2020: Time for a new desktop

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by ET2SN

Water cooling kinda died down after the "big horse power"/bit coin mining thing died out.

Think about it, would you put a fish tank on top of your TV and stereo? In case anything goes wrong, it will go wrong in very big way.

Silicon, electricity, and water still don't mix.

Even a fully sealed water cooling set up will require maint. after a while.

Just asking: is there any new alternative to air coolers, good air coolers? I know these can work well since I use a good (and BIG one) myself (Noctua ND15), still there are two or three games that can out the temps to dangerous maximums bove 90°C that you do not want to run as default temps without wanting to shorten the lifespan of your CPUs, it happens even easier in VR.

[McBeck]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Just asking: is there any new alternative to air coolers, good air coolers? I know these can work well since I use a good (and BIG one) myself (Noctua ND15), still there are two or three games that can out the temps to dangerous maximums bove 90°C that you do not want to run as default temps without wanting to shorten the lifespan of your CPUs, it happens even easier in VR.

Too late for me to jump in, but here are a few comments for others:
1) AMD Ryzen 3600 is king at this point. It may loose a few FPS compared to Intel, but at a MUCH lower cost. If you wan to overclock Intel makes it impressivly difficult for you as you have to buy a specific line of CPU and MB.
2) The AMD MB to get should be ASUS and with the new 550 chipset to support PCI express 4. Asrock has recently seen poor quality.
3) Cooling, this has been tested extensively on various channels, BUT the fact of the matter is that closed loop water cooling is only better if you simply dont like big coolers like the Noctua ones. Aircooling using Noctua 15 is still just as good as the best watercooled ones.

[McBeck]

The setup I have in mind for my next build:
mATX (because I dont need a build in CD/DVD drive)

ASUS PRIME B550M-A motherboard
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Wraith Spire CPU
Noctua NH-D15 SE-AM4
ASUS Radeon RX 5700 XT ROG STRIX OC - 8GB GDDR6 RAM
Fractal design meshify C tower mini (because it looks amazing!)

Add MEM, disks, PSU etc as you need.