Purpose Built

[ehowton]

Two things happened simultaneously; my suddenly inadequate mid-range gaming rig due to the advent of AI, and my junior sysadmin-in-training wife deciding she wanted hands-on hardware experience after her initial CIS class. This was going to be a rather expensive, albeit unique, opportunity. Creating AI models from my photographs in order to manifest unique end-products takes either horsepower, or time, neither of which I have in excess. I'm hoping to change at least one of those.

Geekfriend and I spent a full day researching specs to ensure we could eke out the absolute best price/performance ratio given the dizzying array of options (and stock) available, and double and triple-checking compatibility. For a purpose-built AI system this included a 13th gen Core i9, DDR5 RAM, gen-5 NVMe, and of course the best bang-for-your-buck RTX 4090 on the market - not an inexpensive endeavor no matter how successful the valuation.

What surprised me the most was the price of non-"flagship" motherboards required to pull this off. In that regard, I settled on the MSI z790 MEG ACE which provides (after applying stipulations), an x8 PCIe slot for the (ASUS ROG Strix OC) 4090, and a single gen-5 m.2 for the (Crucial T700) NVMe, leaving a single, non-disabled (chipset-driven) PCIe x4 slot (for bifurcated quad NVMe adapter card) and four remaining gen-4 m.2 slots, one via CPU, three via chipset at the expense of the final SATA connection. Booting from gen-5 NVMe over the loss of (estimated) 1-2% of GPU throughput given the architectural limitations of the i9 while disappointing, seems a fair trade-off, and allows me to continue using most of my existing NVMe, including the ridiculous Cyperpunk 2077 Firecuda, all neatly tucked into a brilliant white Lian-Li O11 Dynamic EVO case.

RAM is similarly affected, able to run at (max OC) 7800MHz with one, single-rank DDR5 stick, lowered to 5600MHz running two, dual-rank DDR5 sticks. I've been pleased with TEAMGROUP my last several builds so purchased their T-Create series for this build-out. Power will be supplied by a Seasonic PRIME TX-1000, a brand favorite of Geekfriend.

And that was the easy part, relatively speaking. This purchase will create a cascading effect as I have my wife dismantle her PC, my PC, a running linux box sourced from my last upgrade, and a spare PC, allowing her to assemble her upgraded desktop from the resultant parts as she learns hardware.