Dear fellow enthusiasts,
my wife and I finally got stable enough in our living situation, that we can buy some new hardware (ours is 7+ years, while hers is a laptop). So I went out into the wild wild web to catch up with 7years of hardware progress (I am technological affine, but not following the trends in any way) and wanted to run by my first iteration of a setup with the infinite wisdom of this community.
For the background: both of us only use Linux at home and at work and do not plan to change this. We do not play AAA games, the most demanding game we play as of late is probably Dota2, ARK and GTNH (a Minecraft mod pack, that eats your ram for breakfast). Hence we won’t need cutting edge hardware, more like an upper end budget setup. Anyway, with my last PC I had tons of troubles with the mainboard, the GPU (nvidia) and other stuff, even though I thought I checked stuff in advance, so I wanted to have an outside opinion.
TL;DR: here my draft, with prices from an online store:
- Mainboard: ASRock B650M-H/M.2+ 97.90€
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7™ 7700, 8 core, 3.800 MHz base, AM5, 32 MB L3 cache 227.90€
- GPU: XFX Radeon RX 6650 XT Speedster SWFT 210 Core Gaming, RDNA 2, GDDR6, 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI 2.1 249.90€
- RAM: ADATA DIMM 32 GB DDR5-4800 (2x 16 GB) Dual-Kit, 84.90€
- PSU: be quiet! System Power 10 650W 61.90€
- Storage: Crucial P3 Plus 1 TB, SSD PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe, M.2 2280, Reading: 5.000 MB/s, Writing: 3.600 MB/s 69.99€
- CPU cooler: be quiet! Pure Rock 2 Black 39.89€
- case: generic 50.00€
sum: ~880.00€
we don’t mind to pay a little bit more here and there, but I do not see any real benefit to it. Even storage should be fine for our purpose and can be easily expended (the MB has two M.2 slots, and even Sata3 should be fine for raw storage).
ah, and we would buy two of those… My first idea was to buy one PC with two GPUs with passthrough of GPU and USB input (sitting anyway close), but I got the impression, that is at this moment more something to tinker, then to run “in production”.
Best wishes, me
PS: if this community is not correct, I apologize and would kindly ask for the better fit.
I’m only running a single eGPU + USB Controller passthrough and while it took some tinkering to get it started it has been smooth sailing afterwards. The B650 series of motherboards has mostly had good IOMMU groupings so there’s a good chance your motherboard will allow you to play around with some KVM/QEMU/VFIO if you wanna try gpu passthrough to a virtual machine.
Regarding Case: Generic I would look into getting one with dust protection (bottom and front) and preferably sound proofing. Having the dust get stuck outside the computer makes cleaning so much simpler and having a quiet computer is lovely.
Personally I’m a fan of the Fractal Design Define 7 but I imagine you can get a case with the dust protection and sound proofing much cheaper than that if you take the time to look around and read some reviews, especially if you don’t need E-ATX or multiple 3.5’’ disk slots.
that is a good point, our flat is in an older house and feels like we need to vacuum every day… not speaking of the two meowing furrballs roaming around… that bringts me to another important case-related topic… I’ll never again buy a case in which the power buttons are on top… one of my cat was walking over the case and his paw was still small enough to press the power button… in the middle of a dota match… at least it lead to a good story