Dude, how much did that cost?
$2549.65, not including the video card, the SATA SSDs, and one of the 960 EVOs (since those came from my previous rig). So yeah, a lot. ~.~
A surprisingly large chunk of the cost was for the RAM and NVMe SSDs. The two of those were $900 combined ($440 for the RAM, $460 for both SSDs). That's actually more than the CPU and mobo. The two 4TB HDDs totalled $350, so half of the cost wound up going to RAM and storage.
If this lasts as long as my previous system did (which is still running! I gave it to my dad) that'll be a 5 year investment, which eases the burn quite a bit.
The original build was hovering right around the $1700 mark, but I ended up getting a much larger bonus this year than I was expecting, so I figured what the hell. The core specs are largely the same (the 8700K with Tt Water 3.0 unit were always planned), but I added the two 4TB HDDs (I was originally going to move my 2 x 2TB drives from my old rig), added another NVMe SSD, upgraded the case (I was originally going to go with the cheaper, less glassy Thermaltake Core series), and bumped the motherboard up from the Asrock Z370 Taichi to the Fatal1ty ProGaming model.
I'm going to do some light overclocking on the CPU as well soon. I've heard of people hitting 5.0GHz fairly easily with liquid cooling (albeit at 86C under load) so I'm thinking I can get around 4.5GHz out of it while staying under 80C. I have no intention of delidding. If I ever did want to crank the clocks higher, I'd buy a custom CPU from
people who know what they're doing.
All that aside, I'm still in the burn-in process, steadily stress testing components and making sure that everything's in working order. I have very high confidence in the CPU and RAM at this point, not to mention the SSDs that came from my old system (two of them having been in service for over a year, with the 960 EVO having 1TB of writes and 5 months of service), but brand new drives always give me pause.
Edit: Something that I didn't fully anticipate (but probably should have) is that manually setting the multiplier--at least for Intel Core iX chips--disables turbo. It makes sense, since turbo seems to basically be a dynamic, floating multiplier that exists even in locked multipler parts. To make things even more interesting, turbo adjusts the multiplier based on the number of active cores, so there's only two active cores I'm running at 4.7GHz. When there's six active cores, I'm running at 4.3GHz. It's essentially a safe overclock.
I think my first step is going to be locking my multipler to 47 (100 x 47 = 4.7GHz) to see if my processor can run full tilt for an extended period of time at full turbo speeds. If it manages a low enough temperature, I think 5.0GHz will be more than feasible with my setup.
Edit 2: Turns out, my motherboard gives you pretty granular control of the multipliers. Neat!
Edit 3: It doesn't look like my CPU can handle the Vcore voltage necessary to push it to 5.0GHz.
That's alright. I'm happy with a solid, stable 4.7GHz. I very much doubt that I'd be able to reach the full load thermal target that I set at 5.0GHz without delidding anyway, seeing as 100% sustained usage with a high heat Prime95 torture test holds the CPU at a constant 80C. It's amazing how much less brutal 3DMark is.
Edit 4: Looks like I got pretty unlucky with the part lottery. It can't handle a sustained 4.7GHz across all cores. Trying for 4.7GHz for 1-2 cores, 4.6GHz for 3-4, 4.5GHz (which was my original target) for 5-6. Running Prime95 now. Fingers crossed!
Edit 5: Rock solid across the board with my custom turbo profile. I'll take it!
