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Schwarzgerät II
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 (Asus GTX 1080) 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.
Boldfaced components are definites.
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 |
| RAM | Holy shit, what the fuck is going on with RAM prices? | ||
| 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. | $123 Amazon |
| 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 |
| Tubing | EK-Tube ZMT Matte Black | Black! 3/4" outer diameter, 1/2" inner diameter. | $10/m EKwb |
