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.
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.