After having a good talk with a few folks, I’ve decided to buy a gaming PC and build it myself. I have everything I need, including all of the necessary equipment and accessories. I don’t want to buy anything from NVIDIA because of some of its controversial decisions, its drivers’ poor performance on Linux, and its high price. I’m going full red (AMD). Keep in mind that I will not be using Windows on this PC at all and will be running Pop OS on it as my primary operating system. I am also buying all the parts from Bestbuy. My budget is not to go completely over $2000
Two questions
- Will everything work properly with all of the PC accessories I’m getting, and is there anything I should replace? (not including the CPU or GPU)
- Do you think it will be enough with three fans, or do I need five for extra cooling?
Everything is linked here: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Crafted_104/saved/XcZCrH
The current price for everything is $1716.78
Only one big problem here: the Ryzen 9 5900X is an AM4 Socket CPU but the motherboard you have selected has an AM5 socket. This board will not work with the AM4 CPU or the DDR4 RAM. The DDR4 RAM is correct for the CPU though.
The CPU requires a dedicated cooler, typically an all-in-one liquid cooling kit (though fan kits exist as well). If you do not already have one, you will need to obtain one. Intel CPUs typically include a basic fan and heatsink, but recent AMD CPUs have more intense cooling requirements and these are left to the aftermarket. AIO kits usually come with a handful of adapters for both Intel and AMD, but you want to make sure a bracket for the AM4 socket is among them. I had an old AIO system when I built my new AM5 machine, but AM5 didn’t even exist when this AIO kit was manufactured.
Not a major problem, but worth consideration depending on your intended workloads: With 16GB DIMMs you will max out at 64GB of ram, which is A LOT, but with 24 threads, that’s a bit over 2.5GB per thread. With two DIMMs (as shown), that’s a bit over 1GB per thread. You will struggle to use that CPU to its full potential when it comes to doing things like compiling somewhat complex software. In practice, I have found 4GB/thread to be required when compiling things like Chromium (QtWebEngine), and about 2GB/thread for things like Firefox. If you are not compiling (major) software from source code or running Gentoo this likely isn’t a problem, and you can always limit the number of jobs to work with the amount of memory you have available in the odd case where you end up doing things like this.
That said, I can’t seem to figure out definitively what the maximum RAM limit is for this CPU or chipset. If it is not greater than 64GB, there is no point of getting DIMMs any larger than 16 GB. The X570 chipset (fanciest, among several in the AM4 family) apparently supports at least 128GB, but this will also depend on hardware support in the motherboard. Just because a motherboard has this chipset doesn’t mean it supports all of its maximum capabilities (i.e. PCIe lanes, memory, overclocking, etc)
I never used DDR4 personally, but from what I hear, the difference between DDR4 and DDR5 is marginal, but DDR5 comes with the added headaches of “training.” It can take upwards of 15 minutes for a DDR5 machine with a lot of memory to boot for the first time. I was nearly ready to RMA my memory before I figured out this was happening, and I had to flash a UEFI firmware update to ultimately get 128GB working.