Schwarzgerät II

Update: rebuilt as Schwarzgerät III

The case is one wife unit.

Pictures of build, 2020-03-30

My 2020 upgrade to Schwarzgerät, built around the TRX40 platform. This will be an upgrade of cooling, motherboard, CPU, and RAM; I'll continue making use of my current case (CaseLabs Magnum T10), SSDs/disks (currently 4TB NVMe SSD, 144TB SATA3 ferromagnetic), GPU (EVGA RTX 2070) and PSU (EVGA SuperNOVA 850 Titanium), plus assorted Noctua fans and IcyDock HDA bays. This will be my first liquid-cooled machine, and I am likely to go for a custom loop. I would have just used a Noctua HSF, but their only product designed for the sTRX4 isn't available in chromax.black. I'd passionately yearned for Noctua chromax.black for months, and its lack of availability for this build (plus the 3970X's mastodonic 280W draw) made me say "fuck it". I'm going custom loop due to the paucity of 360mm AIOs for sTRX4.

New compute.

New materials

Role	Component	Reasoning	Cost/Vendor
CPU	AMD 3970X	One of the finest packages of our era, at a fantastic price point. Thrashes the 3990X's 2.7GHz base clock with a 3.7. I furthermore believe the 64-core 3990X will be memory starved for most task sets large enough to engage all its cores, and thus not worth paying double. The 3990X is still an awesome chip, don't get me wrong, but it's strictly for suckers given the 3970X's existence---and you're talking to a man who was previously running the much-maligned Broadwell-E 6950X.	$1950 Amazon
Motherboard	Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master	Unlike most of the TRX40 boards, it has a fifth 1x PCIe slot, and I always find myself with the occasional piece of shit I need plug in there (usually some wireless card). 1 slot's holding a GPU, 1 slot's holding a SAS card, and figure the other 2 are occupied with 10GigE and/or Fibre Channel and/or a massive SDR and/or an NVMe expander and/or accelerator. Those $850 motherboards couldn't spare a buck for a fifth PCIe slot, even at Gen3? Lame. I have 10GigE cards falling out my asshole, so I don't need them onboard, or at least don't need to pay a $350 premium for them (though that does free up a PCIe slot, depending on what I'm doing). The Aorus Master does, however, give you 2 ETH PHYs (1 Aquantia 5GigE, 1 Intel GigE), and I can always use more of those. It's got the big beefy 16+3 Infineon VRM solution of its pricier brethren and the same Intel AX200 2x2 802.11ax wireless. It doesn't ship with a Thunderbolt card or an NVMe expander like pricier ones, but I already have those, and have yet to work with a Thunderbolt device anyway. USB-C 3.2 Gen2, good good [nods approvingly]. The only thing that worries me is that the audio solution is said not to work on Linux. I'll be using a USB DAC in any case, but if they botched Linux support there, where else might it be broken?	$500 Amazon
CPU block	EKWB EK-Velocity sTR4 Nickel+Acetal	The "Full Nickel" sounds alluring, but so far as I'm aware, full nickel doesn't improve thermal characteristics (the heat-conducting area is of course metal), so the extra $30 is just for aesthetics. I'd rather the top be black in any case. Acetal is reportedly less brittle than plexi, and is the correct color. I might get the D-RGB variant, as it doesn't add much cost ($10), and that might be fun to play with. The EK-Velocity line seems the canonical choice for sTRX4/TR4 waterblocks.	$110 PerformancePCs
Radiator	Hardware Labs Black Ice Nemesis GTR 360	Without employing add-on components I don't have (and are no longer generally available), I can only put in 2x360s (with the CaseLabs pedestal, I could rock dual 560s, alas). I doubt that even 2x360 will be necessary for a quiet, cool build, and intend to start off with a single 360mm. Height is 54.7mm on the Nemesis, and an ultrathicc 60mm for the EK-CoolStream XE 360.	$129 Amazon
Reservoir/pump	EKWB Quantum FLT 240 D5 PWM	It was big and entirely right angles. D5 pump was definitely preferred over DDC.	$210 PerformancePCs
Tubing/attachments	EK-Tube ZMT Matte Black tubing and EK-ACF compression fittings	Black! 3/4" outer diameter, 1/2" inner diameter.	$10/m EKwb

Existing materials

Role	Component	Reasoning
RAM	Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400	Holy shit, what the fuck is going on with RAM prices? For now, I'm reusing the 64GB (4x16GB) I've had in this machine since 2016.
GPU	EVGA RTX Super 2070 FTW3	Beefy, overclocked RTX 2070 Super brings plenty of Turing. I already had this in another machine, and swapped it out for my existing ASUS GTX 1080.
PSU	EVGA SuperNOVA T2 850W Titanium	It hangs
Fans	2x Noctua NF-F12 iPPC 120mm PWM 3x Noctua NF-S12A 120mm PWM Noctua NF-P12 120mm PWM 2x EK-Vardar EVO 120ER Black BB	NF-P12 was salvaged from NH-D14 cooler stack. NF-S12As are on hard drive cages. NF-F12s are on front and back of case. EK-Vardars and NF-P12 are on radiator in push configuration. Silverstone PWN fan hub and no-name Chinese 1-to-5 PWM breakout.
Case	Caselabs Magnum T10 with 78mm ventilated top. 2x MAC-101 drive cages. 2x MAC-332 SSD mounts. MAC-113 fan mount. MAC-151 3.5" device mount.	A legendary artifact. I fully intend to use this case for another decade.
Expanders	StarTech HSB4SATSASBA 4-bay 3U HDD cage Icy Dock MB324SP-B 4-bay 1U SSD cage	StarTech requires 2x SATA power, Icy Dock 1x.
SAS expansion	LSI SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2	2x SAS ports expanding to 4x SATA III each
3.5" ferromagnetic	9x 12TB Seagate Exos	In a 9-disk ZRAID2 (7x12TB usable)
2.5" solid state	4x 1TB Samsung 970 EVO SATA III	RAID10 (2x1TB usable) for torrenting
M.2 solid state	2x 1TB Western Digital SN720 NVMe	ZFS mirror for home/OS (2 used, 1 unused M.2 on motherboard)
NVMe expansion	ASUS Hyper M.2x16	Not currently used, but can hold another 4x M.2s

External components

• IBM Model-M Trackpoint II M-13 black buckling spring keyboard
• Logitech MX Master 3 wireless mouse
  • replaced 3D Connexion CAD mouse
• Dell UltraSharp U3417W 34" USB-C monitor
• Topping DX7s USB DAC
  • replaced Emotiva Stealth DC-1 USB DAC
• moRFeus USB RF mixer/signal generator, mounted to case
• Nuand bladeRF 2.0 x40 USB 3.0 SDR