The current boards / chipsets are pretty mature now, so you can get some fairly good deals. I often suggest waiting for the next gen if you're thinking of buying a new system and current tech has been out for a while, but I am apprehensive about the future couple of years because of the impact of COVID-19 - it may push prices up based on availability of product or components to make new products, and increased demand as the world trends to a more mobile-based work style. If budget is not an issue, by all means, the i9-10980XE is one hell of a chip, and a custom water loop would be ideal to keep that baby humming along nicely as they have a high TDP so they're going to run hot. I hate to say it, but you may want to look at AMD if you specifically want high number of cores, mainly because they are priced far more attractively at that level. I used to always run EVGA boards, but my last few builds have been with ASUS Maximus boards and I have no complaints.. of course if something were to go wrong, I don't expect to have much joy with their after-sale service, unlike EVGA who are absolutely legendary in that regard.
As far as GPU goes, I used to *always* SLI, but in recent years the top line GPUs have become so powerful that it don't think SLI is all that necessary anymore outside of wanting to show off impressive benchmark scores. Plenty of games/software just aren't optimized for SLI anymore, so ..meh. If you're intending to use your machine for compute activities rather than gaming, that might be a reason for multiple GPUs, but otherwise I don't think I'd bother, just go top of the line 2080Ti single card and put a water block on it.
I recommend the Samsung NVMe drives - the m.2 500GB 970 Pro in particular has been awesome for me as the primary drive, and for secondary drives I use 'older' 2.5" SSDs, seems to work well.
RAM - look for somewhere around 4000MHz, Corsair Dominators have always proved reliable for me, although with a relatively high price point. GSkill have lately been very good at doing more for less $ in recent years, so have a look at them - just watch the timings though as some of the high MHz sticks also have ugly high timings which basically offsets all the gains from having the high MHz speed rating.
I haven't run a custom loop for some years, but from my dated experience, EK was pretty much king back then and still is now.
You will notice a HUGE difference from your current system lol.. massive.
Also a good monitor matters - imo 27" 1440p 120-144MHz seems to be the sweet spot, IPS is better for accurate colors, but quality is often an issue these days - a lot of them have bad back light bleed, so it's a bit of a lottery trying to get a good one. The new LG screens might be ok, but ignore the 1ms response time claim, that's just a marketing gimmick that is unusable in gaming. The standard 5ms (like other IPS monitors) is fine though, according to most reports.
Please keep us updated, and take photos for the ModsRigs pages!
post edited by Nereus - 2020/05/01 16:56:06