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Log Would appreciate your thoughts on my prospective build

findingmyfeet

Trash Compacter
Original poster
Bronze Supporter
Feb 23, 2021
48
17
Sorry I meant did you have any extra room lengthwise, my radiator is 317 mm x 138 mm x 38 mm.
 

Qu1ckset

Cable-Tie Ninja
Feb 9, 2020
199
217
Sorry I meant did you have any extra room lengthwise, my radiator is 317 mm x 138 mm x 38 mm.
To be honest I’m not sure, I don’t have the case anymore, I gave it to a friend so I can’t measure , but looking at the few picks I took it looks like it would fit ? But be tight ?

 
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findingmyfeet

Trash Compacter
Original poster
Bronze Supporter
Feb 23, 2021
48
17
Just as an update to everyone who has helped me out with advice I have now bought everything an made my build. I went for the NR200P in the end as it fairly permanent home and everything seems to be running fine and happily.

I'll take some time to post my build very soon, but in the meantime I'd like to say thank you to everybody for their thoughts, advice and objective steering me from what would have been some fairly questionable original items I was looking to source.

@tinyitx @Valantar @Qu1ckset @thelaughingman @daddelbud @Protools Thank you to all of you!
 
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zk2004mb

Average Stuffer
May 23, 2020
58
32
Some general thoughts here:

That motherboard is a poor choice. Why? Several reasons. First, it's DTX, which drastically limits case compatibility (look around the Meshlicious and Dan C4 threads for @Boil's compatibility woes if you're in doubt). Second, it has its m.2 slots on a separate "SODIMM.2" AIC, which further limits compatibility as it sticks out quite a bit from the board, making it incompatible with many sandwich cases. What do you get in return for this? Nothing much. Unless you are an LN2 overclocker, it has pretty much zero useful features over the X570 Strix, and arguably B550 is a better choice for ITX due to its much less power hungry chipset (which is why all X570 boards have fans), and the fact that you're not actually utilizing the PCIe 4.0 capabilities of the chipset in ITX. Yes, you get two 4.0 m.2 slots rather than one 4.0 and one 3.0, but ... the difference is negligible. You'll see it in benchmarks, but even the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives don't come close to saturating a 3.0 bus in real-world workloads (look at the ATSB Light results for a representative average end user load, or ATSB Heavy for very heavy workstation use). A 4.0 drive in a 3.0 slot might perform marginally slower than this again, but nothing that would be even remotely noticeable. One could of course argue for a beefy VRM or things like that, but under non-exotic cooling you can't really overclock Ryzen very much, so VRM quality is plenty good enough on most motherboards. Most B550 boards also have better VRMs than most X570 boards simply due to being newer, and they often also have advanced features like 2.5GbE that no X570 boards have. There are no good arguments for X570 being more future-proof than B550.

I would look at the ASRock Phantom Gaming B550 ITX/ax, Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX, or Asus Strix B550. Each has pros and cons: The Strix has a good featureset and great Asus BIOS, but the weakest VRM of the bunch (by quite a bit). Not that that matters much in real life. It's also rather cramped, and expensive. The Aorus is good and affordable, but lacks front USB-C support without an adapter. The ASRock has right-angle SATA ports making it difficult if not impossible to use them in many cases with the PSU placed directly next to the motherboard. There's an MSI board as well, which should be decent, but I can't stand MSI as a company, so I'm not going into that.

That PSU is complete overkill. It's not overengineered - there are lower output units that are as good or better quality - it's just way more than you'll ever need. A 10900K + 3090 can run on a good quality 650W unit, though 750W is a safer bet due to power spikes etc. Most PSU calculators are utter garbage, and don't come close to real-world power draws, ending up recommending way overblown PSUs. The aforementioned 10900K+3090 setup is likely to consume <500W on average while gaming, though of course this fluctuates. If you're likely to run heavy 100% CPU+GPU workloads like rendering you'll need to account for the full power draw of your components, but with an AMD CPU, that's 144W max (they don't go higher unles you OC, period) + however much your GPU consumes. And given that the 400W 3090 is already pushing the bounds of what can be powered and cooled in most PCs, there's no reason to plan for anything higher than that. Add another 75W for the motherboard, RAM, fans, pumps, RGB, etc., and you've got 620W absolute maximum sustained power draw (of course most 3090s don't pull 400W average - that's the OC versions). Real-world power draws are likely to be much lower, and of coruse using a lower end GPU will cut that number significantly. The 750W Corsair SF Platinum is the de facto standard in this range due to it having been on the market for a while and performing excellently, but any other 750W-850W SFX or SFX-L PSU will be plenty good. Focus on reading reviews and looking at noise, fan profiles, etc, as that can end up mattering more than output capability in the end. There are no cheap or low quality high output SFX PSUs. There's no reason to think the PSU you've chosen is a bad choice, but it's just a waste overall.

As mentioned above, don't buy 64GB of RAM unless you actually need it. "Productivity stuff" is pretty vague, but "maybe a little editing of graphics and video too" makes me suspect it won't be very RAM-heavy (unless you do lots of database work or compiling?). I recently upgraded to 32GB, and ... I don't actually need it. I leave literally everything open all the time (recently it's been 7 Firefox windows with ~15 tabs each, a few Word docs, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, at least three game launchers, with HWinfo64 and Aquasuite running in the background. And I barely exceed 16GB while gaming, and at worst push a bit past that in Lightroom. Ryzen responds very well to faster memory, so buying the capacity you need with the fastest timings and clock speeds you can afford is the best approach. If you're currently close to maxing out 32GB in your regular usage 64GB is reasonable, but if not, stick with 32. RAM needs grow very, very slowly.

The best AIOs out there are either Arctic or EK. They are a clear step above the competition in terms of performance, and should be pretty quiet too (especially the Arctic).

I completely agree with your overall mission of making this a future-proof build (to the degree that such a thing is possible with a PC), but making smart choices is crucial, and going overboard on things where you don't get any benefit but just added expense or complexity doesn't help this mission.
I wouldn't say this board is a poor choice. I can easily name two case that can hold it.
1. Ncase M1, I did a dual 240 rad loop in it with C8I
2. NR200, I did triple rad 1x 280 and 2x 240 in it with C8I.
This board is a beast in overclock. I tuned my 3200C14 dual rank b-die(2x16g) to be 3800C14 at only 1.45V, also the power phase is incredibly good. I pushed my 3900x to 4.6Ghz for ccx1, 4.5Ghz for ccx2, 4.4 Ghz for ccx3 and 4.35Ghz for ccx4 without any issue.
So if the performance is the priority, I would strongly vote for this board.
 

Valantar

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 20, 2018
2,201
2,225
I wouldn't say this board is a poor choice. I can easily name two case that can hold it.
1. Ncase M1, I did a dual 240 rad loop in it with C8I
2. NR200, I did triple rad 1x 280 and 2x 240 in it with C8I.
This board is a beast in overclock. I tuned my 3200C14 dual rank b-die(2x16g) to be 3800C14 at only 1.45V, also the power phase is incredibly good. I pushed my 3900x to 4.6Ghz for ccx1, 4.5Ghz for ccx2, 4.4 Ghz for ccx3 and 4.35Ghz for ccx4 without any issue.
So if the performance is the priority, I would strongly vote for this board.
None of those numbers sound particularly exceptional, even if they are good. Nearly all ITX boards do RAM OC well due to the short trace lenghts (I run my Micron Rev.E 3200C16 sticks in my HTPC at 3800C16 on the bargain basement ASrock B550M-ITX/ac at 1.38V) and your 3900X clock stability is more likely to be down to good silicon than the board in particular. And as I said, the X570 Strix has 99% of the same featureset, it just lacks the LN2 OC functionality. The VRM is essentially the same, which would be (by far) the most important factor on the motherboard for OC. And fitting in two cases isn't particularly impressive :p But the main thing is the massive price premium for the C8I, which it really doesn't even try to make up for in features. It's no doubt a great motherboard, but there are great motherboards at half the price too.