New build in the making....

Also, it's not a gimmick - the PCI4 is a real game changer, in that even everyday manufacturers can get speeds that blow the Intel OPTANE SSDs our of the water. And AMD B550 chipset *also* supports it, which is huge - that is much less high-end and much more budget friendly.

Granted, I'm using the X570, which I may have waited for a bit to get something better - but there is *always* going to be something better if you just wait a few months. At some point you just have to dive in.

Few more things have arrived. Last to get here that is integral to the build is the AIO CPU Cooler, arriving today.

I've been updating the album in my sig below, with more pics. As I start building more, I'll continue to add pics there.

The last piece I need to actually complete the build into a working rig arrived today - the CPU AIO cooler. After work, and class if we have it, I'll be focused on getting it all together, and then installing an OS, after which I'll probably update a lot of pics in the album linked in my sig.

My goal is to test, both benchmark for fun and small burn-in test to verify everything is being adequately cooled, so that by the time the weekend rolls around I'll be ready to play with various OS installs that I want to tinker with, To that end, I'll first be installing Windows 10 directly, for the benchmarking and burn-in, then I'll attempt a Sabayon Linux install, and finally, I'm going to take my old machine and install ProxMox on it to see if I can handle getting it set up correctly for a bare-metal hypervisor, after which I'll be installing VMs comprising of WinX, Sabayon Linux, and WinX Insiders Preview builds. If I can get ProxMox working on the old rig, then I will do a bare metal install on the new rig to start running my VMs the way I've wanted to for a while.

I'm still open to suggestions - ProxMox was suggested to me by a friend in another forum because it allows for direct hardware passthrough to the VMs - which is key for my future uses of the machine. If anyone has any other ideas (again - must have, or at least support, direct hw passthrough) I'd appreciate it if they were mentioned here (and preferably FOSS projects - not ready to pay for a hypervisor yet).

Back to work.

I was in much the same boat with my previous rig - it was an emergency build, but I already had the CPU (I had built a Core2Quad 6600-based rig in 2008, in 2011 that got hit by lightning somehow - never figured it out). Homeowners insurance covered the costs, at an adjusted valuation, for the 6600 rig, so I had a bit of money, but not much - but since I had bought the 965 EE the year after I built the 6600 rig, it was sitting there doing nothing - so I built all around that CPU, picking parts that would not break my budget.

This time I made sure to research what I wanted. I knew I wanted a SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless headset. I knew I wanted a Ryzen 9 3950x. And I knew I wanted as much RAM as I could actually afford. The rest was research, more research, and playing around with builds at PCPartsPicker.

I chose the MSI for its reliability, its age (all the idiosyncrasies with the board should, at this point, have been worked out by users), and the fact that it was one of the very, very few HEDT boards that actually had 3 M.2 slots connecting to PCI gen 4 lanes. *And* it comes with the PCIe card for 2 more M.2 drives when I want. All the RGB, the bling, the extra features - not really a big fan of that - yes, my KB, RAM, and AIO CPU cooler have RGB - not because I wanted RGB, but because they were the most affordable of the best components I settled on. The Vengeance Pro RGB were ~$100 cheaper than the Vengeance Dominator, esp for the 3600 RAM I got (since AM4 Infinity Fabric loves to run at 1800 MHz, in a 1:1 with this RAM when using A-XMP stats - no manual OCing required). Yes, the board says it supports up to 4000 MHz (or is it 5000? whatever) but every video I saw regarding RAM and the AM4 Infnity Fabric showed reliability (across all OEMs using the AM4) dropping significantly the higher you go. And since only my CPU is water cooled by an AIO, I figured it is best to play it safe - after all, blowing out even 1x 32 GB stick in my RAM is gonna be quite costly to replace....

And after painstakingly prepping everything, slowly but surely establishing wiring paths, and doing a lot of wire mgmt, and changing my plans *twice* on what hardware I wanted where, I got it all together - and did a test fire 2 nights ago - and I was extremely satisfied to see that everything worked after all my jiggling things around, wire and cable mgmt, etc. First test fire and I was up and running. Nothing as satisfying like doing it all right - and this included taking my 970 apart and replacing the thermal paste with Conductonaut (don't worry, it is an eVGA GTX 970 with hte 2nd gen ACX cooling heatsink - it is a solid nickel/steel plate over the GPU, not the 3x copper-heatpipe fiasco) and using the Conductonaut for the CPU. Without any manual OCing, just XMP for the RAM, and the default 'turbo mode', as I call it, (throwback from my older rigs that had the single core turbo OC function), when running CPU-Z it was clocking in over 4 GHz on the CPU. I even validated it.

As for the video card - nah. I truly believe that the Ampere-based cards are going to debut at about the same price points as the previous Turing-based cards did . So, I wait a little and I can have brand new 30-series. My GTX 970 will do just fine for now - I've got a lot of configuring and testing to do, as well as a few test installs, before I go, finally, over to ProxMox on the machine as my bare-metal hypervisor.

Finally, I took a ton of pics also. I'll be adding them to the link in my sig, along with the new CPU-Z validation.

Once I've done all of that, I'll mark this 'solved' - indicating that the build is complete and pics are up.

That's awesome! You will have saved ~$80k overall. Very cool!

The refi, in my case, helped a bit, but I kept it at a 30 year for now. I'm eyeing a couple of other large expenditures (like finishing my basement). But if the rates go down much further, I may have to consider doing as you did to lower the over term.

Updated system specs, added CPU-Z validation in sig.

Brilliant. I will also be in my 70s if I keep the house and pay it off, but to be honest, I wasn't planning on keeping the house nearly that long. I want to do like my parents did 30 years ago and actually build a home from scratch - selecting plans, and working directly with a builder on design, including wiring, plus doing all of the networking myself.

Sigh. One day.