$1000 USD CAD and Rendering Workhorse. Getting the Balance right?

[olkipukki]

There are sellers on ebay, where you can configure your workstation to your liking. Then you can ask for no HDD+SSD+Video, and use your won. BTW, most likely the video card could stay, since there werent any breakthrough in graphics cards for CAD anyway.

I'm afraid, this is not a case.

Here is a listing with a freaking 10 core liquid cooled Z420, for half the budget:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z420-3-00GHz-10-Core-E5-2690-v2-32GB-RAM-500GB-HDD-FX3800-No-OS-Liquid-Cooled/183199535303?hash=item2aa78b10c7:g:08wAAOSwsqdcLLm3

Add OP's SSD and video card, and you up to max budget. Also, very likely OP's PC would faster than above. 

People dont realize that DDR3 ECC memory is stupidly cheap now.

Not really  , if you compare new DDR3 vs DDR4  , except stuff from Ebay with million hours usage time...

[sokoloff]

People dont realize that DDR3 ECC memory is stupidly cheap now.

Not really  , if you compare new DDR3 vs DDR4  , except stuff from Ebay with million hours usage time...

Why wouldn't you compare whatever was most reasonable to buy, realizing that ECC memory with 45K hours (5 years) of run time is perfectly fine to run another 45K hours?

[olkipukki]

I second the suggestion to get a used professional workstation from Dell or HP. These have far better thermal management design compared to a generic computer casing. As a result the computer will be more silent and more reliable.

In general, yes, but questionable.

The last pre-build workstation that I used to be Z820, very solid and well designed, with one exception - loud, very load under "a load".
That's not surprise consider a case/fan sizes and inside stuff that need to be cool down.

As wrapper mentioned, you can select right components to a narrow down the issue.

[nctnico]

The amount of noise depends on the type of workstation. The higher end ones stay quiet under load. I have a Dell 5810 which stays whisper quiet even when loaded 100%. The external hard drive makes more noise.

[olkipukki]

People dont realize that DDR3 ECC memory is stupidly cheap now.

Not really  , if you compare new DDR3 vs DDR4  , except stuff from Ebay with million hours usage time...

Why wouldn't you compare whatever was most reasonable to buy, realizing that ECC memory with 45K hours (5 years) of run time is perfectly fine to run another 45K hours?

What we are comparing here? 

For me, reasonable to buy new DDR4 only right now for a new PC.

A few months ago I bought used 64GB DDR3 ECC UDIMMs that 2x times more expensive than RDIMMs I can find.
Yes, these were cheaper than similar DDR4, but not "stupidly cheap" (at least for me)

[olkipukki]

The amount of noise depends on the type of workstation. The higher end ones stay quiet under load. I have a Dell 5810 which stays whisper quiet even when loaded 100%. The external hard drive makes more noise.

Z820 was a high-end in HP range.

[sokoloff]

People dont realize that DDR3 ECC memory is stupidly cheap now.

Not really  , if you compare new DDR3 vs DDR4  , except stuff from Ebay with million hours usage time...

Why wouldn't you compare whatever was most reasonable to buy, realizing that ECC memory with 45K hours (5 years) of run time is perfectly fine to run another 45K hours?

What we are comparing here? 

For me, reasonable to buy new DDR4 only right now for a new PC.

A few months ago I bought used 64GB DDR3 ECC UDIMMs that 2x times more expensive than RDIMMs I can find.
Yes, these were cheaper than similar DDR4, but not "stupidly cheap" (at least for me)

I've recently bought (used) DDR3 ECC UDIMMs for about $1.90/GB.
DDR4 ECC seems to be more like $4.00-$5.00/GB in the used market and on the high end of that range in the new market. (Given that it's about the same price and new is easier to buy in many ways, sure, why not buy new?)

[mnementh]

mnem
 

[olkipukki]

I've recently bought (used) DDR3 ECC UDIMMs for about $1.90/GB.

It cost me ~$3.50/GB (~$28 for 8GB module)

[beanflying]

Bean has already stated that an 8GB RX580 is part of the design spec. And that still doesn't make carefully shopped used video cards any less of a good idea.

mnem
 

As per the opening post the GPU is the part of the spec that is rubbery between new or used. Tracking some local evilbay auctions for used sees them well over 50% and toward 70% new price. A 20% bargain would be a miracle and I have used up my Jammy Git points on TEA items

Some completed Auctions here

Leaning toward paying the $ for new to avoid a potentially heat treated and  one.

[mnementh]

Oh, that's right bean... I forgot the comparatively limited selection available on fleaBay Down Under. Over here I'm seeing XFX 8GB non-OC Edition RX580s as low as $US90 shipped as "Used, good working". I doubt you'll likely find what I did as readily. 

In my defense, I DID say "Carefully shopped used", which you clearly have been doing.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

Found this in my feed this morning. Linus does a budget gaming build project that was seeded by a strange "China-direct tertiary market-marketed" MB find during his CompuTex coverage. 

mnem
"Damned clever..."

[beanflying]

Think I will pass on recycled chip Motherboards 

Ran across this today https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ If it is correct I should have brought a few weeks ago 

[mnementh]

Or a few weeks from now... 

I was just sharing something tangentially related. That video reminded me that all the things we've been discussing are definitely first world problems. 

mnem
All things are relative. All relatives are things. My relatives take all my things... 

[mnementh]

BLEEP!ing MicroCenter... just when I thought my resolve to wait was locked in...

   https://www.microcenter.com/site/products/amd_bundles.aspx#2600

mnem
*wibble*

[beanflying]

We are starting to get a few reductions this end too. 2700X's are available about 8-10% down. Samsung to help out has a cashback on SSD's until the end of the month. Also Amazon Prime days in a bit over a week and evilbayplus will get me 5% off most bits until the end of the month.

Going to wait and see where the 3700X sits but the other reductions might see me grab one over the 2700X.

Time to splurge is soon 

[mnementh]

Yeah, the bastards have the 2600X for $140. Hard not to jump on it at that price, as it is 99% likely compatible with the new 570 boards.
mnem
 

[beanflying]

Given the likely cost of the 570 boards spending more $ on the processor and a lower but acceptably optioned board seems to make sense? The board I linked in post one will run most on the 7nm releases it seems.

[beanflying]

2am and binge watching youtube talking heads instead of 

Seems the 570 boards are not needed to get the punch out of the 3700X for most jobs B450's will do. Power consumption is a great improvement over the 2700X too. 95% a done deal for me at this stage.

[mnementh]

It's a pcie4.0 world, my friend. Or it will be in less than a year. 

Given what I've seen from leaked pricing, the 570 boards will be $40-60 more than equivalent 470 boards. There is where I'd spend til it hurts for best lifetime from that expenditure. Today's polymer-electrolyte capacitors and the name-brand manufacturers' current tendency to over-build the VRM rather than under-build make this a MUCH safer investment than back in the SOYO Dragon days.

I'd buy the best 570 board (minimum: 4 RAM Slots, 2 nvme-capable M.2 slots) and 2 modules/at least 16GB of the fastest known-compatible DDR4 RAM (DDR4-3200 minimum, I'd guess) I can afford first, and then the highest-on-the-foodchain 2xx0X Zen2 processor I can scrape the money together for after that. I'd even hold off on a nvme boot drive if I had any decent SSD to use; spend that money on better RAM/CPU. I'm expecting a new crop of larger MLC as opposed to TLC drives soon. The demand for faster MLC SSDs as boot drives (with a larger, slower TLC as data storage in a 2nd M.2 slot) is fast becoming the standard arrangement for performance builds.

Next on the agenda would be... as best price/capacity deals vs money come available... buy matching part # DIMMs to double up my existing RAM, and biggest MLC nvme SSD I can afford for a boot drive. Relegate existing SSD to data storage, then finally clone over & replace with a TLC nvme drive in the 2nd slot. EVEN the slowest TLC nvme drives now available are 5x-10x as fast as you can get from SATA; this gap will only embiggen as pcie4.x becomes the standard.

Anyways... this is generally the battle plan I've used for every major upgrade I've done in the last 3 decades: Buy the most advanced MB I can afford in the brand I prefer (usually ASUS/AMD), then most quantity/fastest RAM (Spend til it hurts on these two), then best bang/buck CPU available at the time that will run on that MB. Don't give a damn if you aren't running the RAM to its maximum speed; as CPU deals come along and upgrade money comes available, then buy the next up on the food chain CPU until I maxx out the board. Use it until it no longer serves as a gaming/workstation, then replace the daily-driver web-surfing machine with it & start the next build.

It's true that getting 10 years out of my old PhenomII 1055T is a little long to stretch such an investment even for me; but the fact I could do that shows how well this strategy can keep you in a usable machine and truly get you both best performance you can afford AND best bang for the buck over time.   

mnem
*Veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars PC Builds*

[Mr. Scram]

PCIe 4.0 is unlikely to yield meaningful gains anytime soon. It's likely the impact is going to be even smaller than the upgrade from PCIe 2.0 to 3.0 was and that hasn't been noticeable outside of benchmarks for years and arguably still isn't. If you don't need to money for other parts then sure. Unless you're doing very specific things spending money on vast amounts of RAM isn't going to increase performance. It's not uncommon for it even to slightly hurt performance, as the controller has to work harder but programs aren't benefiting from the available RAM. Running out of RAM hurts, but even in a world where OS's try to utilize idle RAM having an excess is a bit of a waste.

One problem we see is that a couple of hard and fast rules sometimes go overboard and the market landscape isn't what you could reasonably predict. We've seen RAM, HDDs and GPUs all become stupidly expensive for their individual couple of years. Then there's the handicap of a head start, where investing heavily in top tier components means they're often too expensive to ditch but are already lagging in performance just a short while later. It seems you just have to roll the dice and hope for some luck.

[mnementh]

That depends on your definition of soon. Within 3 months, no. 6 months, probably. A year, ABSOLUTELY.

I don't see spending $40-60 more (or even $80, if you're dead-set on an apples-to-oranges comparison against B-Family boards) as a LARGE investment against future-proofing. Ignoring pcie4.0 RIGHT NOW is foolhardy in the extreme.

16/32GB of RAM is not "VAST".  16GB has been my bare minimum build for literally a decade. 32GB is now my minimum; I only suggested 16GB TO START. I work in this business. 32GB workstations have been commonplace in the wild for years; I'm seeing 64GB builds now for content-creation.

bean HAS STATED he is doing VERY SPECIFIC THINGS. Things that are by definition bandwidth-hungry. THAT is why I stand behind my recommendation of pcie4.0 as a minimum requirement. To get full speed out of BOTH nvme m.2 slots it is the only way; and unless you want to shell out for a ~1TB MLC nvme SSD, you'll be living with a single slow TLC SSD as both boot/data. Even a 0.5-1.0TB MLC as both will still run considerably slower than MLC nvme-boot+nvme-data drive in bandwidth-hungry applications like content-creation.

mnem
 

[Mr. Scram]

That depends on your definition of soon. Within 3 months, no. 6 months, probably. A year, ABSOLUTELY.

I don't see spending $40-60 more (or even $80, if you're dead-set on an apples-to-oranges comparison against B-Family boards) as a LARGE investment against future-proofing. Ignoring pcie4.0 RIGHT NOW is foolhardy in the extreme.

16/32GB of RAM is not "VAST".  16GB has been my bare minimum build for literally a decade. 32GB is now my minimum; I only suggested 16GB TO START. I work in this business. 32GB workstations have been commonplace in the wild for years; I'm seeing 64GB builds now for content-creation.

bean HAS STATED he is doing VERY SPECIFIC THINGS. Things that are by definition bandwidth-hungry. THAT is why I stand behind my recommendation of pcie4.0 as a minimum requirement. To get full speed out of BOTH nvme m.2 slots it is the only way; and unless you want to shell out for a ~1TB MLC nvme SSD, you'll be living with a single slow TLC SSD as both boot/data. Even a 0.5-1.0TB MLC as both will still run considerably slower than MLC nvme-boot+nvme-data drive in bandwidth-hungry applications like content-creation.

mnem
 

No way that a year is going to make any difference. The difference between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 was more pronounced relatively speaking and that didn't make a discernable difference when anyone was running PCIe 2.0 in anger. It tooks years for any relevant difference to develop and that's debatable too. The moment that the first person is going to use his computer and actually notice a difference because he doesn't have PCIe 4.0 is many years in the future. If you don't have anything else to spend your money on PCIe 4.0 is a consideration, but spending the money on something like a faster graphics card is much more likely to yield noticable results. 32 GB of RAM at this point is money wasted, unless the specific use cases I've mentioned iin my previous comment apply to you. The benchmarking review below shows the difference between 8 GB and 16 GB being negligible. "8GB should be the minimum standard, while 16GB is desirable but not needed." If we look at beanflying's case, he should take a long hard look at what he's expecting to do and how this stresses the system exactly. Most of the major applications have been benchmarked in detail. Some programs can't get enough RAM while others don't benefit at all or even top out at a specific amount. The trick is not to throw money at the wall to see what sticks, but to tailor your system to your needs. Workstation builders like Puget do extensive benchmarks and build systems that play into the requirements of the applications they're expected to run.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page4.html

[mnementh]

We aren't talking about grandfather's eMail machine here. Well, you are. I'm not. 

If you're going to stand there and try to say that a $40 premium... or even $80... for the latest family of MBs is "throwing money at the wall", I'm going to laugh in your face. That is the foundation of your build, and I'd certainly much more trust the money spent there and going with a known-reliable CPU like the 2700X rather than the cheapest possible old MB that we know only partially supports a brand-new untested generation of CPUs.

I've argued for years that MS memory management is crap, and that it doesn't know what to do with more than ~8GB. Fortunately, other software creators DO know how to use it, and know how to use it from within MS' effed up HAL. That is exactly the kind of software bean has stated he wants to be able to use with this build. 16GB, which is what I recommended, is a good start for that; with expansion to 32GB at a LATER date.

What you say was true... years ago. Not now. You clearly have no idea what's on the horizon... I do; it's all I've been researching for several months now. If 32GB was such a waste of money, I know for a fact I wouldn't be seeing it in the corporate fleet machines I service for a living; and I've been seeing it for almost 2 years. Clearly not ALL of them, or even most... but in certain offices, I've seen 6 of them in a row with twin & triple 32" monitors. And corporate bean-counters, the kind who bitch about a $600 Lenovo laptop,  paid for all that without batting an eye. 

Cheers,

mnem
"Good luck, and may your god go with you." Dave Allen

[wraper]

We aren't talking about grandfather's eMail machine here. Well, you are. I'm not. 

I've argued for years that MS memory management is crap, and that it doesn't know what to do with more than ~8GB. Fortunately, other software creators DO know how to use it, and know how to use it from within MS' effed up HAL. That is exactly the kind of software bean has stated he wants to be able to use with this build.

What you say was true... years ago. Not now. You clearly have no idea what's on the horizon... I do; it's all I've been researching for several months now. If 32GB was such a waste of money, I know for a fact I wouldn't be seeing it in the corporate fleet machines I service for a living; and I've been seeing it for almost 2 years. Clearly not ALL of them, or even most... but in certain offices, I've seen 6 of them in a row with twin & triple 32" monitors. And corporate bean-counters, the kind who bitch about a $600 Lenovo laptop,  paid for all that without batting an eye. 

Cheers,

mnem
"Good luck, and may your god go with you." Dave Allen

99% of people don't need 32GB, neither they will need it when throwing out their currently brand new computer. Unless you do very specific tasks which require a lot of RAM, it's a waste of money. For video rendering 32GB is desirable, although you probably will get more performance from better CPU bought for that extra money. Depends on applications that you use and video resolution.
The same goes for PCI-E 4.0, which is only good for ultra fast SSD or ridiculously high speed network cards. Unless you do specific tasks, you won't even notice difference between NVMe and SATA SSD, not to say fastest PCI-E 3.0 NVMe and something that is even faster than that.