Building a new PC/Workstation before the Taiwan invasion

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I was talking to someone last week about how China might invade Taiwan and that chips and/or motherboards etc would go from a drought to non-existent. They own a business with several office employees, and some of his PCs are getting old and he's thinking about replacing one or more in the near future.

What do you think about this parts list for an office workstation that will hopefully last at least 10 years? Long term reliability is most important with speed being a nice bonus.

- I went with DDR4 because it's plentiful and they won't see any benefits from current-DDR5 anyway.
- Yes this is ridiculously overpowered for an office workstation but this is someone I built a $2500 extreme edition PC 11 years ago and it's still going strong, they don't mind paying for good stuff. I'll tell him I can shave $200 off the CPU easily and let him choose.
- Dual SSDs for RAID 1
- 10 year warranty on PSU
- all Noctua fans so I never have to go replace one, hopefully.
- Industrial looking (and very heavy) case so his employees don't catch the schlong covid from it.
- Supposedly can do up to 4 displays with onboard GPU but not sure how yet, he does have triple monitors but I can steal his smallish GPUs if I need to from his current workstations.

Edit: Per some good suggestions here's what I'm going with, DDR5 locked because of motherboard with triple display out and not flashy looking, 750W PSU in case he needs a big GPU later, unlikely but it's $10 so w/e and a little bigger Noctua cooler though I went with 1 fan instead of 2 on it, board only has 3 fan headers so I need a sata splitter.

1659373881936.png
 
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mkopec

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Like you said, no reason for DDR5 right now. And in 10 yrs it will be DDR6 anyway. Only consideration would be if some ram went bad can it be replaced in 5 yrs+ at a decent cost? But does RAM actually go bad? From my experience if RAM is bad its apparent right from the get go.
 
Mist

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If you can wait for 13th gen boards then higher speed DDR5 should absolutely blow DDR4 out of the water.
 
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Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Mist said:
If you can wait for 13th gen boards then higher speed DDR5 should absolutely blow DDR4 out of the water.
Click to expand...
That's the rub, if, they're due next year I think, the global chip supply chain might be frozen by then.
 
Furry

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I think the point of this thread is it could be a bad idea to wait. If Taiwan gets blapped it could be 5 years before chip technology moves forward, and on top of that it’ll cost a lot more most likely.
 
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Silver Baronet of the Realm
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mkopec said:
Like you said, no reason for DDR5 right now. And in 10 yrs it will be DDR6 anyway. Only consideration would be if some ram went bad can it be replaced in 5 yrs+ at a decent cost? But does RAM actually go bad? From my experience if RAM is bad its apparent right from the get go.
Click to expand...
I've seen very few go bad myself. I did find that Asus has a MB that seems specifically built for my purpose though and it's DDR5 only so I"m leaning towards this now, about the same price but the upshot of this board is that it has 2 DP and 1 HDMI so they wouldn't need GPUs anymore, which oddly enough are the thing I replace the most for him besides cheap/bad fans.

www.newegg.com

ASUS Pro Q670M-C-CSM LGA 1700 (Intel 12th & 13th Gen & Intel vPro) mATX Commercial Motherboard (PCIe 4.0, DDR5 4800, 2xNVMe SSD M.2 slots, 4xUSB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, front USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C) - Newegg.com

Buy ASUS Pro Q670M-C-CSM LGA 1700 (Intel 12th & 13th Gen & Intel vPro) mATX Commercial Motherboard (PCIe 4.0, DDR5 4800, 2xNVMe SSD M.2 slots, 4xUSB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, front USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
www.newegg.com www.newegg.com
 
Xexx

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Break said:
I was talking to someone last week about how China might invade Taiwan and that chips and/or motherboards etc would go from a drought to non-existent. They own a business with several office employees, and some of his PCs are getting old and he's thinking about replacing one or more in the near future.

What do you think about this parts list for an office workstation that will hopefully last at least 10 years? Long term reliability is most important with speed being a nice bonus.

- I went with DDR4 because it's plentiful and they won't see any benefits from current-DDR5 anyway.
- Yes this is ridiculously overpowered for an office workstation but this is someone I built a $2500 extreme edition PC 11 years ago and it's still going strong, they don't mind paying for good stuff. I'll tell him I can shave $200 off the CPU easily and let him choose.
- Dual SSDs for RAID 1
- 10 year warranty on PSU
- all Noctua fans so I never have to go replace one, hopefully.
- Industrial looking (and very heavy) case so his employees don't catch the schlong covid from it.
- Supposedly can do up to 4 displays with onboard GPU but not sure how yet, he does have triple monitors but I can steal his smallish GPUs if I need to from his current workstations.

View attachment 425499
Click to expand...

If youre not waiting then od scrub some of this away - Buying D4 right before more D5 stuff comes out is kinda "eh" at best. Memory controllers will be upgraded but current Z690 boards will likely not have a problem with faster DDR5 later anyways so technically no point in not going D5 if youre going to shell out money anyways.

Id pick blade over P5 Plus also as it performs better - https://www.bestbuy.com/site/adata-...or-ps5/6486459.p?skuId=6486459&ref=NS&loc=101

Get a RX6600 if you plan to go 3 displays, onboard for 3 is certainly doable but i do too much random when i work to stick with just onboard and 6600 is cheaper than a 3060


Also if going D4 id go AMD not intel - For what youre doing a B550 Tomahawk and 3600X and a discrete gpu would be fine
 
Lanx

Lanx

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Break said:
I've seen very few go bad myself. I did find that Asus has a MB that seems specifically built for my purpose though and it's DDR5 only so I"m leaning towards this now, about the same price but the upshot of this board is that it has 2 DP and 1 HDMI so they wouldn't need GPUs anymore, which oddly enough are the thing I replace the most for him besides cheap/bad fans.

www.newegg.com

ASUS Pro Q670M-C-CSM LGA 1700 (Intel 12th & 13th Gen & Intel vPro) mATX Commercial Motherboard (PCIe 4.0, DDR5 4800, 2xNVMe SSD M.2 slots, 4xUSB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, front USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C) - Newegg.com

Buy ASUS Pro Q670M-C-CSM LGA 1700 (Intel 12th & 13th Gen & Intel vPro) mATX Commercial Motherboard (PCIe 4.0, DDR5 4800, 2xNVMe SSD M.2 slots, 4xUSB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, front USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
www.newegg.com www.newegg.com
Click to expand...
10years buy and forget workstation? i'd take the plunge now and get 64gb ram

also i notice you got the 650evga, i would bump it up to 750evga, not for power but thats what i did myself b/c 650s and under only come w/ one 8pin mb/cpu cable, while 750s and up come w/ 2, 8pin mb cables, the z690 has an 8pin and a 4pin on the mb, while i'm pretty sure that the 4pin is ONLY for overclocking stability, it's also i9 so who knows how much power you might draw from turbo boost and if the extra 4pin helps, rather have it than not.

i assume youre getting 4 noctua fans to replace and increase airflow for a quiet case? why not also just spend a few bucks for the d15 then as well? i check compatibility, it has enough clearance
ncc.noctua.at

NH-D15 | Cooler Compatibility | Noctua Compatibility Centre

ncc.noctua.at ncc.noctua.at
 
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Break

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Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Xexx said:
If youre not waiting then od scrub some of this away - Buying D4 right before more D5 stuff comes out is kinda "eh" at best. Memory controllers will be upgraded but current Z690 boards will likely not have a problem with faster DDR5 later anyways so technically no point in not going D5 if youre going to shell out money anyways.

Id pick blade over P5 Plus also as it performs better - https://www.bestbuy.com/site/adata-...or-ps5/6486459.p?skuId=6486459&ref=NS&loc=101

Get a RX6600 if you plan to go 3 displays, onboard for 3 is certainly doable but i do too much random when i work to stick with just onboard and 6600 is cheaper than a 3060


Also if going D4 id go AMD not intel - For what youre doing a B550 Tomahawk and 3600X and a discrete gpu would be fine
Click to expand...
Adata is a Taiwanese company, trying to avoid them if possible.
 
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Lanx said:
was there any real reason to get raid0 nvme or just b/c?
Click to expand...
Raid 1, he owns a trucking brokerage and any downtime can cost him thousands if his employees can't arrange shipments quickly.
 
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Oblio

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Break said:
I was talking to someone last week about how China might invade Taiwan and that chips and/or motherboards etc would go from a drought to non-existent. They own a business with several office employees, and some of his PCs are getting old and he's thinking about replacing one or more in the near future.

What do you think about this parts list for an office workstation that will hopefully last at least 10 years? Long term reliability is most important with speed being a nice bonus.

- I went with DDR4 because it's plentiful and they won't see any benefits from current-DDR5 anyway.
- Yes this is ridiculously overpowered for an office workstation but this is someone I built a $2500 extreme edition PC 11 years ago and it's still going strong, they don't mind paying for good stuff. I'll tell him I can shave $200 off the CPU easily and let him choose.
- Dual SSDs for RAID 1
- 10 year warranty on PSU
- all Noctua fans so I never have to go replace one, hopefully.
- Industrial looking (and very heavy) case so his employees don't catch the schlong covid from it.
- Supposedly can do up to 4 displays with onboard GPU but not sure how yet, he does have triple monitors but I can steal his smallish GPUs if I need to from his current workstations.

Edit: Per some good suggestions here's what I'm going with, DDR5 locked because of motherboard with triple display out and not flashy looking, 750W PSU in case he needs a big GPU later, unlikely but it's $10 so w/e and a little bigger Noctua cooler though I went with 1 fan instead of 2 on it, board only has 3 fan headers so I need a sata splitter.

View attachment 425610
Click to expand...
I was literally thinking of posting something similar. I have a 2080 so I am not desperate for a new PC, however, with the inevitable price hike I am strongly considering buying sooner rather than later.
 
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Lanx

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Break said:
Raid 1, he owns a trucking brokerage and any downtime can cost him thousands if his employees can't arrange shipments quickly.
Click to expand...
ok, i guess you'll set him up w/ something like backblaze, if i remember it was like less than 100$ a year
 
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Break

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I was kind of expecting him to order 2 PCs, but he went with 5 (cat not included):

1661267773211.png
 
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I was a little disappointed when I ran Cinemark R23 and only got around 16K at stock settings. The 65W limit of the non-K chips is pretty brutal so it throttles to barely 2.5ghz on all P cores and it's only running at like 40C with this ridiculous air cooler. So much wasted potential.... but thankfully the BIOS isn't completely devoid of overclocking features and you're able to override the TDP watt limit. I upped it to 100W and got a score of 21520 with the CPU hovering around 60C. Going to 115W only got me to 22370 @ ~65C the P cores hover near 4ghz.

Not sure how they're getting 28K out of the 12900K but I imagine they're running insanely hot even with good water loops.

Also fun fact, I can't get it to post with the XMP memory profiles with this Corsair ram so the memory is running a little under spec.
 
Mist

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Break said:
I was a little disappointed when I ran Cinemark R23 and only got around 16K at stock settings. The 65W limit of the non-K chips is pretty brutal so it throttles to barely 2.5ghz on all P cores and it's only running at like 40C with this ridiculous air cooler.
Click to expand...
You should be able to just remove the turbo duration limits in the BIOS.
Break said:
Also fun fact, I can't get it to post with the XMP memory profiles with this Corsair ram so the memory is running a little under spec.
Click to expand...
Update the BIOS and you should be able to post with tighter memory timings and higher speeds, this is normal.
 
Break

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Mist said:
You should be able to just remove the turbo duration limits in the BIOS.

Update the BIOS and you should be able to post with tighter memory timings and higher speeds, this is normal.
Click to expand...
Already updated to the latest. It has some tweaking capability but some of the usual Asus settings are missing. Sounds like a non-K can't go beyond DDR5-4800?
 
Mist

Mist

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Break said:
Already updated to the latest. It has some tweaking capability but some of the usual Asus settings are missing. Sounds like a non-K can't go beyond DDR5-4800?
Click to expand...
More likely the fact that it's a Q670 motherboard instead of a Z690 motherboard.
 
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