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.
You should try to go for a Ryzen “3D” variant with extra cache if you can spare the extra money, it works wonders on some games. I’ve had no issues with mine (7900x3d) so far on Linux
thanks for the hint, I was now looking into it briefly. It seems to be particularly good for badly optimized games, or possibly older (like sc2, which is not really using multi-threading), is that correct? concerning offers… the closest to my current I found was 7800X3D which is with 376€ quiet more expensive, otherwise I found the AM4 variant 5700X3D for only 225€ (of course would need to change MB and ram), but can’t figure out, how the performance difference is. Do you have an idea if the letter is an upgrade from my original idea (7700)?
Yeah they usually have the most dramatic impact on games that have bad CPU optimization, which is a lot of them tbh
I think the 5700x3d is the first one they made, iirc it outperformed even the high end CPUs from the next generation in quite a few benchmarks, but probably not the 7000 gen. If you want to keep the possibility of upgrading, I would advise against the 5700x3d because that’s basically already the best for this socket. By all accounts it’s great value for its price though.
The Ryzen 9000 series is releasing on the 15th. The 9600X might also be worth a look for $279 (according to AMD).
Edit: scratch that. The first reviews are out and it doesn’t look good for the new CPUs