I'm considering to build a new machine for personal use, but it's been a while since I've upgraded, so I'm looking for some thoughs about this one.
Currently I'm running Linux about 98% of the time, with some occasional gaming on Windows. Mostly normal desktop browsing and software dev work, hence plenty of RAM and CPU to keep dev feedback loops tight (Rust, JVM languages, web stuff, containers, VMs, the usual). One new SSD so far, but I have a bunch of 3.5" drives and one M2 I'll probably bring over from my current machine as well. Hence the case should support more than two 3.5" disks.
I'm not looking to upgrade the GPU at this point, I think my current 2080 will still be good enough to power the occasional game and my two 1440p 144hz displays for desktop usage. But I want to prep the system for an upgrade in a gen or two without major changes (meaning the PSU should have enough headroom and reasonably future proof connectors).
I don't care about RGB. Its acceptable if it can be configured to a dim white or single color as ambient light, but no LEDs are preferred if two parts are equal in all other regards.
3.5" spinning disks often use quite a bit of power. If you don't need them all the time I'd buy something to connect them easily over USB.
I usually just buy whatever is a good price vs performance. Buying an overpowered PSU has an effect on the efficiency of that PSU (often it gets worse).
Anyway, maybe one consideration might be sound. I like silent systems so for a system where you'd spend loads of time on I'd rather have it completely silent. That would require drastic changes, but maybe good to check how much noise each component makes while idle, common usage and when stressed.
Cannot easily see, but might also be good to check if your keyboard and mouse are still nice. Though unfortunately the nice keyboards often have RGB.
That's good input, external disks or a NAS might actually make sense here to widen my options (two spinning disk bays seem to be the norm in cases these days, so I had to look around). Though I'll have to check what it does to the price. And I don't want to plug things in and out all the time, so I would need to be something that does standby on it's own rather well.
As for the PSU, that's true as well. I'm really not certain about it, so I went a little overboard I think. I do want to drop in upgrade the 2080 to a newer card eventually (whatever follows 40xx or the AMD equivalent), but not now. I'll definitely look into that again.
Sound: Quiet is nice, hence the case with some insulation and a door to open for heavy workloads. Though I don't need it completely quiet, usually I have headphones on with music/background twitch/whatever even when programming. And I've never did liquid cooling, so I kept my distance. Could be a mistake, not sure.
Periphery is not a consideration, I'm happy with the stuff I have right now. Leopold FC900R black keyboard with MX blues, and some razer mouse whichs name I forgot. Bought it after Logitech spammed me with too many irritating, unskippable twitch ads, and to be honest I'm positively surprised. I didn't think highly of razer before that, had Logitech stuff for as long as I remember. But it's neat except for the nag software, though that's a non-issue on Linux.
Running drives over usb is completely wrong. It will never match sata latency and performance and causes cpu load for packet juggling. On the topic of the power supply just google “psu efficiency curve”, they operate best at ~50-75% load and a beefy psu won’t run its fan.
True, but some of my spinning disks are just file graves with documents, photos, videos, prepared VM images to copy and use and similar stuff. I would never run a system off a USB drive, but having two or three SSDs (the board supports up to three M2) and a bunch of external disks for the less accessed files could be a viable setup. Like one Linux system disk, one for /home and one windows+games disk.