My RIG for 2021 - how much will it come down in price?

Hello all,


I'm saving my money to buy a rig next Xmas in 2021.

So far this year, I got a quote for around 6k for this specification from a few UK resllers. Do you think it will come down in price for around £4500-5000?

If it the price won't be much different than the 10900 when it first was released, I may settle for 8-10 Alder Lake CPU with a Z590 motherboard.


Components:

Monitor: Asus XG438Q
CASE: Phantek Enthoo 719
CPU: Intel Core i9 10900K Unlocked 10th Gen Desktop
GPU: RTX 3090 (third party)
Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero
RAM: Corsair Vengence Platinum RGB DD4 64GB 3466Mhz
M.2: Samsung 970 Pro 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe (Windows)
M.2: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB M.2 PCIe NVMe
SSD: 8TB 870 QVO SSD 2.5” SATA 6GBPS
HDD: 16TB Seagate IronWolf Pro
SOUND: Integrated Motherboard
WIRELESS NETWORKING / BLUETOOTH: Integrated Motherboard
POWER SUPPLY: HX Series™ HX1200 — 1200 Watt 80 PLUS
OS: Windows 10 Professional
RGB LIGHTING: Corsair RGB LED Lighting PR

Cooling:

AOS: Corsair H100i RGB PRO XT
PASTE: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the CPU and GPU
FANS: EK-Vardar EVO 140ER Black BB (500-2000 rpm) – exhaust & EK-Furious Vardar EVO 120 x3 (case fans)

 

6k???
How much do these components cost individually? My first guess is 3k max.

 

I got the quote from a few UK resellers.

 

For a heavily marked up system, or the components?

 

For the components and for putting it together, I guess.

 

OK, upon closer inspection you"ve opted for like 1k worth of SSDs alone lol. I guess you can try pricing components individually and putting it all together yourself, since it's not hard.

 

Yeah, I have. It comes out more than 6k. Think the quotes have been pretty reaosnable.

How much do SSDs and GPU comes down in price after 15 months?

A few hundred quid?

 

Wouldn't expect SSD prices to fall much. You can save some money by opting for 970 evo plus instead of pro, which is an overkill unless you are running a heavy database server or something.

 

What are you going to do with this computer? It's hard to provide advice without knowing that. Presumably, gaming, but with those kinds of SSDs ...maybe something else.

Charles

 

It all depends on what you're doing with these components but, in general it seems a bit overkill unless there's a specific use in mind.

Components:
Monitor: Asus XG438Q
CASE: Phantek Enthoo 719
CPU: Intel Core i9 10900K Unlocked 10th Gen Desktop
GPU: RTX 3090 (third party) - this is going to be your 2nd heater for your house if you're planning on mining or anything and will be the source of your noise if you're putting a load on it since they put off so much heat. When I was playing with mining w/ dual cards I had to set the fans on the cards at at least 70% to keep them under 70C. If you're doing a single card and crank the fan manually to compensate for the heat it's putting off it should stay cool enough.
Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero
RAM: Corsair Vengence Platinum RGB DD4 64GB 3466Mhz
M.2: Samsung 970 Pro 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe (Windows) - 512GB is a bit much for OS / Apps but, if you see below about 1TBx2 in a RAID 1 configuration it would allow you plenty of space w/o the need to take the hit for the 2TB price below. I tend to set my OS partitions for 100GB max and that works in most cases for apps and if you run games they really don't need to be in the OS partition in most cases and run just fine from another partition or even different disk altogether.
M.2: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB M.2 PCIe NVMe
SSD: 8TB 870 QVO SSD 2.5” SATA 6GBPS
HDD: 16TB Seagate IronWolf Pro
SOUND: Integrated Motherboard
WIRELESS NETWORKING / BLUETOOTH: Integrated Motherboard - Pick up an AX200 for $15-$20 // if you're doing networking related tasks find a cheap 4 port GigE Intel card for about $50 // spare ports but also the ability to bond/team the ports for higher bandwidth or simply go with a multigig card that adapts to the highest possible speed as those are starting to become more common as time passes. I just don't trust a 1-2 ports on the MOBO to really last or have the best throughput overall.
POWER SUPPLY: HX Series™ HX1200 — 1200 Watt 80 PLUS - you probably don't need a 1200 Watt model unless you're running dual GPU's but, even then it probably wouldn't need to be over say 850W and that brings your price down by 50-75% from the 1200W series.
OS: Windows 10 Professional
RGB LIGHTING: Corsair RGB LED Lighting PR

Cooling:
AOS: Corsair H100i RGB PRO XT - this might or might not make a difference compare to a good air cooled system w/ proper thermal pad in place. I run air cooled tower w/ an 8700K and a graphite pad instead of paste and it's typically sitting at 30C but might go up to 60C when it's transcoding or pushing a ton of data across the network
PASTE: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the CPU and GPU
FANS: EK-Vardar EVO 140ER Black BB (500-2000 rpm) – exhaust & EK-Furious Vardar EVO 120 x3 (case fans) - look into Artic 5-packs that can be daisy chained off the same header - 140mm 120mm I've been using these in my compact case Node 804 w/ 5 Drive in a Raid 10 configuration + spare - total of 11-12 of them crammed in the case on 3 headers and they barely make any noise unless the system is taxed by a process and even then they don't make all that much noise. The box is on 24/7 since it's configured as the router/wap/FW/NAS/DVR/etc all in one and thus not wanting to hear it sound like a jet engine came into the design / configuration of it.

Anything in red above is where most of your money is going. Components shift in prices but, do you really need to go so far with the multiple drives in excess of the OS space? SSD = Premium / NVME 2TB = waste of money unless you're doing something truly I/O intensive. Skip the $1000 16TB and build a raid 10 that makes the most of the speed and backup capacity if there's a failure. I picked up 5 WD Red 8TB drives for $169/ea and have more than enough i/o bandwidth for anything running locally since the network can't breach 100MB/s in data anyway w/o bundling ports together.

As to the NVME drives.... I recently picked up a PNY XLR8 1TB and it's performing pretty well considering it was less than $100 after an Amex Promo on Amazon. It beats my BPX Pro but does run about 2 degrees warmer on idle but hits 1.5GB/s in transfer speeds between the 2 drives and has a high TBW / 5 year warranty as well.

I would probably suggest running 2 of XLR8 drives in a Raid 1 for your OS / main i/o tasks.
You could do some flash caching with 2 X SSD drives if you want a speedy buffer for the RAID option which can be setup through the bios on the mobo so it's transparent to the OS if you decide to switch from Windows to something else. You can also consider doing an HBA instead of a Raid card to speed things up bypassing the PCH bus.... There's a M.2 one that's got 5 Sata ports on it for the spinners if you go that route for about $50. If you have the slot for it then go with the traditional one to keep the 2nd M.2 open for the 2nd NVME

The biggest savings you'll see though is probably the GPU coming down in price if they release something better between now and then. They seem to be on a roll with new cards lately jumping up in specs this year alone compared to last year. Of course you'll need to resist the urge to upgrade to the priciest card possible during your "build"

 

With this: GPU: RTX 3090

The price isn't going to come down anytime soon compared to the older 2000 seires.