I am just throwing it out there. I don't play games, so I don't intend to get a second mortgage to finance a video card.
I think I will wait until DDR5 prices drop, that and everything else. I figure by Christmas.
So up to now I have been strictly a Intel guy. I keep thinking back to those early days of AMD cpus and well for those of you who remember, they were quite bad.Some were good performers, they sucked up electricity, Hotter as Hades making them a cooling nightmare, but they were cheap. I know things have changed, convince me.
I do a fair amount of work with video and audio, mainly transitioning formats and editing. To a lesser extent work with photos. All this stuff is high resolution. That requires fast RAM, fast SSDs I/O (I usually have a "scratch" or work drive) , and a GPU to off-load conversion processing cycles.
I have always had great luck with MSI boards. I have handled many different manufacturers boards in the decades I spent managing a repair facility for all kinds of users.

What brings me here to ask that question is this: Lately I have been maintaining commercial networks and business environments. You know the drill. Mostly Dell commercial end user hardware, Cisco networking hardware, blah-blah. Pretty standard boring stuff aimed at running a business in a secure environment, mostly no fun so I have been out of the loop on bleeding edge hardware.

DVDR_Dog said:

I am just throwing it out there. I don't play games, so I don't intend to get a second mortgage to finance a video card.
I think I will wait until DDR5 prices drop, that and everything else. I figure by Christmas.
So up to now I have been strictly a Intel guy. I keep thinking back to those early days of AMD cpus and well for those of you who remember, they were quite bad.Some were good performers, they sucked up electricity, Hotter as Hades making them a cooling nightmare, but they were cheap. I know things have changed, convince me.
I do a fair amount of work with video and audio, mainly transitioning formats and editing. To a lesser extent work with photos. All this stuff is high resolution. That requires fast RAM, fast SSDs I/O (I usually have a "scratch" or work drive) , and a GPU to off-load conversion processing cycles.
I have always had great luck with MSI boards. I have handled many different manufacturers boards in the decades I spent managing a repair facility for all kinds of users.

What brings me here to ask that question is this: Lately I have been maintaining commercial networks and business environments. You know the drill. Mostly Dell commercial end user hardware, Cisco networking hardware, blah-blah. Pretty standard boring stuff aimed at running a business in a secure environment, mostly no fun so I have been out of the loop on bleeding edge hardware.

Click to expand...

Hope the build goes well; you have a lot of good options to choose from.

Photoshop require a lot of RAM, and a fast scratch disk, Davinci Resolve relies more in CPU and GPU, nVidia preferred... For my video conversions I use Handbrake, it runs most in CPU... RAM is pretty scarce to find this days, due to AI demanding a lot of it...

Given a choice, I go for a Xeon CPU. Better performance at the same nominal speed, much better large memory support, also supports error-correcting RAM (ECC server RAM can usually be had at a significantly lower price than desktop RAM).

AMD burned their CPU bridges with me a long time ago (all the reasons OP cites, and more), but even were that not so, in the present most AMD motherboards are "gaming boards" which lack the quality, features, and stability of a workstation board (and even AMD workstation boards tend to be a step down from the Intel/Xeon boards). If I'm spending money, I buy a workstation board. Yeah, they cost more. They are worth it. They are fairly scarce on the DIY market. I like Asus workstation (Intel) boards for DIY, but I also have an old Lenovo Thinkstation that blows away everything in its class, and that old Xeon CPU supports 256GB of RAM.

(With the escalating price of SSD/NVMe storage, one use for extra RAM is a RAMdisk for the write-intensive stuff like browser cache, scratch disk, and tempfiles. Cuts down the wear-and-tear on flash storage by ~90%. Even 1 or 2 GB as a RAMdisk suffices, if you're tight.)

There's a guy on the MSI forums who is really in-depth on the memory thing, and he points out that gaming boards are never designed to gracefully support more than the 16GB RAM that console devices do (therefore what game titles aim at), and performance can suffer if they're populated to the degree they nominally support.

I'm also halfway looking for something newer, but I'm not paying extortionate RAM prices. I sure look a lot smarter for maxing out RAM on all the old systems before the price went up!

Depends on the use of the machine. Ive just finished a non gaming machine to take out with my photography and video kit for on site storage and editing. Laptop 6GB ram and a Celeron processor @2.4GHz more than enough for what I want, with MS office and bluetooth to talk to my devices. A recycled ASUS X550CA with a 2TB SSD inside, fresh dose of heatsink paste and a few heat fins on chips that give off heat. Slightly upgraded fan motor to a brushless that stops it getting even warm.

Building a non gaming machine still means you will need to consider:-

1. Storage (OS, misc storage and system programs)

2. OS to be used, Windows, Linux, or whatever you intend to use.

3. Use of the machine, (data processing, Picture editing, audio linking etc)

4. Battery upgrade if you are taking it out for long spells. I have added a 5V DC USB type C socket to mine so i can plug in a Power Pack I take with me and also a modded power supply / charger to take 12V out of the cigar lighter in my transport.

5. Screen size

6. Keyboard layout, generally if im going to use a lappie out of heome I have a full UK keyboard on it inc the Num Pad. Fannying around with function keys and keyboard shortcuts out of home is an annoyance.

7. Do you need new or will a refcycled / repurposed machine suit your needs.

8. A decent carrying bag if required that can hold all accessories. My mobile work kit has a DVD rewrite ext unit, USB hub in case stuff needs a good talking to, an RJ45 socket or LAN socket (not everywhere has direct access via WiFi)

9. A phone that can have a Hot Spot created on it to ensure a secure connection to your machine and the net.

10. The BUDGET. probably the most influencial consideration there is.

Hope thios helps you out

When someone talks about building a system, they are rarely speaking of laptops. But yes, use-case is the prime consideration. I wouldn't want to be carting around my first Xeon workstation (from 2000)... it weighs 57 pounds!!

Laptops are a very different thing from desktops, especially if "portable" is a major criterion. I have a low-spec Asus netbook that I drag around and it's perfect for its job (glorified typewriter), as it weighs a little over one pound and has 24+ hours of battery life. My best laptop is a 2020-model Dell Precision you wouldn't want to carry very far (it weighs almost 5 pounds) but even tho it was the top available spec, it's still significantly outclassed by my 2013 Xeon workstation... which I built from salvage and used parts.

I don't worry about which OS. With my desktops PCs I use a hotswap bay and a stack of drives each with a different OS. No more battles between GRUB and the Windows bootloader.

Reziac said:

When someone talks about building a system, they are rarely speaking of laptops. But yes, use-case is the prime consideration. I wouldn't want to be carting around my first Xeon workstation (from 2000)... it weighs 57 pounds!!

Laptops are a very different thing from desktops, especially if "portable" is a major criterion. I have a low-spec Asus netbook that I drag around and it's perfect for its job (glorified typewriter), as it weighs a little over one pound and has 24+ hours of battery life. My best laptop is a 2020-model Dell Precision you wouldn't want to carry very far (it weighs almost 5 pounds) but even tho it was the top available spec, it's still significantly outclassed by my 2013 Xeon workstation... which I built from salvage and used parts.

I don't worry about which OS. With my desktops PCs I use a hotswap bay and a stack of drives each with a different OS. No more battles between GRUB and the Windows bootloader.

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there are a lot of x99 motherboards from brands like Machinist, Huananzhi, and Qiyidaand, and super cheap Xeon cpus at Alibaba and those chinese marketplaces... had you tried any of those?
I'm a longtime AMD user, the only xeons I have were Mac Pro computers..
And I really do prefer MSI mobos, too..

garibaldo'' said:

there are a lot of x99 motherboards from brands like Machinist, Huananzhi, and Qiyidaand, and super cheap Xeon cpus at Alibaba and those chinese marketplaces... had you tried any of those?
I'm a longtime AMD user, the only xeons I have were Mac Pro computers..
And I really do prefer MSI mobos, too..

Click to expand...

Phil's Computer Lab has messed with a lot of those cheap Xeon brands -- they're made from chips salvaged from retired servers, which gives you more options in CPU and RAM. Which is fine, and they're okay as a budget solution, but per Phil's reviews, they don't have the stability of the mainstream brands, and they certainly lack the feature set. Minimal slots, occasionally iffy support for attached devices, sometimes driver issues. If one fell from the sky I'd happily put it to work, but it's not what I'd buy on purpose.

One thing I want in a board is max fullsized slots, because I always seem to fill them up. (Current main systems have 8 or 9 slots, and they are ALL full.) I also want 8 RAM slots, if I have the option. That pretty much limits my choice to Asus. I've had good experiences with MSI (at least since they got their act together during the early P4 era; their P60-era boards truly sucked), but they have moved away from workstation boards and really don't have what I want anymore.

I have an MSI "H97 Gaming 3" from 2016 that fell on my head, and let's just say it's a wee bit quirky. The M.2 slot does not support modern NVMe, only older 2x drives, good luck finding that. And even with a Xeon CPU it only supports 32GB RAM, when 64GB support or even more was already standard a full generation back. That's kinda typical for "gaming" boards, tho. It's not unstable, it doesn't misbehave, but there was considerable hair-tearing before I figured out why it would not recognize an NVMe in its M.2 slot. (It does boot from an NVMe on a PCIe card, tho, and I get full speed. But it only supports one NVMe at a time, even on different adapter cards.

For comparison, my 2013 Lenovo/Xeon supports 256GB (also, I chose it partly because it has onboard SAS support). My X79 Asus supports 64GB with an i7 (might double that with a Xeon) and it has two NVMe drives on cards. These are a generation older than the MSI, but both are workstation boards. The Lenovo supports a significantly faster CPU than either the Asus or MSI boards.

There's also that because of how gamers churn hardware, they kinda get used as hardware beta testers by the manufacturers. Since I think stability means uptimes measured in years, I want hardware that's fully mature with all the bugs worked out, and an expectation that I'll get 10 or 15 years out of it.

So, different strokes; these are mine.