So After few weeks of faultless work yesterday my system literally died. When I hit power button on my case it started to boot and after about 3 seconds just turned off completely. No power led's on motherboard, no smoke or smell of melted plastic, no signs of life whatsoever. Tried few different outlets - same thing. Checked just PSU (seasonic prime gold 1300) and it seems ok (vent is working). Need to plug another PSU to confirm if it's MB...... damn, that's exactly what I needed right now.
Jeez...that absolutely sucks. Both PSU and Motherboard? :- (
In last 10 years I've build 20 PCs at least...and never had a single faulty component (or my memory can be getting senile...but I would have remembered some serious stuff). The fault rate is usually sub 2perc. for most PC components, so someone does eventually get unlucky.
It's seems counter-intuitive why it's often very expensive motherboards, but they're very niche, small run products. The most expensive board ever, Asus ROG Dominus (2000 euro) had fault rate of 50+ perc. :- ).
Just one thing to check... memory issues often manifest in crashing PCs into cold boot that require pulling the plug from socket (or PSU) to restart. Asus board did this quite often to me when I tried testing memory speeds on X399 (Zenith Alpha gen1).
The board doesn't give you any meaningful Q-Code? Did you try clearing the CMOS?
secondary HDD - 10TB SkyHawk Surveillance HDD 3.5" SATA 7200RPM
Absolutely don't buy "Surveillance" HDD :- ). Specialized HDDs, like for Surveillance (which are heavily optimized for continual write, at expense of random), or Backup drives (much faster write speeds, but far worse reads,etc..) are really only meant for that particular purpose.
This is different compared to NAS drives, which really are just rebranded regular drives, not actual enterprise level drives. Those are all-purpose.
But this leads to your second question:
In terms of general use, I usually just install my programs on my main NVMe hard drive and my assets on a secondary HDD (mechanical) A friend of mine suggested using the NVMe main drive (or even a NVMe secondary) for scene projects and regular use assets (ie megascans/poliigon) - is there any merit to this as to whether its best practice for loading times?
Yes, running everything on SSD is massively beneficial. It doesn't have to be
NVMe (SSDs that use much faster PCI-e instead of SATA as interface). In fact, such drives are mainly beneficial for continuous read/writes of large amounts of data, think transfering 200 GB of Photos. Loading 2GB 3dsMax project, 2GB Photoshop project, with 1GB assets? Not even a million fraction of second improvement, because those are bottlenecked by their respective software IO speeds.
It's possible to buy 6.5TB Enterprise PCIe drives from Samsung on eBay at 1/2 the original cost. Not super cheap, but comparatively to buying 3x 2TB mainstream drives. And they offer power-loss protection, massive lifetimes, etc.. but none of those are replacement for back up.
I am using these ones
https://www.ebay.de/itm/6-4TB-Samsung-PM1725a-5DWPD-Enterprise-TLC-V-NAND-PCIe-3-0-x8-NVMe-HHHL-AIC-SSD/372860281583But even regular SATA (even the cheapest QLC drives like Samsung 860 QVO) are much better (and silent!)
Cooling - i was recommended to get the Noctua NH-U14S but a user on this forum is saying he is getting 100c temps on a stress test?
A friend of mine bought the Coolermaster MasterLiquid ML360 RGB TR4 EDITION and is saying under coroan rendering, never goes above 65c which is great i guess. It has 3x120mm fans.
Stress tests are meant to stress your PC, they are up to 20C higher than regular usage.
Your friend has the same CPU you are looking at? ML360 is definitely not better than Noctua. It's regular Asetek AIO like all other, only with bigger coldplate stuck to it (but the water inlet is still only in middle).
It will do ok job for 3960/3970X because they have dies in middle but definitely not better.
Only compare temperatures if your friend has the exact CPU, runs the exact benchmark, and has the same conditions (Room temperature, case airflow). Otherwise all these "He has that, and She has that" are absolutely random uncomparable numbers.