So now I have a 5900 and a 3070 on the table and would kindly ask for any help mainly with motherboard and RAM (and other stuff too,..;))

Not so long ago I’ve read about some BIOS(?) instabilities with new 59XX series/mobos. Was it just a problem some people had or AMD&co fixed it? Anyway it scared me a bit. I could still get a different CPU or even go Intel, but it would be a pain.

Graphics - it is what it is.. don’t ask..So: EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 FTW3 ULTRA

Main use on Windows 10:

- audio (in combo with RME Babyface pro, mainly ITB, some other USB/MIDI controllers like Maschine mk3, MIDI Keyboards. SW like Ableton, Reaper, all NI stuff of Komplete Coll.Ed. So Kontakt libraries too)
- CG, especially for (stills) rendering – V-ray shader (for that that I needed RTX)
- AfterEffects, Premiere Pro. For now I work with 1440p monitor(s)
- NO gaming

RAM:
I already had a look of what I can get based on

suggestion by @quadcore64
G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 32GB (2x16GB) C16 DDR4 (F4-3200C16D-32GTZN)*
*this one I can get immediately and it’s the cheapest ~180€
G.Skill Trident Z Neo 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3600 (F4-3600C18D-32GTZN) ~220€
G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz DDR4 RGB (F4-3200C14D-32GTZR) ~290€
what real world difference does 2x the price bring (w/o OC)

MOBO:
Total blackout ..B550 or X570 I guess, but is there a favorite? (I read that e.g. B550 Aourus Pro V2 could have better memory topology than an asus X570?)
Basically I am all about stability over OC anything, if that matters..

wishlist:
- simplicity and place for that GPU (mobo, that is)
- good support for pcie4 ssd(s) and couple other disks

@taskforce, any "preferred"?
- no need for Wifi (I’ll use my Linksys USB to install some SW & such though)
- a LOT of USB 3.2/1, 2.0 ports, the “standard” size (1 usb-c doesn’t hurt, I guess, but..)
- ofc good 50xx support (that BIOS thing?)

- sure, as silent as possible, but not necessarily dead quiet.. not a mastering engineer ;)
- air cooling preferred (will a Noctua solution do?) unless it's stupid for some reason
- good PSU and a nice case suggestion? I like big towers /w a lot of place, lol.. but if the airflow is better in smaller ones, as it was discussed once.. well idk

in advance to ALL that help “technically-challenged” ppl, like myself

 

The X570 chipset will give you 8 more pci-e gen.4 lanes than B550. Which for any type of workstation use is always better, since you can install more nvme drives and various multi-purpose expansion cards, without sacrificing pci-e or sata slots on your motherboard (depending on what kind of device you want to connect). Also bios in good X570 mobos has more options to tweak and is also more mature since it's been around for sometime now. So, if you think that B550 is newer -so better- this is not the case here. And there is a small refresh of new and updated (hardware wise) X570 models from the usual manufacturers so i'd take X570 over B550 anytime, especially if the target machine is a meant to be a workstation for audio and rendering.
To make it more clear, the good about B550 is it's much better than B450, which for the most part had cheapo VRM solutions to cut cost, leading in many cases in total mobo failure, especially when users paired those mobos with 12 or 16 core cpus. So, manufacturers got their lesson this time around and most B550 have adequate or even very good (the more expensive ones) VRMs but that's it.
In terms of features, B550 has only one gen.4 pci-e nvme slot and one x16 pci-e gen4 slot for your GPU. The rest are pci-e gen3 and usage of more nvme drives (if the particular B550 mobo has more than one nvme slot) typically leads to disabling sata slots etc etc.
Now, if you don't care about thunderbolt, my main suggestion is the Asus ROG X570 Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. This is a ~400$ mobo (in normal situtaions without considering the covid19 caused inflation, however Amazon reports it will have it avail in February for 379$ retail), which isn't cheap but considering it rivals all the 700-800$ flagship mobos in all terms, it is the best mobo for Ryzen cpus atm. How?
1. It is the only "non extreme" x570 mobo with no chipset fan. The other two x570 fanless mobos are the liquid cooled Asrock Aqua which costs 1000$ and the Gigabyte Xtreme @ ~700-800$.
2. It has a really serious re-designed VRM. 16 (14+2) power stages of Texas Instruments VRM @ 90A each (8 phases). Knowing how monstrous this VRM can be in real world performance, it makes perfect sense why they skipped on the chipset fan in the first place. In common language, you cannot max this VRM's capacity even with a 5950X oc'd @ 6ghz with liquid nitrogen. And because of course normal workstation users would never do so, this is more than one would ask for at this price range.
3. Features: Now this is what i call, a proper backplate:

Now if you want Thunderbolt, the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master (revision 1.2) is probably the best option around. The mobo is an industry standard and needs no introduction, after all it's one of the two mobos that AMD themselves use to test all their cpus. (The other one is the Asus Crosshair VIII). The revision 1.2 adds a TB3 header as standard, revision 1.0 of this mobo released in some regions, seemed to lack this somehow. Although it's a ~360$ part, in order to connect thunderbolt devices, you will need to purchase the Gigabyte TB3 add-on card separately which is an additional cost of ~60-70$. Despite this shortcoming, TB3 works quite nice with this mobo, if you know how to properly install TB3 drivers (and which ones) in Windows that is lol.

All chips my friend @tzzsmk posted are very good. My thought goes to Vray, Kontakt and usage scenarios. While Vray isn't directly affected by ram capacity, the bigger the scene the longer it will take to render with less ram, in some cases it won't at all. Now, by all means, i am no expert in Vray, but i 've built machines for pros who are and they all go for 64gb of ddr4 ram minimum. So if your usage scenarios include big scenes to be rendered, 2 x32 gb DDR4 @ 3600mhz/CL18 will be best. This will also be best for heavy Kontakt usage of orchestral libraries. Finally it will also be best for upgrade purposes, leaving two free ram slots in your mobo for the maximum possible future ram expansion. Ram like these two sticks: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08688GFPD. This set also gets a "best 64gb kit" for 2021 award here: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ram,4057.html
Oh, about that real world difference of the "double price", it is not of real consequence for workstation users. It makes every sense if you are a competitive gamer or use really ram intensive software that makes extensive use of the ram's cas latency. Now simply explained, CAS latency or CL in short, is the time delay of the memory from receing a command to issuing it, measured in cycles. The smaller the number, the faster the ram module is but always in conjuction with the ram's speed and capacity. So for instance, my suggestion of ram has a typical CAS latency of 18 cycles, which is the most typical clocking in DDR4 @ 3600 mhz. However, this is a (set of two) 32gb stick and not 16 or 8 gb, which makes it a dual dual-rank stick which is really hard to push any lower.
To judge what the typical CAS latency should be in any given speed, just add or subtract 1 ram cycle for every 200mhz of speed. So the normal CAS latency for DDR4 @ 4000 is 20 cycles. And for DDR4 @ 3200 is 16 cycles. However you can clearly see my man put there a Trident Z set @ 3200mhz with 14 CL. Now although this module is a 3200mhz ram, it has faster response than most modules, with the catch being that it's frequency is limited @ 3200mhz, so it has an actual smaller limit of data load throughput in comparison to ddr3600 or ddr4000 etc etc. To find what the actual latency of any memory module is we divide the CL with the frequency and multiply with 2000, because it is after all Double Data Rate memory.
In general, the combination of both high frequency and low as possible CL is the best. With Ryzen cpus it is a little bit different in terms of that Ryzen cpus have a chiplet design, with the cores communicating inside the chip through an "interlink" called Infinity Fabric. This is a "coherent high-performance fabric that uses sensors embedded in each die to scale control and data flow from die to socket to board-level". And this is more sensitive to CAS latencies than Intel's monolithic design cpus, so any memory that exceeds the sum of 10 in the math i mentioned earlier, should generally be avoided when pairing with a Ryzen cpu as a rule of thumb. The expensive TridentZ 3200/14CL has an actual latency of 8.75 whereas the Patriot i posted has a typical 10. Now for laughs, Crucial has a 8gb ddr4 module which is 5100mhz with a CL of 19. This means the actual latency of the module is 7.45 cycles which makes it the faster memory atm given its frequency bandwidth. But looking at the price, the set of 2x8gb costs about 850 euros lol. A really interesting DDR4 2x32gb set is this:
https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-64gb...D-64GVK-_-20-374-066-_-Product&quicklink=true
Now this is a 3600mhz @ 16 CL which has an actual latency of 8.88 making it practically equally fast as the Trident Z 3200/CL 14 but given the higher bandwidth and capacity, the bigger one wins. This 64gb set though, at 360$ is ~100 dlrs more expensive than the typical 3600/CL18 Patriot, i wrote about earlier. If you made it this far reading (lol), hopefully you now know a bit more about ram and you can judge what you need by knowing what type of usage you do.
To sum it, balance is everything, tight timings on ram are great if only are equally paired with adequate bandwidth and capacity. Imho, a DAW and (light) video rendering user, has no usage scenario for the fastest 16gb on earth. They will instead make good use of 32, 64 and 128 gb of "earthly" CLs with adequate bandwidth like 3600 or even 4000mhz (by today's standards).

The best gen.4 nvme SSD atm is the Samsung 980 Pro. It is based on Samsung's V-Nand 3 bit MLC flash and it reaches 7gb/sec in sequential read and 5gb/sec in seq. write. It also excels in latency (but about the same as its predessecor the 970 pro) which is most important in applications like DAWs. The catch in latency -which notably Anandtech missed in their review- is that this drive is the fastest pci-e gen.4 (consumer) drive in random 4k read & write which is what most of every day computing consists of. At the price of ~140$ for the 500gb and 240 for the 1tb, it's one of the most expensive in the market but it's worth every penny since apart from being the fastest, it comes with a 5 year warranty and a MTBF of 1.5 million hours.

It's not stupid at all. But not adequate enough. Personally I own a long range of Noctuas myself and i am a big fan of all their lines and have installed a ton of them on clients' pcs. Thing is, when you step up to 12 and 16 cores with very fast clocks as the 5900X, from medium cpu loads and upwards you get to hear the fans working. And i'm talking Noctua NH-D15 which is their top of the line, not some smaller model.
Only liquid solutions provide adequate cooling with low noise. The past 3-4 years i have move most of my pc builds to liquid AIO and custom water cooling and only go for air cooling when the build includes up to a 6 core cpu. The difference is you get slightly better cooling with much less noise even at full cpu loads.
So my pick for 2021 is the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360. At around 100 euros it's a little more expensive than the top Noctua only it wins by far in terms of temps and noise. I tested it myself against the NH-D15 with a Ryzen 9 3900X. Where the Noctua was at 43db and the cpu was at 70 Celcius, the Arctic was at 34db and cpu at 50 Celcius, all under the exact same cpu load. Arctic achieved such a product by designing it themselves instead of paying a license fee to Asetek (which 95% of the liquid AIO do), and by totally skipping any RGB bling presence on the cooler, pump or fans. If you want bling and RGB the EK AIO 360 is a very good but not better and more expensive solution.

Corsair RMx series are fully modular, semi-passive, 80+ gold rated ultra silent psus and come with a 10(!) years warranty. Nuff said.
Alternately, EVGA 80+ gold modular psus are great but come with a 5 yrs warranty, are not as silent as the RMx series and come at about the same price. Anywhere from a 750w model to 1000w will be fine for your comp.

Hehe, i love big towers. I have 4 of them lol. But most of the people will go for a good mid tower solution. If you have a lot of hdds/ssds the full tower is a better, less crammed solution, as it will allow some cold air from the front case fans to move further in the case, whereas the mid tower will be crammed with drives leaving much less room for air circulation.
So for a full big tower i will suggest the Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL (~180$) and for mid tower its smaller brother, the Meshify 2 (~140$).
The Meshify 2 XL supports up to 18 hdds and 5 ssds and you can still mount your AIO on the top of the case. The mid-tower Meshify 2 supports up to 11 hdds and 4 ssds although it will be crammed with all these. To maintain good airflow you 'll be fine with up to 6 hdds and 4 ssds with the smaller Meshify 2. Both cases are very sturdily built with airflow focus due to their mesh front and modular design which is also scalable to the user's needs. They also look great but this is subjective of course.
Alternately and in the same price range, the Lian Li PC-011 Dynamic (~140$) and PC-011 Dynamic XL (~200$) are Lian Li's "2020 greatest hits" so if you don't like the Fractals there you are. These Lian Li cases are more gamer focused with a lot of glass bling and take less drives than the Fractal cases. But they are equally very well built and sport some neat modularity with separate compartments for drives and psu than the main mobo area.
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/meshify/meshify-2-xl-dark-tempered-glass/black/
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/meshify/meshify-2-dark-tempered-glass/black/
https://lian-li.com/product/pc-o11-dynamic/
https://lian-li.com/product/pc-o11d-rog/

So that's about it. I hope the guys will excuse my long post, i 'd like to believe it was on the informative side. If you need more choice options, have questions, feel free to post or pm, atm covid lockdown stands strong here, customer's don't build any new pcs because of the crazy inflation, my studio's locked down too, so i 've plenty of time to kill
Cheers

 

Last edited: Jan 24, 2021

As suggested by @taskforce, a MB tilted towards workstation features is best.
Some recommendations:
Gigabyte Aorus pcpartpicker list (U.S.) - newegg list (U.S.) -

ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE newegg list (U.S.) - pcpartpicker list (U.S.)

 

Last edited: Jan 24, 2021

Are you kidding. THANK YOU so much for all this info! I'll have to re-read it 2-3x tho LOL.. just studying the CAS latency ATM ;)
Seriously, have to look up @ what can I get my hands on.. the GPU already here. I'll see what "deal" (yeah right) can I get for the CPU and then see what my wallet has to say..

I'll be back with my needs/possibilities and hold you to that..

Thanks again guys!

 

Just a tiny update on my (wannabe) build and a couple of questions, if anyone will catch this. the "most important" part of the silicon just came in. I'm still trying to get everything more or less local. There was a delay with 5900x.. whooah, who needs videogames. This seems just like playing one.

Now comes the ram and motherboard. And my Qs:
RAM

This one looks good, but I was checking it against the Ryzen-Compatible Memory | AMD https://www.amd.com/en/products/ryzen-compatible-memory/ready-for-3rd-gen-amd-ryzen and it doesn't come up. Can I just ignore this? The ram I listed is all there.
Second, it is very difficult to get the 64GB pair (locally - probably because gamers don't really need more than 16 afaik) Even the 32GB pair sticks are less common than 16, but I could get that ones.
Is it possible to get two pairs of (same) 32GB mem and fill all 4 slots to sum up for 64?

motherboard
I can get:
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero for ~370 € and then
ASUS ROG STRIX X570-E (270 €) or F or ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS WI-FI (230 €)
the prices are all over the place btw
Gigabyte X570 AORUS PRO or Gigabyte X570 Aorus Ultra (350 €)
Aorus Master non- existent. @taskforce, seems you really pick only the best parts - all gone..;)
(there are also some Asrock boards)

I would just like something to stick the 5900 and that 3070 in

seems also a nice/only ;) choice and have another place to add another similar. Like the backplate on the Crosshair VIII Hero (this is not the Dark Hero one), but if others do the job, fine by me. No need for thunderbolt, wireless ..I am mostly concerned that they work with 5900x out of the box (or have that usb bios update thing ready)

(esp. reg. mobo) I could buy something (more) expensive, but I'd have to order it from who knows where. And generally, it is an investment - I'll spend on it just as much as I can get back in a reasonable time. There is a thing with V-ray (many ppl that I know don't use it effectively), will write about this.. now I have to catch some sleep. I'd just like to order the mobo asap, but I'd love to have some confirmation from the AS family first (beware there is probably some heavy stupidity in my post, lol)

Thank you in advance for any info

 

As far as I can see, the gathering of parts will take another week or so. I left this public, because the info you're giving is really helpful for all - this should be pinned(!) (but pls check your inbox..;).
Meanwhile I'll try to get as close as possible to what your suggestions were. I obviously started with "vital" components that are harder and harder to get with every day passing by.. but even the eg. Arctic is not so easy to find around the corner..;)

Thank you, again!

 

Just to stress your point - the thread and the answers ARE really helpful. You're building almost the same pc as I plan to do (with the same audio interface) - maybe yours will be a bit stronger. But those are the relevant choices for pc parts now and you seldom read advice that considers music workstation builds and goes into detail on all the little things people that only build a pc once every ten years simply don't know.
I've been following the discussion since I will wait for the prices to come down a bit (another option for a possibly interesting thread) but I wanted to weigh this in here

 

Not gonna happen mate. At least not until summertime and this doesn't mean prices will be completely normalized. The supply chain has been severely disrupted for many reasons:
- Manufacturing factories still don't work with full staff.
- Demand for comp gear has almost tripled the past 6-8 months, due to a big part of the global populace working from home or just staying home and need something to pass the time while keeping in touch with the rest of their micro/macro world.
- Transport and Logistics work constantly overtime to serve the supply chain but there aren't enough of them to fulfill the hugely increased demand. I personally have clients of mine who had their gear delivered via taxi drivers lol.
- Scalpers and miners put huge orders wherever they can get away with it and freshly imported gpus/cpus etc, that already took months to get to their destination, dissappear overnight.
So it is my estimation (and by all means if i am proved wrong it will be a good thing) that prices will stay high for the foreseeable future.
Cheers

 

Ah that would be annoying - I was thinking the prices might go down come spring when people get out of their houses more often and the demand from gamers is partly satisfied and partly decreasing because of the warmer weather
But I dont know - I was wrong in october not to get my parts then, when I was waiting for the new Ryzen generation to drop the Ryzen3900 prices... now the RX580 I was planning to get has jumped from 180€ to 380€ -lol- I am considering to get the 3070 just to get decent value for money :D ... and it might not be the worst idea for coding/machine learning. I think that would be my way to go if I decide to order in february

 

Last edited: Feb 4, 2021

So I recently made the switch from Mac to Windows and have pretty similar specs to what you're looking at. I can give you my quick overview for what its worth.

CPU - Ryzen 5900x. (The more I use this, I realize im not using it to its full potential even with my heavy synths in projects like Diva or Omnisphere. It handles all my projects with maybe 15% CPU usage. incredible but also maybe overkill? probably could of dropped down to 5800x or even 5600x and saved myself a few hundred and got good results. oh well lol

Mobo - B550 ROG Strix. - seems to work fine. lacks some ports (USB C) and some PCI-e gen 4. capabilities. only one of the M.2 slots is gen 4 which is okay if you're not use multiple m.2 since you'll only get 3.0 from the other slot. Still fast but something to keep in mind. As for this bios fear you have, don't stress. I accidently installed the latest BETA bios, and I'm yet to find any problems considering its not a stable release. Also supports 6 x SATA for SSD drives incase you don't wanna use that 3.0 m.2. Still good transfer speeds.

GFX card - Still waiting for 3080... (GTX 660 for now)

I used an AIO cooler. the store I shop at had a deal on kraken x73 so there's no real data or acoustic reason I chose this.

RAM - 2 x 8gb Corsair Vegeance @ 3200. Nothing to say here. Works like ram should.

Hope it helps you but so far I'm very pleased with the results of Ryzen 5900x.