I’m a computer science student so I do programming and running VMs and my current PC is getting a bit slow for that as well as for gaming. For gaming I want to play at 1440p at 60 to 80 or so fps on medium settings. I want to play GTA and Borderlands 3 and Cities Skylines. In general I’d like to be able to play most things that are currently on steam and work with proton. My budget is like $1200 or so.
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total
$1139.45
Local Total
$1134
As I’ll be buying the parts here in Europe i added an extra column with the prices I have to pay here. I could get a Sapphire Radeon RX6650XT Gaming OC Nitro+ for $395 and a 5600X for $197. I don’t have an older Ryzen CPU so i need a MB with BIOS flashback.
As mentioned before i want to run Linux (fedora) so that’s why I’m going with AMD for the GPU. The 32G of RAM are for being able to run VMs. I’m thankful for any hints!
That looks like a decent machine to me. I might go with less storage and more memory, but I have a NAS here for bulk storage, and I guess that depends on how many games and VMs you plan on having versus how many VMs you’ll be running concurrently.
32GB is what I have in my laptop here, and it does fine for running a linux host with a windows guest for the projects I can’t do in linux.
Thank you for your feedback! Yeah the 2TB of SSD are quite a bit of my budget. I do have a (only used for like 4 hours) Toshiba P300 3TB 3.5" 7200 RPM HDD that i could also add to this then maybe i could go to just 1TB of SSD. But i was hoping to leave the time of slow spinning rust behind…
32GB RAM is good for VMing, but if you plan to run more than 2 with 2 cores in VM, you’d preferably want a 5800X, to run 3 with 2 cores, but if not, 5600X is perfect.
GPU Wise, a 6650XT imo is just, a rather better option, if you ask me. Also, NVMe as main storage is not something I suggest. And now I see you have a 3TB HDD… They die really fast. Just keep caution of that. I’d say go 1TB NVMe stick, and maybe 2 x 2TB WD Blue Hard drives. ^^
How do you mean that? Like for game storage? Are there downsides to using only NVMe besides the price? I don’t think i need 5TB of storage. 2TB should be fine. I don’t really record video or anything.
Oh also note that I put a 5600 (non-X) in this build to save $40. Do you think a 5600X is a very worthwile upgrade over a plain 5600?
I don’t think you need to worry about using an SSD as your primary drive. The endurance ratings of most SSDs out there are high enough that you probably won’t ever have a problem during average consumer use.
Trusting important data to a single drive of any type isn’t a great idea, but that’s a different deal, and there’s lots of ways to deal with that.
Thanks! I do have a backup solution. It’s no “geo-replicated ZFS NAS with nightly scrubs to prevent bit rot” but weekly manual round robin backups to a bunch of external HDDs with one of them being on the other end of the city as a protection against fire or something like that will have to do for now. And a bit of rclone encrypted cloud storage for backups some small important files.
as a comp sci student, I would suggest getting an nvidia card so you can do CUDA stuff. I hate recommending this btw but it makes implementing stuff like pytorch way easier
imo, if you’re already looking at $400 for the GPU, you may as well look at a used 6700. It’s a very big performance jump, and they tend to go for that on ebay.
Since he is running GNU/Linux and this is his main rig, nVidia is a no go for him as he mentioned. HIP and ROCm will allow him to take CUDA code and run it on his setup albeit will be translated into OpenCL but there are other ML and MV solutions out there that do not run on PyTorch.
Just to provide some clarification: I use NVidia GPUs since Fedora 9 without any issues. In current Fedora versions I would ignore the preconfigured repos, add RPMfusion repo and after following their install steps you can simply update/upgrade Fedora as you’re doing now and without any worries.
while this is true, it’s also a PIA to keep working because AMD doesn’t make the setup in any way easy. Also translating through OpenCL is slow.
Nvidia works very well now and while I prefer AMD for most setups, in his particular use case he will be dealing with a lot of other students using CUDA so it would be easier to stick to the same specs.
All that said if someone’s dead set on AMD I’m not against it, just wanted to lay out other options since the CUDA issue will end up being a PIA.
NVMe/SSD will wear off if you do a lot of writting to them. On the 3TB HDD topic, uhhh… TL:DR most of them are pre-failed 4TB drives w/ slapped on stuff that makes em work like 3TB ones… don’t ask why… ← any 3TB hdd. Get a 4TB one if you really need high amount of storage
5600X and 5600, I think the only difference is clock speed? That’s more up to you, but if you’d ask me, 5600X for 40$ more is, yes.
I’d have a bit more bias, towards the RX6650XT
Uber majority of them, will have a Dual Bios switch, along with running faster [for not much more Watts]
Are you shoveling everything [data/program wise], on the one M.2?
If it were me, I’d keep data on a separate drive – all eggs in one basket, can be a bit risky, even today
While it’s easy to re-write, the likes of OS / Programs / Steam-sourced games [time consuming, if anything]
But if your data/assignments were intertwined- that can be described as irreplaceable [effort / time lost]
Can get likes of a SATA M.2 and seat it at lower M.2 slot [wouldn’t needing THAT much bandwidth + cheep]
The 5600 v 5600x, is more-less splitting hairs. I’d look at more cores, in case more money can be put down
Whether being the 5700x [efficient-AF, for an 8C] or 5800x [more wattage demanding but runs harder]
Ohhh, just took note… Should look into a CPU heatsink, esp. now that you’re plotting on bumping up CPU
Since some of your mainboards power delivery is exposed, you could look at some downdraft variants
[ be quiet ShadowRock LP // Noctua L9x65 // AMD Wraith Prism // Sycthe Shuriken 3 // Noctua C14s // …]
And get a tube of thermal paste [like Arctic Cooling MX5 or Noctua NTH1]
Not a bad lineup but I have a couple of suggestions.
First off, a dual NVMe setup might make quite a bit of sense for your use case. Wear level is, pretty much, fine, this is how my daily usage SmartCTL drive looks like, and I’ve been running Ubuntu on it nonstop since December 2019, granted this one is TLC and not QLC:
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.15.0-48-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number: KINGSTON SA2000M8500G
Serial Number: 50026B72824E8B9C
Firmware Version: S5Z42102
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: 0x2646
IEEE OUI Identifier: 0x000000
Controller ID: 1
NVMe Version: 1.3
Number of Namespaces: 1
Namespace 1 Size/Capacity: 500 107 862 016 [500 GB]
Namespace 1 Utilization: 372 581 294 080 [372 GB]
Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size: 512
Namespace 1 IEEE EUI-64: 0026b7 2824e8b9c5
Local Time is: Sat Oct 8 01:32:31 2022 CEST
Firmware Updates (0x14): 2 Slots, no Reset required
Optional Admin Commands (0x0017): Security Format Frmw_DL Self_Test
Optional NVM Commands (0x005f): Comp Wr_Unc DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat Timestmp
Log Page Attributes (0x0f): S/H_per_NS Cmd_Eff_Lg Ext_Get_Lg Telmtry_Lg
Maximum Data Transfer Size: 32 Pages
Warning Comp. Temp. Threshold: 75 Celsius
Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold: 80 Celsius
Supported Power States
St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat
0 + 9.00W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 + 4.60W - - 1 1 1 1 0 0
2 + 3.80W - - 2 2 2 2 0 0
3 - 0.0450W - - 3 3 3 3 2000 2000
4 - 0.0040W - - 4 4 4 4 15000 15000
Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt Data Metadt Rel_Perf
0 + 512 0 0
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 37 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 4%
Data Units Read: 28 072 960 [14,3 TB]
Data Units Written: 37 279 300 [19,0 TB]
Host Read Commands: 399 249 897
Host Write Commands: 580 330 234
Controller Busy Time: 8 662
Power Cycles: 1 137
Power On Hours: 14 727
Unsafe Shutdowns: 47
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0
Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, 16 of 256 entries)
No Errors Logged
As for how much you need, 1TB will not be bad to start with, you can always buy more later. Here is a geizhals.eu budget-ish build:
One could be tempted to reach towards a €400 AMD Ryzen 5900X… And that would be awesome, except now you need 64 GB of RAM to handle that properly, and possibly a better motherboard and/or cooler. For your use case, would be awesome but that’s another €200-€300 extra in total.
Thanks for your reply. Going 5900X is probably a bit outside of my budget. But it’s tempting…
About the 6700 XT: There now also are the slightly cheaper 6700 (non-XT) models available. I had a look at some local online shops and a 6700XT is ~ $ 485 while this
6700 is ~ $430. (6650XT is $390) . So to me it looks like the 6700 (non-XT) would be the best deal there. But it’s rather new so are there any downsides to it or any Linux compatibility issues?
Well, the only downside with the 6700 non-XT is that it might require you to upgrade to a newer kernel and graphics stack (mesa); depends on how comfortable you are with that. If not, Ubuntu 23.04 next year should have all potential issues sorted out, and it should run today regardless.
Other than that, well, it should be an awesome choice for the next three years or so. I’m running 1440p with City Skylines just fine on a 6600 non-XT and high details without a hitch.
