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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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