Suggestions for Intel Motherboard?

[restorer-john]

The Tone Board of heatsinks is, IMO, the Hyper 212 Evo when it's on sale for about $20.

Can be a squeeze in some cases, especially the ones with vents/windows above the CPU.

 

[zermak]

I doubt Amir wants to save on case. I have the one someone suggested here, a Fractal Design R6. It is a neat case if you don't need windows and just looking for a well made and clean look. I am using a Ninja 4 in it as CPU cooler and it fits easily. There is plenty of space. Of course there isn't a fan on the side because of the case design. It has damping sheets on both sides to lower the noise made by the fans inisde it. Anyway mine is nosey cause of the GPU which is a old one and with a cheap fan solution.

@amirm About the PSUs. I follow a few sites but JonnyGURU is great for its reviews. There is also this thread on LinusTechTips PSU tier list which is a continuation of one started on Tom's Hardware and before that of overclock.net. At the end of the day there are few OEMs that makes nice PSUs and other brands adopt it and make their own.

 

[HammerSandwich]

Can be a squeeze in some cases, especially the ones with vents/windows above the CPU.

Always worth noting. Though it's not the tallest cooler recommended so far...

FWIW, my (very obsolete) stereo PC's in an original Lian Li PC-60. The awesome mobo tray's now useless, because the Ninja doesn't fit thru the opening. Of course, it was already mounted, outside the case, when I realized this!

 

[lex62lex]

A top tier cooler may be overkill, but the zen 2 architecture is all about cooling if you want the best single thread performance. The cooler the chip is, the faster it will run. Overclocking is nearly impossible and cooling is everything. Good RAM and tight timings are the only thing that can help significantly, but overclocking memory is exhausting and stability tests a must

 

[mkawa]

amir is currently only looking for a motherboard and CPU. he is currently running a skylake i5-7400. his workload is split between the AP, lightroom and photoshop. motherboard must be ATX.

i have a lab full of commodity components, the most potent of which is a 7940x with an asus x299-a. he'll probably need to upgrade his PSU, but i have a seasonic focus 850 platinum i can toss in. i _think_ i have an asus thunderboltex3 around here somewhere, but thankfully pricing on the tbex3 is down to 60$-ish. i "collect" air and water cooling hardware, and can offer either a masterliquid 240ml or an nh-d15 or thermalright macho rt, etc. i also have a hybrid fan gigabyte 1070 itx. basically, i am a one stop shop.

i can scale down to an 8700k, but i don't have a motherboard for it. i can also scale down to a 7820x.

i also have a bunch of other oddball gear, from x99 workstation board + xeon to a z170 6700 itx setup.

i'm trying to convince amir to take a machine's guts with partial payment in audio (or general test equipment for the lab (!)) and the rest considered a donation. on my end, i will take anything that's purchased or configured from my parts bin and also run a good week's worth of stress testing on it to get it into the better part of the bathtub failure curve.

can folks help me goad him to take the kindness of strangers?

 

[dwkdnvr]

Ok, question. Everyone in this thread is saying that Intel is still king for single-threaded performance. With Zen 2/Ryzen 3xxx this just doesn't seem to be the case any longer: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Am I behind on the gossip? Is there a sense that these results are misleading and that Ryzen 3xxx doesn't deliver as advertised?

 

[mkawa]

any measure of performance is benchmark-dependent. there are like 15 different ways to compile linpack that will perform like a dog on one cpu and a champ on another.

in general, it's fairly safe to say that zen 2 has about the same IPC as skylake, and that intel coffee lake/coffee lake refresh has about 5-10% IPC improvement over skylake. the trick is that coffee lake hits 5ghz whereas zen 2 maxes out at about 4.6ghz, so, spitballing, it's generally accepted that coffee lake has about a 15% single thread advantage over zen2.

it would be very interested to know what instructions the AP device software hits, but my guess is that it uses intel specific SIMD (unfortunately most commercial software does) and potentially avx-512 (hence my pushing of x299/skylake-x) as well as a bunch of memory bandwidth (again, quad channel x299..).

would love to see gprof output, but in the meantime, anything is going to be significantly faster than that i5-7400...

 

[q3cpma]

>intel specific SIMD
Except AVX-512, I don't know any. It's considered unusable (for now) by some like the x265 devs since the generated heat of the SIMD units brings too much throttle to give anything.

 

[mkawa]

people I have talked to at adobe love avx512 and poo on zen because of it.

avx in general is an intel specific isa extension, and the amd analogue is arguably less performant and definitely less common in consumer software but os one of the major sources of increased ipc on intel platforms for doing things like computing ffts..

 

[digitalfrost]

Personally, I would buy a Ryzen board and add a Thunderbolt card if needed.

 

[q3cpma]

people I have talked to at adobe love avx512 and poo on zen because of it.

avx in general is an intel specific isa extension, and the amd analogue is arguably less performant and definitely less common in consumer software but os one of the major sources of increased ipc on intel platforms for doing things like computing ffts..

AVX hasn't been Intel specific for a long time, AMD CPUs implement it along with AVX2. The performance difference was always marginal even if real (see x264/x265 benchmarks for SIMD intensive open source benchmarks) and Zen 2 solved it by using a real 256 bits wide unit instead of fused 128 bits one.

 

[amirm]

Heat dissipation and noise are a big deal to me. So I really like the 7 nm feature size of AMD 3700. So that is the direction I am leaning right now although I have flip flopped a ton.

 

[mkawa]

it's hard to go wrong with any of the higher end options presented here. it sounds like you just need to make up your mind . this is an extremely minor decision compared to 20k levinson monoblocks..

as i said, i am currently running a 3900x on x570, just built a 9900k on z390, was running 8700k on z370 for a while, and of course 7820x and 7940xs on a bunch of different x299 boards.

one thing i will say is that through all of the weird pc builds hobby, motherboards fail at the highest rate. don't pinch pennies there. however, you often can't tell the difference between high-end cpus. gpus fail at a shockingly low rate, and you can also really tell the difference just in win10 desktop unless you're running 1080p. that said, if you are running 2k or less on windows, you can't tell the difference between the coffee lake igpus and discrete gpus. i have no experience with the vega onboard graphics of the 3400g and the 3200g (except that they seem like a great deal).

 

[despoiler]

Stability
https://www.techpowerup.com/257514/...ggy-company-pulls-it-from-motherboard-vendors

Maturity:
https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/134663-amd-set-release-boost-fixing-agesa-1003abba-update-soon/

Aba is fine unless you have a Navi gpu from AMD. It affects the graphics not the system. Even then you can just hard code gen3 in the bios.

Abba nets you 25-50 mhz peak so not a big deal. Can you show me how many Intel boards release only the initial BIOS an no other? It's literally never happened so your point isn't one.

If you really want to get to brass tacks how are the continued Intel security vulnerabilities working out for them?

 

[mkawa]

AVX hasn't been Intel specific for a long time, AMD CPUs implement it along with AVX2. The performance difference was always marginal even if real (see x264/x265 benchmarks for SIMD intensive open source benchmarks) and Zen 2 solved it by using a real 256 bits wide unit instead of fused 128 bits one.

good to know!

If you really want to get to brass tacks how are the continued Intel security vulnerabilities working out for them?

i've thought about this quite a bit, being close to this research area. my feeling is that it's still an academic concern at the rate that kernel patches are being released, and we just aren't seeing real exploits in the wild. also without SMT, you don't really have access to the most fruitful side channel, and intel is moving away from SMT. eg, 9700k and below.

the area where it is not academic is deployed in timeshare datacenters. that's a rather big deal. personal pcs, not so much.

 

[HiFiSoundFarts]

Why not just go with a mini computer like the Cubox? You can can get a complete computer for $100 with windows 10!

 

[lex62lex]

Ok, question. Everyone in this thread is saying that Intel is still king for single-threaded performance. With Zen 2/Ryzen 3xxx this just doesn't seem to be the case any longer: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Am I behind on the gossip? Is there a sense that these results are misleading and that Ryzen 3xxx doesn't deliver as advertised?

As mentioned above benchmarks can be really different. The real single thread test for me is always game benchmarks and the average fps. If you stick a massively overkill gpu in a system, the bottleneck is going to be the cpu in the application and how fast it can feed the gpu frames. This is more so the case when you test low resolution and high framerate. Games are typically not really optimised for multi threading and thus rely heavily on single thread performance (with a few exceptions). Game benchmarks are also readily available in most reviews from tech channels on youtube where some have an exhaustive list they run through for each cpu.

 

[mikemaverick]

I9-9900, if you do not need unlocked CPU. (Which should be enough for Photoshop anyways) Make sure you got a decent graphics card (GTX1660 or above) as they can do hardware acceleratio.

 

[amirm]

one thing i will say is that through all of the weird pc builds hobby, motherboards fail at the highest rate.

Indeed, my current PC was an emergency replacement of the last one that failed.

 

[amirm]

Why not just go with a mini computer like the Cubox? You can can get a complete computer for $100 with windows 10!

I need something much faster than my current i5 due to how much of a CPU hog Audio Precision software is.

Those things are cute though. Had not seen them before so thanks for telling me about them.