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I’m looking for the following with the system:
Here’s the parts list I have so far:
Does this setup look OK? Is there anywhere that I would need to upgrade, or anywhere where my current choice is overkill?
Thank you in advance for any advice!
If you're going for VR, I suppose you'll never have too much power. Maybe wait for a bit longer and pick up one of AMD's new Big Navi GPUs instead? The Sapphire Pulse RX 6800 perhaps, coming out later this month? If your budget allows. It's quite a bit more expensive.
You definitely can. I've got an R4, and I don't see any reason to replace it any time soon.
If you go with the CPU and GPU you mentioned, 650W should suffice I suppose. Depends largely on the GPU you pick. All those hard drives suck a few watts as well of course.
I read somewhere that MSI's custom Nvidia designs tend to be better. Personally I don't think I'll even consider their hardware in the future, unless there are no other options available.
Modern components will turn off fans when they aren't needed.
The trick, when you do need active cooling, is to have big heatsinks and big fans. A slow-turning large fan will be much quieter, and lower pitched, than a small fan turning quickly, but it will move the same amount of air.
SSDs are entirely silent.
I've also found various threads complaining about high idle power consumption (example ). Is it something you've come across? It looks like it applies to all RX 5700 XTs though, not just Sapphire, and not just Linux. It seems it's related to the memory clock speed getting "stuck" at maximum when using high refresh rates and/or multiple displays. I can't tell from those discussions if it's a real issue or not...
If I'm just using a not-so-fancy single monitor maybe it's fine, although I wonder if I'd run into that problem if I then add the Valve Index, since I presume that counts as a second display?
Hmm... I think that would be out of budget for me. The RX 5700 XT is probably at the top end of what I'd like to spend.
In fact, if I'm not going to go for VR immediately, would it make sense to economise with a lower-end GPU for now? Or is it hard to save much compared to the cost of an RX 5700 XT while still having good performance?
I do my gaming on a single TV screen, so can't help you there. I did see reports of problems from people with multiple monitors a few months ago, perhaps using a certain combination of outputs, but I thought those were dealt with already. There's a long thread somewhere on the GOL forums, can't remember the title.
My idle power consumption has been fine since I bought the GPU about a year ago. Haven't had any trouble at all, in fact.
Well, you could get an RX 5500 XT or something for half the price, but I have no idea if that would be sufficient for Elite Dangerous. I gather it's about as fast or a bit faster than an older RX 580, but consumes less power. Of course, the 5700 XT is significantly more powerful.
My own strategy is to splurge for the best hardware I can reasonably afford at the time, and then ignore any new hardware completely for a few of years.
Obviously everyone has their favourite distro/desktop environment, that they'll happily argue about at length, and I don't want to turn your thread into one of those threads. But. I'd personally recommend Kubuntu or KDE Neon over straight Ubuntu. You get the same user base, third-party support, hardware testing at Canonical's facility, and the hybrid conservative/forward-looking release model, but you get a more easily customisable experience. If you like Gnome, though, feel free to discount this as the ravings of a lunatic.
As I understand it, Minecraft itself is fine with OpenJDK, but OptiFine (which brings some performance enhancements and some niceties) needs Oracle's Java. If you want to run multiplayer servers, Spigot helps a lot; I ran a four-player server on a Raspberry Pi 2 for a while using Spigot, and it was fine.
Last edited by CatKiller on 22 November 2020 at 10:47 pm UTC
View PC info
Overall you're worrying about a lot of stuff you shouldn't be. Most peripherals, GPU cooling systems, and JAVA stuff would obviously work just the same on any sane distro. Ubuntu is a good choice since it has long had a solid if 3d party support for the latest MESA and almost official for the latest kernel(s).
You're going for the top ATI GPU (ex-top.. but nevermind), a mid-higher end CPU and topping it off with an old cranky HDD? No reason it won't work, albeit sub-optimally.
Also if noise is a special concern, sticking to the stock cooler is questionable. You're forking out on a 5700 but baulking at spending some dough on a tower cooler...
Most of your real concerns have little to do with Linux.
Last edited by mos on 23 November 2020 at 5:26 pm UTC
View PC info
Also, even if you go with the 3000 series Ryzen, I'd suggest going for a X570 chipset motherboard which will play nicer with 5000 series Ryzen in the future (and enables you to use the latest NVMe PCIe gen4 solid state drives too).
I recently got myself a 1TB PCIe gen3 SSD which runs at 3500MB/s read and 3000MB/s write speeds, and favour NVMe over slower SATA-based SSDs (There is little price difference nowadays).
If it was me building a new machine for myself, I'd also aim for a new AMD RX 6800 graphics card to compliment the above.
I use Debian 11 Bullseye (Testing) as my operating system of choice, and it is sufficiently up-to-date for me to play games with my AMD Ryzen 5 1600 and NVidia GTX 1080ti graphics without having to mess around with kernels and drivers. The drivers available in Testing (currently Nvidia 450.80.02) are perfectly fine for my gaming needs (I've been playing RAGE 2 in Proton at 2560x1440 and Ultra settings, and I play 7 Days To Die native at 4K Ultra).
Also, recommend getting a case with good air-flow if you are aiming for a high-end gaming system. That's another area where I thought I had made sufficient provision with my main machine, but it could do with slightly better cooling.
Last edited by g000h on 23 November 2020 at 6:52 pm UTC