Hardware for Linux gaming PC
Hardware for Linux gaming PC
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure about the SSD. Has QLC substantially improved since hitting the market? If not I'd recommend going with something TLC-based.
You do have a point, the SSD is known to have very slow cache that Toms and others have reported dipping the sequential to 0MB/s
One could possibly get something like TeamGroup MP44L or SN580
Here's what I got when I upgraded: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Kn3hsL. In addition I have two sata ssds (1 TB & 2 TB) for data storage. It's similar to yours. For me performance was the priority. Doing most of my gaming on Linux.
Edit: As the ram in my build are expo models they run at 6000 MHz. No instabilities.
Btw, should i go with PCIe 4 or 5 for MB and GPU, DDR5 for RAM?
RAM is not PCIe, so that is an independent question, whether to go for DDR5. Unfortunately I am not deep enough into the matter to give you a real answer to your question
PCIe gen 5 is for the PCIe slots and NVMe storage slots, but they're backwards compatible; you can put a gen 3 component in a gen 5 slot and it will work at gen 3 speeds. Similarly, if you put a gen 5 component in a gen 4 slot, it will be limited to gen 4 speeds. Right now there's very little appreciable difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless you're spending a lot of money on the component (GPU/storage). Another thing to note is that Gen 5 requires that both the CPU and motherboard support it; a CPU with gen 4 support in a gen 5 motherboard will limit all the slots to gen 4 speeds.
RAM is a totally different standard that must be matched exactly for what the motherboard has; if it's a DDR5 motherboard then you have to use DDR5 RAM or it won't even fit in the slots. You can get a PCIe gen 5 motherboard and just use gen 4 SSDs or GPUs, that's perfectly fine and leaves you room to upgrade later.
Right, i sometimes mix DDR5 and PCIe5 together. Corrected.
Seems mostly fine to me, I game all the time on Linux (Bazzite gang 🤘) with a 3900X + 7900GRE, haven't had any significant issues aside from needing to make sure clock speeds were configured correctly on the GPU. Two ram sticks is the way to go with these systems as sometimes they don't support 4 sticks at full speed.
You're right that GPU passthrough is definitely more for tinkering or advanced users with very specific needs (usually professionals who need Windows/Nvidia and choose to run it in a VM rather than dual-boot), with a budget to match. For a gamer couple, having fully separate systems is going to be much less hassle and more resilient against failure.
The one thing I would recommend changing is the power supply, it's unironically the most important component in the computer because if it fails it can kill everything else, and the System Power 10 is known enough for being low-quality that discussions of that come up in web searches. Poor quality power supplies can damage your hardware and otherwise cause weird, intermittent issues even if everything seems to work fine most of the time, and will fail and shut off the computer when a good power supply would have just kept on chugging. Seasonic and Corsair are considered the best brands and have 10 year warranties - they're more expensive, but they're worth it. You want 80+ Gold or better these days, this is a buy once, cry once component.
If you don't have a UPS, I would also recommend getting one at some point, either one big shared unit (if they'll be close together) or two individual units. Having backup power will allow you to shut down the computers gracefully during a power outage, and prevents the worst-case scenario where the power goes out while the computer is installing updates and it turns into a brick.