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.

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[–] jrgd@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Largely things look good. It might be a good idea looking for a motherboard that has Intel ethernet rather Realtek. I'm also a bit curious if the barebones VRM design on the board is adequate as well.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Good point, thanks. I had the same with a tiny homelab, which I assembled recently. What do you mean with barbone Vrm design? I'm not familiar with this

[–] claymore@pawb.social 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

VRMs (voltage regulator modules) are what bring the power to the CPU and these can get quite hot on high power processors. If you look around the socket on a motherboard, usually above and opposite the RAM, they are the big square/rectangle shaped components. Most high-performance motherboards have heatsinks on top of them to keep them from overheating, which your MB does not have.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

thanks for the clarification. I always thought those giant heat sinks, which one often find on gaming boards are snake oil to make it look cooler ;) but anyway... the CPU I am currently aiming for has a TDP of 65W, so that should be fine... GPU I don't know yet, there I might reiterate. I'll definitely keep it on my radar.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

what do you think about the ASRock B650M PG LIGHTNING, or the ASRock B650 PG LIGHTNING? latter is unfortunately not in stock, but besides the missing heatsink on top and the size I also do not really see a practical difference between the two

[–] claymore@pawb.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The B650M is a smaller size and therefore has less features, but overall they seem similar. Biggest difference would be the integrated SSD heatsink and better VRM design + cooling of the non-M version. Also the second SSD slot being connected to the CPU instead of the chipset, if you ever want to put in two M.2 drives. One thing to watch out for is that both of these boards use a Realtek LAN chip which sometimes can be problematic with Linux.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

ok, thanks. yes I noticed the realtek nic, but unfortunately I haven't found a single MB with an intel chip below 200euro. So if this really causes issues, I'll just get a PCIe NIC

[–] moody@lemmings.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would look for the next generation of GPU if you can find it. You should be able to find an RX 7600 for about the same price, and would get better performance and longer expected useful lifetime from it.

The one-PC-two-users thing is indeed more of a gimmick than an actually useful prospect. You can find videos of it being done, but it's really not as nice as one would hope for.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

they are a bit more pricy, but not much, so I changed that, thanks :)

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 1 month ago

Honestly, go for a Ryzen 5 and use the extra money you save to buy a new gen AMD GPU. You won't notice a difference between the 7700 and the 7600X. Gaming never utilizes the 6 cores even when having videos and stuff up in the background.

Always overspend on the GPU instead of the CPU for gaming.

[–] minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The components are well balanced. You might want to take a look at PSU Cultists Tier List.

Maybe take a look at the Thermalright (Peerless) Assassin CPU Coolers. They are testing well and are very affordable.

Lastly, you should make sure your mainboard has everything you need (M.2 slots, RAM slots, ...). Upgrading a mainboard is not that much money.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

thanks for the input and the link. Yes the MB I am worried about the most. The last I had shipped with a buggy BIOS, and the published updates were even worse... but it is really hard to know in advance, otherwise the listed one has all IO, that I need.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Also, check what kind of update mechanisms it uses. For mine, you can just plug a USB drive into a specially marked port, and it will flash the BIOS automatically (provided the drive is set up in a particular way), and you can also do it from BIOS.

Some have a button, instead. Just know what you're getting, in case you need it to rescue the BIOS.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

the one I listed checked all boxes, good thing to look for, for my last one I still needed to have an obsolete windows partition...

[–] Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Looks good. Just be aware that that 2.1 HDMI port is gonna work in 1.4 mode, cuz the HDMI consortium sucks and they don't want to open source it or smth

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

thanks for the hint, I read not to good stuff about HDMI as well as of late. If that fails, I'll just use the DP connectors :)

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe try !linux_gaming@lemmy.world or !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks, is it possible to just cross post to another community, or do I need to copy& paste the text? Haven't some much posting on Lenny yet

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Crossposting should be fine.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

ah, found the button, thanks

[–] anzo@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just to put some, apparently unconsidered, idea on the table... I'm quite happy with my zfs raid array of 6 hdd, a "workstation" type of motherboard, and loads of ram (2x64). I didn't use the latest hardware trends, DDR 4 actually with 8-cores Xeon CPU. And added a GPU so gaming is covered. Prices where at your range. Here I hope to hoard loads of multimedia (holidays videos, etc.)

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

thanks for your input. for that purpose I recently built a low power N100 homeserver with a zfs setup. Electricity is really expensive here, so I didnt want to run a performance CPU and GPU 24h (even in idle)

[–] lupec@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm no expert but I see no obvious red flags there, should be good to go!

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".

I'm under the same impression, I check it every few months but it looks clunky and not worth the trouble. Not something I'd like to rely on right now, that's for sure.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I really would love to have such a setup, but only if I have a "stable" daily driver as fallback.

[–] lupec@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Nix is on my infinitely long list of stuff to get into, when I'm in better shape.