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.

    • Lupec
      1•4 months ago

      The only way I see myself ever giving it another go is if I manage to get into my NixOS setup for easy replication or something, too much manual tweaking otherwise.

      The compromise I arrived at after I migrated to Linux was booting windows off a VHD file on a USB SSD when I really need it. That way I get a portable, fully performant install without it wasting any disk space or messing with my partitions.