Honestly, I think you've placed too much emphasis upon one aspect of how a PC works and for the things you mention, with respect to software, the PCIe lanes availability is one of the last things I would consider.
CAD and 3D modeling (I do use a bit of Blender for comparison) is more dependent upon CPU, GPU and RAM. I wouldn't be concerning myself with how many PCIe lanes I have available to me when those components are more important for the project I am working on. Eg. does my graphics card have enough onboard RAM (VRAM) to manage the texture files this particular scene uses? Can my CPU smoothly make the changes I make to the scene and render a preview quickly? Will my CPU and/or GPU render this scene fast enough to my satisfaction?
Editing? From a video editing perspective, I think it's the only one where potentially a large amount of data is moved about. (And even then I'm not sure if it's one of those which fully takes advantage of PCIe 4.0.) But like with 3D work I'd look to CPU, GPU and RAM and also add in fast storage for a quicker work flow.
Podcasting? No experience, but I don't expect any heavy usage of PCIe lanes. And plenty of people do it without a heavily specced PC.
3D printers from what I see can connect to a PC, if that's how you want to use it, via USB, Wifi or ethernet. There's no need for additional PCIe lanes for it.
Do you need all that extra connectivity you mention? Only you can answer this question and at the moment you don't sound certain as to what your requirements actually are beyond wanting to future proof (to some extent). By all means, choose a motherboard with the most connectivity available so you have the option to use them when and if the time comes; but don't concern yourself too much with the theoretical maximum data transfer rates the PCIe standards state at the cost of other aspects of a build. As it is, it doesn't sound lik:e your intended/potential use case will utilise those sort of figures.
When you are ready, post in the build thread with your intended use case and budget and I'm sure one of the resident builders can direct and recommend a set of specifications suitable for you.
Case choices :
- Fractal Design Define R6, White, Tempered Glass
- Corsair Graphite Series 780T White Full Tower Case
- Be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 rev.2, Orange
- Fractal Design Meshify S2, White, Tempered Glass
I like the Corsair and Be Quiet but are the others better?
- (The likes of Scan and PC specialist only offer the Fractal design Define R6 withtou a window in their configurators. )
Processor
Threadripper 3960x
Motherboard
- Asus TRX40 Rog Strix Gaming
- Gigabyte TRX40 Designare + Thunderbolt card + 4x 4 th gen PCIe M2 SSD Addon cards
- MSI TRX40 Creator + 4x 4 th gen PCIe M2 SSD Addon cards
- ASRoc Taichi + 4x 4 th gen PCIe M2 SSD Addon cards
Been favouring the Gigabyte Designare due to the Total Thunderbolt and PCIe Gen 4.0 4x M.2 SSd add on cards, Dual Bios but it had only 2x 16 lane 16 size PCI slots, 2 x8 lane 16 size and a 1x slot as opposed to all 4 16 lane speed. Most custom suppliers only favour ASUS. Mixed into on MSI relaibility and bios. Any help here would be appreciated as this has been oen of the biggest decision problems.
Cooler
Dep on supplier been looking at
- Corsair Hydro Series H100i RGB PLATINUM
- Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML360 RGB TR4 Edition, 360mm All-in-One Hydro CPU Cooler,
- Corsair Hydro Series H115i PRO RGB, 280mm All-In-One Hydro CPU Cooler
- Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 FAN CPU cooler
- CorsairH150I PRO CPU cooler
GPU Graphics Card
This has been another ream decision problem:
- Quadro RTX 4000
- EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti BLOWER GAMING 11GB GDDR6
Solidworks appears to be the main 'fly in the ointment' fussy fKR demanding a quadro as for most others the Geforce seems to be a btter choice for use with:
- Solidworks, Vectorworks, Rhino, Mari, Modo, Google Sketchup, Autocad
- Maya, 3d Studio Max, Katana, Cinema 4 D, Softimage
- Mudbox, Z-Brush,
- Blender, V Ray, Renderman, Encoder,
- Adobe Premier, After Effects, Nuke, Audition, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign
So a mix of CAD, Media Creation, 3d Animation, 3D Character Creation, 3D Modeling, Podcasting, Editing, Visual Effects, Rendering, Encoding, both single and multi thread.
Operating System Drive SSD drive.
One of the following NVMe
- 1 TB 4th Gen Corsair Force
- 1 TB 4th Gen Gigabyte Aurus
- 1 TB 4th Gen Seagate Firecus 560
Storage Drive
Raid 1 Pair of
- 4tb Seagate Ironwolf Hard Drives
Have a fair bit of data and looking for a primary backup, will look into a netwrk drive and online backup later
DVD Writer
ASUS x24 DVD/CD Re-Writer
Not that fussed as long as one does the job and fits in the case
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Custom Build companies top choices
Scan Uk, PC Specialist and Amari are top choices for a custom build any experience with them?
Scan and amari offer 3 years RTB and 1 year onsite warrantee
I could most likly build it but research shows not much saving if any as the companies can buy in bulk and somewhat vervous about breakign th £4-700 pound board and £1350 processor with clumbsey handling first time... would rather practice on a £100 model I can f up first.