cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/25475442

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.

  • @bazsyEnglish
    13•1 month ago

    The draft is pretty good. Only a few points to consider changing:

    • That is an entry level Motherboard which may limit your upgrades in the future. It overheats with a 16 core ryzen 9.
    • The ram size is good, but the speed and latencies are just as important nowadays. A 6000 MT/s CL30 Expo ram could improve CPU performance, but it’s a kind of OC so not every combination is fully stable at the highest speeds.
    • Especially with competitive and indie games it’s easy to run them at high FPS. I would consider getting a 1440p high refresh rate (144+ Hz) monitor if you don’t have one already. It’s a huge upgrade coming from 1080p60Hz.
    • @[email protected]OP
      1•1 month ago

      thank you for the input and the references, this is highly appreciated!

      • The concerns for the motherboard I am already looking into, do you have any thoughts on 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
      • it was funny to me, that nobody commented on the ram yet, that was literally the cheapest I found for the MB. So I can try to reiterate that part
      • concerning monitor I was recently very lucky. I friend of mine fried his own and bought a new one, then he ask me, if I want to have it in order to try to fix it. Turned out the internal PSU was fried… so I tossed it out, soldered a barrel jack to the input wires and now use a 20euro external PSU. its a 1440p monitor with 165Hz.
      • @bazsyEnglish
        1•1 month ago

        That ATX board would be great. The mATX B650M PG is also better than the previous one, it is good enough. If you can find the B650M-HDV/M.2 in stock that is even better if you don’t need 3 m.2 slots.

        That monitor was indeed a lucky deal. It looks to be a good combination for this setup.