Building a new dev machine (Early-Mid 2020)

News & General Discussion
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I built my last dev machine in 2013 and it is long overdue for total replacement. I have a decent idea of what I want, but maybe some people in the community can let me know if I’m missing something. I’m asking here instead of a PC build forum because some Unity devs might be able to talk about the things that directly impact gamedev tasks.

The primary purpose of the machine is dev but I will also use it for playing games.

Main dev tasks:

  • compiling
  • light baking (Still using the CPU baker because our scenes use features not supported by GPU bake)
  • building asset bundles
  • rebuilding the library
  • console development
  • long running automation tasks (processing multiple scenes over a period of hours)

Secondary dev tasks:

  • Video editing/rendering
  • Blender
  • Photoshop
  • Audio recording and editing

When a long-running task is processing in one application, I want to be able to switch to another application without too much slowdown. I sometimes run two instances of Unity at once because while I wait for my console workspace to process a build, I work on other tasks in the PC workspace.

During the development of A Fold Apart, I found myself working against tight deadlines and anything related to batch processing has been stressful. Sometimes something will happen with a bad merge, a vendor-required engine upgrade, or rendering a new version of a video for a partner. Iteration time when in a time crunch is super important.

I consider this machine an investment since I spend so much of my time working.

Processor:
Threadripper seems like the way to go and the 3960x feels like the sweet spot for a higher base clock speed and multiple cores.

RAM:
The more the better, probably, but I have a few questions.

  • Will I see much performance gain between 32GB and 64GB?
  • Will I see a performance difference with overclocked RAM (above the base DDR4 3200)?
  • Will overclocked RAM affect stability enough that I should avoid it?
  • Is there a difference between filling 4 or 8 of the TRX40 mobo RAM slots?
  • I definitely don’t need ECC, right?
  • UPDATE: @Ryiah added that 3733MHz RAM is the sweet spot for the infinity fabric of the new Ryzen chips. This is backed up in this Forbes article, where AMD apparently said 3600MHz is best price/performance and 3733MHz is the absolute best performance.

Storage:
I plan to use at least 2 of the M.2 slots on the motherboard. One for OS and applications, and one for projects. Depending on price, I would also consider using another one for games, or possibly for different projects that would be worked on at the same time.

  • How important is the speed of the OS/Applications drive? Is it just as important as the speed of the projects drive? Should I use Samsung Pro for both, or should I use a cheaper Evo for OS?
  • For a games drive, is it worth using an M.2 slot, or are the less expensive SATA6 drives fine (obvs SATA6 is fine, but I’m asking about it as a value proposition)?
  • Does M.2 RAID make any practical difference for build times or asset processing?
  • UPDATE: Apparently ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro are faster and cheaper than Samsung Evo Plus and Pro.
  • UPDATE: @Joe-Censored added that ADATA might be the fastest, but the type of memory it uses may not be as durable as that of Samsung.

Motherboard:
I am currently considering the Gigabyte Aorus Master because I don’t need the 10GB LAN in the Extreme and apparently the cooling and power management are quite good. The board supports RAM overclocking, but as I said above, I don’t know what impact this will have on performance and stability.

Video Card:
I’m considering just sticking with my current 1060 until the next generation of nvidia GPUs hit the market. I am interested in VR dev and it is my understanding the nvidia GPUs are still better for applications like Blender.

Cooling:
I generally just use the stock fans with the processor and I don’t overclock the CPU. It is my understanding that I should look at liquid cooling or one of the large 3rd party heat pipe coolers recommended by AMD (and make sure it is specifically built for this generation of Threadripper). The trouble with the cooling blocks seems to be RAM clearance because the sticks are so close to the CPU.

Sound card:
I’m considering getting a sound card just because I can hear the CPU through my speakers in my current motherboard audio. I might hold off on this until I test the sound through the new motherboard.

Power supply:
I will probably have a couple of larger storage drives, and would like to keep my options open for a second video card in the future. Running some initial numbers looked like a 850 would be sufficient. I have used PSUs by Enermax and Corsair for the last couple of builds. I’ve heard good things about the build quality of EVGA PSUs recently. Is it still the case that PSU have a sweet spot for efficiency between 20% to 80% of listed power? If so, should I be getting 1000+ watts?

If anyone has advice or cautionary tales, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks in advance!

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My main dev workstation is currently an AMD 3900X, and I have been really happy with that overall. I also considered using a Threadripper, but did not see enough benefit for my use case.

I use three NVMe drives, with two in the motherboard and the other in a PCI-E card. For specific NVMe drives, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus is an excellent value to consider. The “EVO Plus” is slightly better than the “EVO” model. The main benefit at this point of the “Pro” model is the theoretical extended life expectancy.

I use 32GB in every workstation. I don’t think I would benefit from 64GB RAM very often in workstation workloads. The only time I use more than 32GB of RAM is in a server.

For graphics, I currently run the RTX 2080 ti. It is overpriced, but runs really well. If you are planning to do VR dev, a 1060 card is probably not going to be ideal for you.

For a power supply, get a high efficiency 1000W. A 850W would probably be fine, but you might push it to the limit with a Threadripper and a new video card under heavy loads.

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sidenote: test Bakery (plugin) for doing baking stuff, apparently it can also benefit from RTX if you upgrade gpu later.

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I’m going to post feedback I’m getting from other sources here, so people can find it. This was from a friend on Slack.

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On overclocking RAM, with any kind of overclocking your results may differ on a part by part basis. Even 2 seemingly identical components can show different results when overclocked. One may be perfectly stable, another may result in random failures. One may be able to overclock to a higher frequency than another. Don’t plan around the idea that an overclock is guaranteed to work, because it is only guaranteed to run at the actual spec.

On the ADATA SSD, it might be the best one depending on what you want out of it. the ADATA uses TLC flash, while the competing Samsung use MLC. TLC generally wears out faster than MLC and usually has slower write performance, with the advantage of higher capacity. It depends on really how much you’re actually writing to the drive whether the endurance of the drive actually matters though.

ECC is generally a nice to have feature, but not needed unless you want to minimize memory related downtime or cannot tolerate the rare unexplained error (cosmic ray flipped a bit!).

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DDR4’s base speed is not 3200. DDR4’s base speed is 2400. Anything above 2400 is overclocked. Factory overclocks are perfectly fine as long as the processor and motherboard have it in their support lists. Anything outside of the support lists hasn’t been tested by the company and may not work but in most cases it should if it isn’t too crazy.

For Ryzen 3000 (and likely Threadripper 3000 too) the memory sweet spot is 3733 because the Infinity Fabric will run at a 1:1 ratio up to and including 3733. This is one of the tactics it employs to keep latency low. Once you step beyond 3733 the ratio changes and latency goes up.

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Yeah, that’s starting to get into what an overclock even means though. There is lots of memory kits advertised as 3200, What that means is you enable its XMP profile in the BIOS. But is that an overclock when you’re running the memory at the speed it is advertised and intended? I consider an overclock when you try to push 3200 memory even higher, but I can understand why someone else would consider just enabling its intended XMP profile to be overclocking. Not sure

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Yes. Personal opinions aside it’s an overclock. It’s just that the overclock occurred at the factory rather than by hand.

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That makes sense. The motherboard spec didn’t list 3200 and below as being OC so maybe that’s the difference between OC and XMP. I was curious about the higher clock speeds too because I read somewhere that AMD was providing 3600 memory kits for Threadripper demonstration.

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XMP is an overclocking feature. Intel created the standard with the sole purpose of making it trivial to install a factory overclocked kit. Turning on XMP literally just takes a series of numbers that have been precalculated by the manufacturer and enters them into the overclocking settings of the board.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/extreme-memory-profile-xmp.html

That said it’s definitely a possibility that the standard has changed to have 3200 be a base speed and the public facing information hasn’t been updated to say anything about it. Just going to add this because my information is the same info anyone can access. I don’t have access to the standard itself and the news doesn’t tend to comment on a change.

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I think my question about 4x16 vs 8x8 is more of a trivial interest when I look at prices. 8x8 is almost double. Similar to 3600MHz vs 3733MHz where the latter is almost double the price.

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My recommendation is almost always to buy higher density sticks than to buy a stick for every slot but then I tend to upgrade the memory capacity of my systems before they reach end of life. My own searches haven’t turned up anything about a performance hit between four and eight sticks.

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It would be best to try to find benchmarks, but the 3960X has quad channel support, not octa channel (is that even a thing?). So you shouldn’t see increased memory performance by adding new sticks once your start going above 4 sticks. Below 4 sticks you may notice decreased performance, similar to dual channel memory systems with all memory incorrectly installed in a single channel.

I just noticed you said you want to run this on a Gigabyte Aorus Master motherboard. But that is an AM4 socket board. The 3960X Threadripper is not AM4 socket, but sTRX4. You’ll need a different board, also double check the board supports quad channel memory (I’d be surprised if any don’t, since it is a big reason to go Zen 2 Threadripper, but double check). The 16 core 3950X is currently the highest performing AM4 CPU available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_sTRX4

edit: didn’t realize Gigabyte lacked so much creativity that they give multiple different products they are producing at the same time the exact same product name.

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AMD’s Epyc server line has eight channel memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc

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Gigabyte gives the same names to all of its boards. There is a sTRX4 version of the Master. It makes googling it a bit trickier than it needs to be.

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Just to clarify the discussion about NVMe SSD cards, in order to get MLC with Samsung, you have to go with the Pro. Comparing the Samsung 970 Evo 2TB that uses MLC to the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro with TLC, it is around $600 vs under $300. I just ordered the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB, as I didn’t think that I would reach the limit in durability within 5 years, and at that point I will likely be purchasing a larger capacity NVMe.

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Hi, would you buy 3950x instead of 3900x if you could choose again. Or the extra cores are overkill?

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Sure. The only reason I bought the 3900x instead of the 3950x is because the 3950x was not available yet. The 3950x offers even more performance.

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Many thx for such a quick reply. My late 2013 macbook pro freezes when importing large project or switching platforms. And it’s not possible to create large terrains or scenes even.

Can you please take a look at my part list to see if it makes sense to you? https://pcpartpicker.com/list/8z7mmg
The cost of this build is bit over my budget. I have another build in my mind which uses 3900x + 2080 super + asus x570-e gaming which saves me around 1000 euro. But then again I don’t want to have all the trouble to upgrade my rig soon.

If there is no big difference in performance maybe I should buy 3900x instead of 3950x because it will save 300 euro in my country. And maybe I should use it to buy a better monitor or to add another 32G of RAM. But the question is I can always buy more RAM or a better monitor later on when I have new budget. Upgrading to 3950x from 3900x means selling the 3900x first. It looses money and takes effort to sell it as well. I tend to go for the 3950x but I’d like some second opinion.

And for the graphic card. I was originally about to go for 2080 super but considering 2080ti has more vram, 2080 ti might be better for game development? I mean scenes are not optimized yet. I even thought about getting a 1080 ti 11g for 450 euro and wait for the 3080 ti which will be released somewhere this year I guess.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

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I currently have an RTX 2080ti in both my main rigs. I doubt the 2080ti gives me any real advantage over the 2080 super in terms of development work day to day. If you want to save money, use the 2080 super instead of the 2080ti.

Similarly, the 3900x is fantastic. Choose the 3900x instead of the 3950x to save some money.

Also, consider using a different motherboard. I love the high end Asus boards like the Maximus (for Intel) and the Crosshair (for AMD), but they are definitely overpriced. There are x470 motherboards available for less than half the price that would offer you very similar features and performance. For example, when I built my 3900x system, I used a GIGABYTE X470 AORUS ULTRA GAMING that I found on sale for $125.

For the power supply, you will probably be fine with the one you selected. Personally, I would go bigger just to make sure there is plenty of power. I went with a CORSAIR HX Series, HX1000, 1000 Watt, 80+ Platinum Certified. That would add some cost to your build, though. The 750W should be enough, but I personally prefer to overspec the power supply. I have built systems before that ran too close on power, and those systems had weird instabilities when certain power rails were slightly overtaxed.