Moving from Laptop to Custom Built PC... Feedback?

[AlluringImminence]

Hi there,

I'm making my first custom-built PC, here are my parts: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/BQcqyk

I use all the Adobe apps, working heavily with Premiere Pro and After Effects. Any feedback on this? I'm not too sure about the video card... it seems affordable and is running the 2070 chipset from NVIDIA so I figured it is okay. I'm not looking to throw 700-800 dollars into a GPU really. I've already needed to downgrade from the Ryzen 9 to Ryzen 7 because I was planning to spend about 1600-1800 for the build, in total, and 8 cores should do fine to my current 2 cores.

Also, someone recommended this motherboard instead of the one I currently have on the list: B450 Tomahawk Max, since it's a little cheaper, but then I get the following warning: "The motherboard M.2 slot #1 shares bandwidth with SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports. When the M.2 slot is populated, two SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports are disabled."

Should I be concerned?

Thanks!

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

If you use the B450 Tomahawk Max, it's actually the limitation of the CPU itself (unlike on Intel platforms, the Ryzen's bootable SATA/m.2 controller is embedded in the CPU itself, utilizing four of its 24 total PCI-E lanes): It supports six SATA ports, but if you connect an m.2 SSD into its sole socket, two of those six SATA ports are disabled. But relatively few people have more than two or three disks total installed internally in any PC system.

The X570 Gaming Plus has only four SATA ports from the CPU in order to accommodate the m.2 socket, but also has a second m.2 socket that's run off of the X570 chipset itself, plus a third-party SATA controller to bring the total supported number of SATA ports back to six. And this, once again, is all due to the limits of the CPU's four storage-dedicated PCI-E lanes. (This is in contrast to the mainstream Intel platform up to and including the 9th-Generation CPU line, where all of the m.2 sockets are run off of the chipset's PCH with its limited throughput.)

[AlluringImminence]

Thanks for your reply, so what do you recommend should be changed? Switch to an Intel processor? Sorry not too familiar with the PCI-E verbiage and what impacts it has.

[RjL190365]

No. That's just the way the CPUs are set up. Intel's mainstream platform also has 24 total PCI-E lanes, but are set up a bit differently from the Ryzen platform: Four of those are reserved for Intel's proprietary Optane memory (whereas four Ryzen PCI-E lanes are for bootable devices). All of the storage controllers on an Intel platform are run off of the chipset.

In both mainstream platforms, four PCI-E lanes are solely for the connection to the motherboard chipset. That leaves just 16 PCI-E lanes available for the GPU.

And accounting for the sharing between m.2 and SATA ports, you'll still have four available SATA ports in these mainstream platforms when you use an m.2 SSD.

If you want your system to handle more storage devices than any of those mainstream platforms can handle, you'll have to spend a lot more money for an X-series Intel or a Threadripper (both HEDT platforms).

[AlluringImminence]

Okay, I don't plan on using any other storage except for the HDD and SSD so I think I'll be fine. Do you think GPU is fine?

[RjL190365]

Yes. Keep in mind, that unless you already have an RTX 2070, it's been effectively superceded by the RTX 2060 SUPER and the RTX 2070 SUPER. If you mean the RTX 2070 SUPER, then yes, it would be a good match to your planned 3700X.

And I would strongly recommend a second SSD in your planned build, in this case: Every single one of the HDDs are much too slow for video editing, especially 4k and higher. And it's not the video playback from a simple video player that's the problem there; it's just the way all video editing programs work. The programs must decompress compressed video to a very high bitrate and a very high color depth, which eats up both storage bandwidth and is also very sensitive to latency, for viewing in the program (this is exactly why the slowest current HDDs are unsuitable for even standard-definition video editing, let alone FHD or 4k). HDDs have way too much latency for a video editing system, and therefore should be reserved only for backups and archiving.

[AlluringImminence]

Thank you very much. I've gone ahead and swapped over to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB GPU, same price for better performance.