwidth. ie I could potentially replace my proposed PCIe v3 2080ti with a future PCIe v4 version

AMD 3950 Ryzen CPU
Gigabyte X570 AORUS ULTRA (AMD AM4) DDR4 X570 Chipset ATX Motherboard
32 gig of RAM (you can get by on 16 but with your budget, 32 is good) 3600 speed
Gen 4 NVME drive
2080Ti

^^^^^^^
Ok, so I spent the morning doing more research on the above, and I think I'm beginning to see the light -- so please correct me if i am wrong, but for games, an Intel i9 9900KS might edge the AMD 3950x as it has a higher single core clock speed, but both are overclockable, again with the Intel chip having a slight edge on overclocking (barring silicon lottery!), but the AMD has the advantage of double the cores for anything that can make use of them.

Plus the 5GB/s read of the 2TB AORUS NVMe PCIe v4 would be nice.

One question - if I go AMD 3950x, does it make sense to select AMD 5700 graphics card over Nvidia 2080, or is there really zero issue mixing manufacturers (again a legacy scar from 1990s)

Rich

 

[richardjb]

Thank you all, I think I've finally decided upon the main bits of the build being....

Corsair Crystal 680x ATX (£200.00)
Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master AMD AM4 X570 Chipset ATX Motherboard (£311.99)
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 3.5 GHz 16-Core Processor (£699.99)
HYDRO Series H150I Pro RGB Performance Liquid Cooler - 360MM (CW-9060031-WW) (£149.98)
CORSAIR VENGEANCE RGB PRO 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 3600 (PC4-28800) C18 (£339.83)
Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 2TB Solid State Drive/SSD (£743.98)
Gigabyte Geforce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming OC 11GB GDDR6 Graphics (£1,059.98)
Corsair HXi Series HX1200i ATX Power Supply (£249.98)
Total £3,755.73 (although ill now start to hunt the lowest prices of these components

The main points in my logic being...

Case -- No more logic than I liked it, nice shape nice size
Motherboard -- PCIe4, PCIe4, PCIe4 - still doing a bit of research on which board
CPU -- Quick, More cores than the intel and I will run a lab with multiple VMs which could use them.
AIO Water Cooler - I hope this is sufficient for some basic overclocking, no experience doing it, so guesswork really.
RAM -- Speedwise It didnt look like 4400Mhz would make a masive diference to me, 1 to 2 FPS at most. As for 64GB, I also do a lot of photoshop'ing which will definitely benefit from 64GB - From what I can find, I don't think the multi cores of the CPU will help Photoshop much, if at all.
SSD -- 5GB read, 4.4GB write, RAID 1 so if there is failure I have time to buy another (Don't yet know whether RAID 1 will improve or slow the read/write, will do some bench-marking)
Graphic Card -- My main focus of the machine, so happy to spend a little more, almost the king at the moment, I appreciate I could save £300 going Super for only ~8% performance reduction
PSU - Like the AIO cooler, is this big enough? how do you size these things.

By all means comment, correct, even mild insult
Rich