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) and SSDs/disks. 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, but their only product designed for the sTRX4 isn't available in chromax.black. I'd deeply adored Noctua chromax.black for months, and its lack of availability for this build (plus the 3970X's awesome 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.

Role	Component	Reasoning	Cost/Vendor
CPU	AMD 3970X	One of the finest packages of our era, at a fantastic price point. I 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 (it's still an awesome chip).	$1950 Amazon
Motherboard	Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master		$500 Amazon
RAM
CPU block	EKWB EK-Velocity sTR4 Nickel+Acetal	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