Grade my new PC build - what should I tweak?

I didn't realize we had so many other computer people here. I had a Lenovo-towered PC I built in 2010 that I had upgraded little things on ever since that was still holding up fine until a power outage killed the HDD and I realized that I was in desperate need of something that wasn't held together with figurative duct tape and bubble gum for video editing.

So, still the same case (and optical drive!) but everything inside is brand new now. 

• ASUS PRIME B450M-A Motherboard
• AMD Ryzen 5 2600 6-Core 3.4 Ghz CPU
• G.SKILL Ripjaws V-Series 8 GB RAM x2 
• AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU
• WD Green 240 GB SSD
• Seagate Barracuda 2 TB HDD x2
• Seasonic S 12III  550W Power Supply
• Windows 10 Professional 64 Bit

What do you think? It's all still in the old case. I even had to de-pin the power button harness and trace the wires and make my own blueprint of the circuit board in order to make everything just plug into the motherboard and work (and light up correctly). I need a USB 3.1 and some front USB's (the ones in the case are toast) and have another optical drive port left. Running a single large Samsung monitor and a Logitech speaker system with sub. I have an ancient workhorse EPSON WF-3520 printer on the network that does great and a Crealty Ender 3 I still need to put together. Running DaVinci Resolve Project for video editing.

Anything I should do? Tweak? Change? 

Hi Javelin,

  OK.  Sorry for the wall of text coming.  That looks like a pretty good list.  I would make a few suggested changes:

1. Ryzen 5 2600 -> I would look at prices for the Ryzen 5 3600.  Today on PC Part Pciket, the 3600 was ~$0.60 more.  No brainer at that price.  Faster, more efficient, newest tech so it will last you longer.  2600 is great, but for that small of a delta it is worth it.  The B450M-A should be compatible.
2. SSD - Is this a SATA SSD or a NVME M.2 SSD?  Could you share the model #?  If SATA, I would definitely change it to a NVME SSD.  Much faster.  The Asus MB can use NVME drive for booting.  I can give you some more recommendations once I know what you were looking at.
3. 2 x Segates 2TB drive - I would have a hard time recommending drives that small now.  Additionally, anything 2T from seagate I would be a little concerned about unless it was their newer USB drives.  Seagate went through a period of time during the 2-4TB drives phase (when those were the biggest capacities) where they had a lot of problems.  Look up the Backblaze drive reliability reports.  Seagate did really poorly when Backblaze was using the <4TB drives.  4TB+ things seemed to get better.  Also, do you need two drives?  Would one 4+TB drive be better?  Redundancy is not a backup.  I'd get one drive and then pay for a cloud backup service instead.  Also, it just recently came out the the drive manufacturers are using a different type of media that has really slow writes.  Would be OK if you are just storing a lot of media, large game installs.  Again, if you can provide some more info as to why you were looking at 2x2TB, that would help to come up with something else.
4. Radeon RX570 - So, older tech, power hungry, but you would have to spend a lot more to get a meaningful upgrade.  I would look at Geforce GTX 1660/1660 Super/1660 Ti.  The 1650's are really similar perf to the RX570 but at higher cost. 

So, just a note about the Windows 10 install.  If you already have a license on the current chassis for Windows 7, you can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free.  I've upgraded all 3 of my boys' computers to it, plus the gaming computer we also have.  We even went from Windows 7 32 bit to Windows 10 64 bit in the process.  Look up "CNET Windows 10 free upgrade" for an article about it.  Here is what you would have to do.

1. Before you start tearing down the old computer, get the Product Key (install key) for your current Windows 7 install from either the sticker on the computer or use one of the available utilities to recover it from your current windows install.
2. Install all of the new hardware
3. Install Windows 7 onto the new computer using the Product Key already on the computer
4. Download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool
5. Run it and upgrade to Windows 7 to Windows 10
6. Let it run and then once complete, you will want to change your login to a Microsoft login - This will register the Windows 10 Digital license key with Microsoft - This is a important step as you will want to do a clean install of Windows 10
7. Create a USB install disk (need at least a 8GB usb stick) using the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool
8. Reboot and boot from the USB key to install Windows 10 - When it asks you if you have an install key tell it to continue without a key.  We will fix this later. Wipe out the partitioning on the boot drive to let Windows 10 set it up right
9. When it configures Windows, login with the microsoft account you setup in step 6 - This will allow Windows to contact Microsoft and use the key registered in step 6 to authorize this install of windows
10. Enjoy

It is more involved, but it does give you a clean Windows 10 install without the $100-$150 cost for Windows.  Again, this is assuming you have Windows 7 already on the computer.  If you don't, then this is all moot.

I have a couple of spare generic ATX cases if you'd like it.  I can put it outside so you can swing by and pick it up.

I can take pixxors in a moment.

In reply to Wxdude10 - Mike :

Dude, thanks for all of the info! I suppose I wasn't very clear, I already built the thing. Some of the components were already here (power supply, one of the HDD's) and some were from a friend (GPU). The SSD is an NVME and I have Windows 10 on it and it's what boots the PC (and yes, I did the free Win7 to Win10 upgrade!). On the HDD's, one is from the older build and one is new. The older one is dead and I need to take it back out. I need more storage because raw files and edits for videos are space hogs! Should I look into a 6-8 TB HDD? Different manufacturer? I've had 2 of my 3 Seagate HDD's fail, hmmm...

So far, my GTX 1060 (3 years old) in my laptop has never let me down, which has included editing 30-minute videos of 4K video at 30fps, starting with 2-3 hours of raw footage.  I'm ridiculously happy with my 1060.  With prices hanging around $100, it might be a good budget option.

Right now I have it paired with an 8th-gen i7 that can easily overclock to 4.10 (although I never have) with proper cooling and 32G memory, and I have yet to find any activity that will overwhelm it even at 2.2Ghz.

If you want to optimize for regular video editing, I'd say your storage and video card needs an upgrade over what you've specified.  Maybe I've been watching too much Linus Tech Tips, Jayztwocents, etc. but I'd be looking at something like the below.  But I do recognize that may double your budget.  

Boot: 240 GB SSD is okay

Scratch: 1 TB SSD, preferably NVME

Main Storage: 3 or more 4TB (or larger) drives (RAID 5) 

Video Card: GTX 1070 or 1660ti/super or better

Or, you may want to do what I'm in the midst of planning, and build a NAS.

I second the NAS or at least use at least 3 -5 drives in a RAID array within the existing case to provide some form of redundancy in case you lose a drive.

In reply to scardeal :

I should say that my video editing is silly little 10-30 minute YouTube videos shot with a GoPro1 or a really cheap Chinesium "action cam". I'm at 1080P max.

Stefan (Forum Supporter) said:

I second the NAS or at least use at least 3 -5 drives in a RAID array within the existing case to provide some form of redundancy in case you lose a drive.

I don't even know what that is. Walk me through it please?

NAS is great for storage, but I'm not sure I'd have the patience to render video from one. For that I'd still want storage on the main machine and then push the backup/archive to the NAS.

GPU appears to lag behind everything else. 1660TI would be my first upgrade but I pc game and hate sluggish graphics 

NAS = Network Attached Storage.  basically an external enclosure of some sort with a single drive or more that simply offers up storage space.  There's lots of info on the web about them and many different ways to do it.

Many network routers have USB ports that allow them to work as a NAS with an external drive.

There are also dedicated NAS solutions that provide RAID capabilities to better protect your data and improve speed.

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.  Basically a way to leverage less expensive disks drives to improve reliability through spreading data across an array of disks.  

There's several ways to setup a RAID array.  Mirroring is the most basic and duplicates the data between two drives (or sets of drives).  Striping spreads the data across several drives and it also improves speed.  Adding a spare or parity drive to striping provides a decent amount of redundancy.  Overkill would be pairing striping and mirroring, but that requires a lot of drives so it's left for hardcore data management/servers.

Think of it this way; You can make lots of power from a small engine, but it may not live too long at those levels.  If you increase the number of cylinders and make the same amount of power, chances are you'll suffer less failures and if you do have a failure, you'll be able to limp along longer until you can repair it.

Javelin (Forum Supporter) said:

Stefan (Forum Supporter) said:

I second the NAS or at least use at least 3 -5 drives in a RAID array within the existing case to provide some form of redundancy in case you lose a drive.

I don't even know what that is. Walk me through it please?

Something like this: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-451%2B

It basically provides a network drive that all computers on the network can access (if you permit them to) and it stores the data across multiple HDDs with some redundancy built in. If you lose one disk, you can replace it with a new disk of the same size and it'll be able to reconstruct the data as if nothing happened. You can even continue using the NAS while it's degraded due to the defective drive.

In reply to Stefan (Forum Supporter) :

To expand a little on what you wrote, I wouldn't recommend using striping without redundancy. Yes, it tends to improve performance by distributing reads and writes across multiple disks but without the redundancy that a parity drive provides, losing one of the arrays in a striped set will trash your whole disk set.

Agree with you on the stripe + mirror, that's a configuration you occasionally find in database servers as it tends to perform better, but it's overkill for a home NAS.

To clarify, I'd use a NAS for archival purposes, but keep the active project on a local drive.

A NAS is simply a dedicated device to provide network shares.  It often can provide other functionality as well.  Think of it like a dedicated file server that's easier to deal with.

Usually you're going to want a dedicated device to provide some sort of redundancy, so they offer options around that.  They can also be configured to improve throughput when using many drives.

Backstory:

I had built a file server running Ubuntu a couple years ago, and now that it's time to update it and add capacity, I'm a little hesitant because it feels a bit duck-taped together.  So, I'm going to try out 2-3 NAS products to replace it:

• FreeNAS
• UnRAID
• Synology (if I don't like the previous two)

With FreeNAS or UnRaid, they customize FreeBSD/Linux to make a computer into a storage appliance.  You can use generic hardware and it'll use that to run a file server.  The big difference is that once networking is up and running, there's a big friendly web interface to configure everything.  Adding drives and managing it is less quirky than managing volumes on a generic server install.  Synology/QNAP/etc. take the appliance idea even further and give you a custom-built box with their custom OS/firmware/etc. and have easier hardware integration and setup.  

Javelin (Forum Supporter) said:

Anything I should do? Tweak? Change?

Honestly? Nothing. Despite what other's claim and outside of an expansion board to get more USB 3.0/3.1, you're PC can handle 90% of anything that could be thrown at it. Even if you stepped up your video editing I doubt you'd need to go much further.

Still air-cooled?

Nothing.  The GPU is a little unbalanced for gaming but... that's not your purpose.

The machine will still do an excellent job with Davinci Resolve, just the wait time is longer when encoding.  And you can just batch the files and render them out while you sleep.  

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

Yes, still air-cooled. I can pour beer on it if it will help?

Kid#2 says the graphics card is the only weak spot in the build, everything is fairly well balanced. He approves. 

Jav,

  Sorry, I thought you were asking about the planned build.  Looks good all around.  The 2600 is really good.  Like the others said, The RX570 is the weak point, but it should be fine unless you are heavy hi-res gaming.

If I was to make a recommendation for disks, a lot of people who build home NAS units (data hoarders - There's a whole reddit on it) look for the Western Digital 8 to 12 TB external USB drives.  WD Elements I think.  They shuck the drives and throw out the external case.  You can get some good deals on drives this way.  ~$15/TB is a good price.  If I had to recommend drives that you don't shuck, I would look at:

Western Digital - But keep to 8 TB+, they recently went to SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) on drives lower than that without making it clear - Slow write

Hitachi/HGST

Toshiba X300 drives - I have a 5 TB in my system at home for a couple of years 24x7 - No problem.

I've heard some better things about the newer, larger Seagates

Do some hunting on Reddit ( bunch of reddits to find stuff).

Javelin (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

Yes, still air-cooled. I can pour beer on it if it will help?

No, cool WITH beer. Far easier, offers drinks too

But seriously, aside from a RAID setup to store footage you're in a good spot. Another detail to mention- that 550 power supply still has *some* headway, but not much especially when dealing with the very modifiable but power hungry AMD cards. Any upgrade you'd make would likely snowball pretty quick into new also getting a new processor/PSU, so I wouldn't sweat the basic 570 much unless you seriously needed graphical oomph; and even then, i'd probably be better to snag a used 1070/1060 6GB from an ex-bicoin miner than get an all new card.

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

The newest PC game I own is Need for Speed Underground, which came out in, 2003?

In reply to Javelin (Forum Supporter) :

Oh berkeley, yeah you're fine. Doom Eternal could probably run medium settings on your machine for around ~60FPS.

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

I have the original doom, does that count?