Back in the day I used to build my own desktop computers, I had a bit of a thing for the small size ATX cases from shuttle, mainly because I used to travel around to LAN parties a lot but also because I just loved the idea of throwing it in the car and taking it with me, living in the city and heading home at weekends meant that I needed a system that was both super fast and game ready but also able to pack up quickly — laptops back then just really didn’t cut it unlike today.
Just recently I’m in the marketplace for a new machine, mainly a gaming machine but also something for video editing, it’s been nearly a decade since i had a brand new computer mainly because my current one and my laptop have been more than enough but just recently I’ve wanted to start doing a lot more multi-media stuff that requires much more computing power — in other words more cores, I wanna be able to be encoding a video, while streaming and hey, maybe in a game at the same time.
I’ve been looking at AMD chips mainly, I’ve got nothing against the INTEL chips but with all the bugs and issues with vulnerabilities and such like, they might have fixed those issues in the new 10(xxx) chips but I dunno, I feel people stay around prodding and poking those chipsets when the find issues and I’ve not heard anything about AMD issues plus if you wanna make a mackintosh their seems to be a real community around building out good AMD builds — it’s an option to boot into — in fact, triple boot on something like this is kinda easy too, that would be my option.
Obviously running a number of virtual machines, video encoding, live streaming, gaming all requires a beefy machine and I’m really into the power of the threadripper series, especially the new chips, but as with mostly anything, when you want the newest stuff you gotta pay the early adopter prices — in this instance, your looking at a motherboard that’s gonna cost you £700/$1000+ to accept that chip!
The chip, AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X Processor (24C/48T, 128 MB Cache, 4.5 GHz Boost) is £1,239.98 alone! — but it does have 24 CORES and 48 THREADS, that’s kinda crazy, I mean when you consider that I’ve been using a 4 core machine for like the last decade, having the ability to 5x what I’ve got and keep loading this thing with memory over time is where my head is at.
this board will accept up to 256gb of memory too, ddr4 4600 mhz chips too, super fast, just adding memory as and when the prices drop, I’ll start with 64gb to cover all my virtual machine needs and add more over time.
Another thing that I’m really keen to have onboard is the wi-fi 6 and 10gb lan, just a little bit of future proofing for at least the next few years and the addition of space for FIVE M.2, PCIe 4.0 is pretty nice too, I’ve been running an M.2 for about a year now and I love the speed of it so the idea of FIVE of them, maybe a bunch of them in RAID and a drive for gaming files or rendering — I’m here for it.
I’ve always been a super fan of ASUS boards, rock solid stable, they put a lot of work into power management and longevity which I have a lot of respect for, while I don’t understand at all (like at all) all the specs on the power side of things I’m guessing they have put more work into that because of the demand of the power management of the chip
Optimised power solution with 16 Infineon TDA21472 power stages, ProCool II power connectors, microfine alloy chokes and 10K capacitors — sounds cool, but seriously I have no idea these days of modern boards.
It’s not cheap to keep up to date these days, probably looking at nearly 5k for a fairly up to date system these days that does everything, I do think that I’ll get at least five years of computing power out of a beast like this so when you run the numbers your looking at like £100 a month to make it worth while — with the clients I work with and the courses that I currently put out that’s easily covered.
Obviously to add onto this aside from decent ram and a solid power supply I’d probably attach a clean power APC to make sure that i give the board good power in case of future brown out and such, I mean if your spending a couple of grand or more on a brand new machine you wanna look after it right?
It’s a good time to buy right now, a lot of the 2019 machines are getting slashed in price, you can pick up a super decent gaming laptop for like £600 off right now too, always love to upgrade around this time of the year to have a great fresh start and to crush any tasks going into a new year.
What’s your upgrades going into 2021?
Peace and Love
Humble me Along XxX