Linux and the AMD 2400G / 3400G

I’m hoping to build a small (possibly fanless) system to act as a source for my stereo DAC (ModWright modded Oppo BDP-105) It needs to run JRiver Media Center and a web browser that will stream from Amazon Prime and BitChute. I also need to stream audio from Spotify (possibly through the browser) The pc will be hooked up to the DAC via USB, and I’ll be using a Bluetooth keyboard & mouse. The pc will have a hard connection to the router. I haven’t decided on a case but it will likely either be a Streacom FC10 or I’ll go with an inexpensive micro-ITX case/board.

I don’t need a lot of graphics power, and I’d like to avoid the Windows tax. Since JRiver has a Linux version I’d like to give it a shot. Given the requirements I’m leaning toward an APU, 8-16Gb of ram, an M.2 boot/apps drive, and a 2T SSD data drive for CD/SACD rips, and DSD downloads. No real need to overclock.

Does Linux work well with the 2400G? (any guesses as to how long before I can rely on it for the 3400G?)

Recommended Distro? (I’m thinking Ubuntu)
Which motherboard? - I have no need for a 570x but I’d probably want at least a B450.

What am I missing?

I know nothing about that but everything else should be no problem even for a 200GE.

I’ve been running Linux on a 2400G as my primary workstation since Feb 2018.

Disable C-states in UEFI to avoid a hardlock issue, otherwise should be fine without any fuss.

All of the major desktop distros support the 2400G now, including Debian Stable (which is generally pretty slow).

^ THIS!

A 2400G or even the Athlon 200GE mentioned by @noenken is overkill for what you need (if that’s the only thing you will do). You probably could go with an ASRock J3455M, it’s a micro-ATX board with a Celeron quad-core (based on Atom cores) soldered to it, with a fanless heatsink, uses only 15W (I run pfSense on it). If you don’t want to go the Intel route and you really want a M.2 drive, just get a B350 / B450 board and either the 2200G or Athlon 200GE.

Ubuntu should be fine for your needs. Never heard of JRiver, but I see it has builds for Fedora and Debian, so the .deb should work in Ubuntu.

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You can run JRiver off a raspberry pi. Especially since you have a USB DAC, there is really no problem in doing that. Your audio experience wont increase by throwing like 14gb of unused RAM at it etc.

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Technically Debian is the only officially supported distro. But I use it every day on Fedora. There are no ‘builds’ for Fedora, but a shell script that converts the .deb to a .rpm.

Any debian distro under the sun is fine (so ubuntu popos whatever you want). Fedora is fine, but a tad bit more invested (although the script basically does everything by itself). And the official apt repo also works on arm devices, such as the pie.

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I was actually pricing out a b450 and a 3200G the other night…

could be tempting…

I’d love to see the 3200G or 3400G in a NUC style form factor.

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Sounds like a great RPi 3/4 project. JRMC has an ARM version in DEB format. That makes it perfect for Raspbian.

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For just streaming music an RPi is probably ok, for running streaming sites like spotify in a browser probably too. But it will feel a bit sluggish.


Thing is, you barely save any money compared to a 200GE plus board and you lose quite a bit by doing so. Upgradability is the most obvious one but also the ability to … well, watch stuff streaming in newer codecs. Because if you have a dead silent PC next to a hifi system, chances are that there is a display around somewhere. :wink:

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The J3455M is $67 on Amazon, the Athlon 200GE is $55 by itself. Cheapest B350 board is $60. You do get more performance with the GE, but the price is almost double.

But I agree with this:

Especially since @hydrian mentioned that JRiver has an ARM .deb package.

I personally did a mini-radio at my old job, using 4x RPi 3s, each with its own small audio amplifier and ceiling speaker, 1 was the master node (just running music in VLC and streaming it on the LAN) and the rest were connecting to the master (also with VLC).

I personally ran a Pi 3 with Raspbian on a 1080p display with non problems, didn’t felt sluggish at all in chromium. A Pi 3 should probably be more than enough for OP.

In Germany the J3455M is 77,- Euro. The Asus A320M-K is almost 60 bucks as well here but the 200GE is 45,-. So, it would be close to 80,- vs a little over 100,-. I would pay those 20 to 25 bucks, I would also pay the 115,- over the 67,- just for the upgrade path alone.

I just don’t like soldered on CPUs. :wink:

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@ThatGuyB The RPi 4s can do 4k@60 on a single monitor.

Thanks, everyone. I was leaning toward the more powerful system for a few reasons:

  1. I don’t know what I’ll want to do in the future with it. But my understanding is that DSD and SACD formats require some horsepower. I’m still a bit unclear on when/how/where that processing gets done. I do export the entire library to mp3 for mobile use - which can be a bit of a pain with how slow it is now.
  2. I want it to visually fit in with the other HiFi gear.
  3. I’m replacing a Mac Mini 2.3GHz core I7 with 4Gb ram and is so painfully slow that I just can’t take it anymore. It takes 1min 10sec to launch Firefox and get the home page, and that’s not even finished populating all the info on the screen. It takes several minutes to open preferences on a reboot. I’m just done with it. The only machines I’ve owned that felt that slow were my Kaypro-2 (z80), IMSAI 8080, and the SouthWest Tech 6800. So I want a system that isn’t going to annoy me by being too slow (my i7 2.6GHz MacBook pro with 16G, and an SSD is fast enough but I use it on the road almost daily so it’s not getting tied up for the stereo) and my 2700x/1080Ti gaming machine with the 3440x1400 doesn’t fit either.

I think I might finally get around to booting up my Pi 3B and trying the ARM version - I need to do that at some point anyway.

If you are converting lots of audio files at once, then suddenly a 2400G or 3400G starts making sense. The Pi can still do that, but you’ll probably be better off letting it do its thing for a few hours (no multi-tasking while converting audios)…

That’s definitely not normal. When was the last time you cleaned it up? (both hardware and software) I suggest you live boot into Fedora or Ubuntu and see how it feels, before you start buying new stuff. Especially if the i7 is a quad-core variant. You might have a HDD failure, upgrading to a SATA SSD is recommended, you might get the Mac Mini back to life.

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I didnt assume you actually have all your songs on that machine and need to convert them for mobile. JRiver does only need to convert a song once, it gets cached on disk. But id still not wanna do that on a pi for a sizeable library. Gonna take a while.

FWIW I just installed Gentoo on a 2400G and it’s rock solid and was fairly straight-forward to set up.

Ahhh, well, nevermind

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Alternatively, an old mac mini will do the same thing.

Duo core. And it’s been that way since it was taken out of the box. I’ve done two complete reinstalls of the OS. I can upgrade the memory and swap out the hd for a much faster SSD, but at this point, the further away from Apple I get, the better I like it.

I suppose I could try the upgrade, it’s possible that might boost the performance enough but I doubt it.

I’ll look into Gentoo - I’m wide open to options at this point. I just know I want to give Linux a spin.

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