EClark1894 posted at 4:29PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387186

WDBeaver posted at 1:06PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387110

Are you comfortable building one? .

Not at all.

Ah, well. If you were willing to experiment, you could put together either a serious beast now, or a decent performer with upgrade options. Going with industry standard parts, you would only need a screwdriver or two, and a pair of needle nosed pliers to get into the tight places. And since all the parts would be white box, you could obtain replacements from almost any distributor.

The beast option would be the 1920X, the 12 core 24 thread 1st generation Threadripper. That can be had for around $250 US. The motherboard I would recommend is the Gigabyte Aorus 399X (there are two versions of this; one is ATX, the other is E-ATX sized and gamer intended, with a wireless capabliity on the motherboard. The gamer version costs quite a bit more). Mainly for the fact is has 8 SATA ports for drives, and three of the M.2 form factor SSD sockets on board (these particular sockets accepts either 2280 or 22110 sized SSD card, which cost the same as standard 2.5" SSD drives. The good part is that the M.2 sockets have direct access to the PCIE bus, so they are even faster than SSD's on a SATA port). Plus the fact it sports 8 DDR-4 memory slots, for a max of 128 gigs. 500 gigs of SSD runs about $60 US atm (either 2.5" format or M.2 format). So this board can handle multi terabyte storage, and enough memory to run your OS and content programs with memory to spare. The graphics card could wind up double the cpu cost, depending on the architecture and VRAM. DDR5-6 vram is at least half the cost of a video card, sometimes as much as 3/4, depending on how many gigs it has.

The above is what I have in my office now. I built a gaming box with the ripper and Gigabyte board, then the main system had a southbridge failure -just- after I got it set up after a rebuild. Since the ripper was still cheap and available, I rebuilt the main box with similar specs as the game beast (although the game beast has a Gigabyte Geforce 2060 RTX video card, and the main box is running the old system's Geforce 960, which is sufficient for the OpenGL support). I haven't bothered trying to use 3D Benchmark yet, but here's an example of just what kind of power one of the Threadrippers has. Without any hesitation or stuttering, I have had uTorrent running a double download, NordVPN running. Opera open on a graphics heavy site. Open Office. P-Booost. Poser 11 with a render of a test animation with LaFemme with Arodana's dynamic hair and Nerds dynamic loincloth and a couple other dynamic pieces I'd have to look up. There was also parallel file transfers through USB going at the same time to different drive locations. And the processor temp stayed below 55c. I have the overheat alarm set that low as I have air cooling.

If you wanted a longer term upgrade (the 3rd gen of threadrippers have a different socket configuration that the 1st and second gen, so they are basically eol), then I would find an AM-4 motherboard. That would give you the entire Ryzen processor line to play in. You could start with the 4 core Ryzen 3, and as prices fall move to the 5, 7, or 9 series. The Ryzen 9 series top end runs more cores/threads than a 1st gen ripper does, and as they add more to the top end, the prices of the others fall. However, you probably wouldn't get the same options regarding storage.