Overview / Usage

In designing this build I started making a list of all of the uses my current PC has and looking at how best or optimize and compartmentalize them. This build will need to,

• Serve a development environment for side projects and Computer Science classes.
• Run a high school independent study program. I teach, Game Design with Unity, Animation, Digital photography and Digital media.
• Run the latest games and windows specific development

Methodology / Approach

This build will be setup as a triple boot system. Instead of partitioning one hard drive or SSD for multiple operating systems each operating system will get it's own SSD. I'm OK budgeting for the extra SSDs since M2 SSD drive are pretty reasonably priced these days and the mother board selected for this build supports up to 5 M2 drives. It feel like only a few years ago you were lucky to find a motherboard with more than one M2 slot.

With each boot environment I want to minimize the number or programs that try to always run unrelated to the main purpose of the boot sector. While virtual machines would be faster for quick switching my environment, the down side is more unneeded things running. With my primary uses staying focused for long periods of time is more important then quick switching.

The first boot-able environment will be my development environment. The OS will be Ubuntu for the overwhelming community support and availability of Ubuntu deployment servers. I've found with setting up programing environments I end up with a bunch of stuff trying to always run to mirror the resources of different deployment environment. The resource usage of development databases, Redis and other software which defaults to always on is minimal but can add up.

I want to use this environment as part of my home lab. VS Code IDE and Git is about all I need to write code but this computer is powerful enough to do more. I intend to setup virtual machines to simulate different deployment environments or docker hosting. With 16 cores in the Intel Core i9-12900K I will be able to easily run several virtual machines at once at once on VMware. This will be a huge step up over my current computer which realistically can only run 1 Virtual machine at a time with a noticeable lag.

The second boot-able environment will be my teaching environment. The OS will be Windows 10 to match the student laptops the school issues. I will install software to match what is included on the student laptops. The software is mostly Unity and Adobe products.

Because the student laptops are issued to minors they are heavily locked down to prevent them from installing unauthorized programs. As a result the student laptops are mostly stuck with the version of software they deploy with each year. It is important to keep my teaching environment mirrored to the student laptops for the sake of compatibility and having a matching UI in software. If an update has UI/UX changes then it's significantly harder for students to follow along on a demonstration.

The last boot-able environment is going to be gaming and windows specific development. The combination of a MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 3070, 32GB of ram and an Intel Core i9-12900K will be able to run every game out there easily for the next 5 years on high settings. The OS will be Windows 10/11. I haven't been able to upgrade my current computer since it doesn't have a TPM 2.0 chip. I will probably upgrade to Windows 11 at some point.

To maximize multitasking and make the most of limited desk space I will use a 4 monitor setup. The tentative layout is,

• Monitor A: IDE Display
• Monitor B: Main display, Gaming
• Monitor C: Email, Chat or project research. Monitor C is positioned such that I can skim my email while stuck in a zoom meeting and still make eye contact. It's also in a good spot to have documentation or stack exchange debugging research up while working on monitor A and B.
• Monitor D: Zoom OR Command prompts, development servers ect. With my office layout this position gives a nice view of my bookshelf for a Zoom background.

I'm going to have to play around with what works best. With clamp on gas spring Vesa mounts I'll have a lot of wiggle room to figure out what works best.

For the top down view I drew the monitors to scale in Adobe Illustrator to make sure they would fit on my desk. For the front perspective view I just did a free hand semi single point perspective to give to give an idea of how it will all fit.. The M2 SSD graphics were also made in Illustrator.

Technologies Used

Tech specs

• Power supply: Seasonic FOCUS PX-850 Power Supply
• SSD: 3x (1 TB) WD BLACK SN850 SSD
  • I plan to pickup additional SSDs for a total of 3 to take advantage of the 5 M2 slots on the mother board. Down the line I will add a large hard drive for bulk storage.
• Video Card / GPU: MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 3070 Video Card
  • The 3070 series video cards will effortlessly run all modern games on high settings. This GPU will support prototyping VR games in Unity where my initial prototypes usually aren't optimized.
• Case: Silent Base 802 White
  • I'm really excited for the Silent Base 802 cases filter system. As a owner of 2 German Shepherd I vacuum up about a kitchen sized trash bag every week mostly from them shedding. This is extremely problematic with computer's trying to continuously move air through. With removable cleanable filters only the smallest bits of dust will be able to make it into the case which I can clean out with compressed air.
• Keyboard: CORSAIR K68 RGB Gaming Keyboard
  • Pulling late nights and having a backlit keyboards is a game changer. I hope people aren't spilling drinks on their keyboard so often they buy a spill resistant keyboard...
• Mouse: Logitech G502 HERO Gaming Mouse
• Heatsink: MSI MEG CORELIQUID S360
• Motherboard: MPG Z690 Carbon WIFI
  • This motherboard fully integrates modern tech. I has an abundance of USB C and 3.2 Type-A ports with 4 USB2.0 Type-A ports for keyboard mouse duty. Having support for 5 M2 SSDs is esential to this build.
• Memory: 2 x 16 GB
  • When 32GB stops being enough the mother board has 2 open ram slots to upgrade to 64GB.
• CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K
  • 16 Total cores! I could allocate an entire set of cores to a few virtual machines and still run most games. The P core, E core arrangement is new to me but it makes sense. Most of the stuff running on a computer would be happy with the CPU power of a Raspberry pi. By including E cores to handle these low resource task the P cores are left free focus on high performance task like games, compiling large projects.

Monitors

Monitors A, C and D are used monitors that keep kicking after maybe a few to 10+ years of service. This is fine for monitors that mostly pull productivity duty where response time is unimportant.

• Dell s2209w $25 garage sale find.
• Samsung Sync Master 2233. Sticker on the back says I've been running this one since 2009.
• Gateway FPD2275W. Sticker on the back says 2006. Last year I replaced a blown capacitor to get more life out of it.

Which brings us to the main point. It's time for a new monitor. Monitor B will be a new,

• Dell 27 Gaming Monitor: S2721DGF

I'm not made of money to replace all the monitors with new ones. I'll probably still be using this new Dell 27" in 2030...

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