this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023

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New linux dev machine setup - Thoughts? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm considering to build a new machine for personal use, but it's been a while since I've upgraded, so I'm looking for some thoughs about this one.

Currently I'm running Linux about 98% of the time, with some occasional gaming on Windows. Mostly normal desktop browsing and software dev work, hence plenty of RAM and CPU to keep dev feedback loops tight (Rust, JVM languages, web stuff, containers, VMs, the usual). One new SSD so far, but I have a bunch of 3.5" drives and one M2 I'll probably bring over from my current machine as well. Hence the case should support more than two 3.5" disks.

I'm not looking to upgrade the GPU at this point, I think my current 2080 will still be good enough to power the occasional game and my two 1440p 144hz displays for desktop usage. But I want to prep the system for an upgrade in a gen or two without major changes (meaning the PSU should have enough headroom and reasonably future proof connectors).

I don't care about RGB. Its acceptable if it can be configured to a dim white or single color as ambient light, but no LEDs are preferred if two parts are equal in all other regards.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'd swap the RTX for whatever AMD or Intel Arc GPU with similar price, unless you really need it for CUDA (at least until ROCm matures). You'll save yourself some hassle installing and maintaining NVIDIA proprietary drivers, especially if planning on having multi-screen setup, or want to try and take advantage of Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Agreed, NVidia proprietary drivers on Linux are a mess, they are the primary source of problems for me. I'm just using the card because I already have it, but in the future I'll very likely go AMD. Or Intel if the ARC cards can match until then, they do seem to make promising progress in the last few months.

I used CUDA to try some machine learning stuff, but that's a one off and not a strict requirement. And installing CUDA broke my system standby. So yeah... way to go NVidia. And that's not even talking about their pricing these days.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but I have a bunch of 3.5" drives and one M2 I'll probably bring over from my current machine as well. Hence the case should support more than two 3.5" disks.

3.5" spinning disks often use quite a bit of power. If you don't need them all the time I'd buy something to connect them easily over USB.

I usually just buy whatever is a good price vs performance. Buying an overpowered PSU has an effect on the efficiency of that PSU (often it gets worse).

Anyway, maybe one consideration might be sound. I like silent systems so for a system where you'd spend loads of time on I'd rather have it completely silent. That would require drastic changes, but maybe good to check how much noise each component makes while idle, common usage and when stressed.

Cannot easily see, but might also be good to check if your keyboard and mouse are still nice. Though unfortunately the nice keyboards often have RGB.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's good input, external disks or a NAS might actually make sense here to widen my options (two spinning disk bays seem to be the norm in cases these days, so I had to look around). Though I'll have to check what it does to the price. And I don't want to plug things in and out all the time, so I would need to be something that does standby on it's own rather well.

As for the PSU, that's true as well. I'm really not certain about it, so I went a little overboard I think. I do want to drop in upgrade the 2080 to a newer card eventually (whatever follows 40xx or the AMD equivalent), but not now. I'll definitely look into that again.

Sound: Quiet is nice, hence the case with some insulation and a door to open for heavy workloads. Though I don't need it completely quiet, usually I have headphones on with music/background twitch/whatever even when programming. And I've never did liquid cooling, so I kept my distance. Could be a mistake, not sure.

Periphery is not a consideration, I'm happy with the stuff I have right now. Leopold FC900R black keyboard with MX blues, and some razer mouse whichs name I forgot. Bought it after Logitech spammed me with too many irritating, unskippable twitch ads, and to be honest I'm positively surprised. I didn't think highly of razer before that, had Logitech stuff for as long as I remember. But it's neat except for the nag software, though that's a non-issue on Linux.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Running drives over usb is completely wrong. It will never match sata latency and performance and causes cpu load for packet juggling. On the topic of the power supply just google “psu efficiency curve”, they operate best at ~50-75% load and a beefy psu won’t run its fan.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

True, but some of my spinning disks are just file graves with documents, photos, videos, prepared VM images to copy and use and similar stuff. I would never run a system off a USB drive, but having two or three SSDs (the board supports up to three M2) and a bunch of external disks for the less accessed files could be a viable setup. Like one Linux system disk, one for /home and one windows+games disk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks a bit overpowered to me, honestly. Unless you're planning on running a whole ass kubernetes cluster in there, or multiple VMs at once, or big full stack monolith solutions, you can probably tone down the CPU, RAM, and PSU. If cost is a consideration, you might be able to get better value on storage by dropping down to 1TB too.

But you know, if this is what you want and you have the money, then enjoy!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks for the input. Budget is not a problem, PCP estimates this at about 1700€ which is ok. I could spend more if it brings any significant gains, but I'm not inclined to spend hundreds more for a few percents performance.

Budget is the upside of being an adult, the downside is time. I tend to build machines and keep them for about five years without major change nowadays. I have neither time nor inclination to fiddle anymore. Hence I do think it's rather beefy as well, but it should hold out for a while without handholding (e.g. for LLMs, if there is ever a local github copilot alternative I'd like to try that. But it's too early to tell right now). Thus I'm also not about to downsize the SSD, more storage is better. Games are getting larger and larger and I'm tired of redownloading them when I do decide to play after a month (currently on a 240GB SSD for games, last played RDR2 and Forza Horizon, both over 100 gigs each).

Though I'm not sure on the PSU. New GPUs do seem to use a lot of power, but this machine runs for a lot of hours. Energy efficiency would definitely be a plus, I'll look at that again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You might also want to do a quick check to ensure your Linux disto can handle this mobo and CPU too. Linux is a lot better with that kind of thing these days so it's probably fine, but there are still a few edge cases for certain higher spec hardware or certain less popular distros.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

but there are still a few edge cases for certain higher spec hardware

Or like my experience: I upgraded my AM4 CPU to something newer. This required a BIOS/UEFI upgrade. After that getting out of suspend was unreliable. So even if the hardware seems fine it might have issues later on.

It seems to work again since a recent kernel, but as it only failed to resume in maybe 10% of the cases it's difficult to say if the problem is gone or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

True, I think the 3D cache won't be supported well by the Linux scheduler for a while, if ever. But it's ok considering that the 3D version is more power efficient in benchmarks and the CPU will crush everything regardless for a while.

I've looked for linux support of the board around the web, seems ok with some potential wildcard aspects (wifi, sound). I'm on Ubuntu, so nothing exotic in terms of linux. However if the board turns out to be a major problem in the first 10 days I'll return it (14 days no questions asked returns in EU), but I don't want to create waste so I did my due dilligence.

Generally my experience with Linux in the last 10 years was good, 9 of 10 problems I had in that time came from the proprietary NVidia drivers messing things up again and again about once a year. Hence I'll be strongly looking at AMD whenever I get around to upgrading the GPU.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you just want it for a workstation, I mean, I only know very little about programming workstations so take that into account when reading my notes, but overall it doesn't look bad. Getting backup storage is always a good idea, but if you already have offsite backups then that's already better than just slapping a second drive in your rig, Your PSU I would think would be overpowered. Newer CPUs tend to be power-hungry, but if I'm remembering correctly, AMD's CPUs of this generation tended to be WAY better in performance per watt than Intel's. You just need to find out which ones are good about the power consumption and which ones aren't. And I don't remember the 2080 Super being a power hog compared to the 30 or especially not the 40 series, but I honestly don't remember. So if you've looked into that, you'd know better than me. I mean, more research is always good, hopefully, more knowledgeable people chime in soon, but I agree with the other guy. For simple Linux programming, if anything, it looks a little overpowered.

But then you mention gaming. The kind of games you want to play, the framerates you're looking for, what extra features you want if any, that may all have a significant change on a couple of your choices. I would definitely think about getting a separate internal drive for gaming and not do that on your work drive, but that's my own personal policy that you may not see as nearly as important. If you know the games you want to play and the stats they take and your current setup is going to work for that, great! If you are thinking of trying some other games after you upgrade and want to try especially some of the AA and AAA releases of recent or coming years... They're absolute VRAM hogs. And getting anything under 10 gigs of VRAM will probably work, but not for everything and no one knows for how long at the moment. Because it's gotten ridiculous. There are games that just won't run properly with only 8 gigs and it's asinine. That's not a concern if you aren't looking at those kinds of games. There are huge libraries of games that don't require those silly VRAM minimums. I've been gaming casually in 1080p/30fps on a 2 gig VRAM GPU for the past seven years and it's only just started giving me trouble with the kinds of games I play. (I'm upgrading to a 1440/60fps build myself.) This, of course, is not me telling you to upgrade that for sure. And if you do upgrade, used 30xx series cards are likely to be your best bang for buck, especially if you can find one willing to transfer a still valid warranty to you (which you can do) if you want to stick with NVidia.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The one thing I’d look into is x670 vs b650, you save a little money (b650) but the extra 8x pcie lanes may be useful for you in the future. At least it was for me going into Ryzen with an x470 and now on x570 with dual gpu’s and a 10g nic.

You said in another comment the price is fine so other than being fun overkill it’s solid. I have a very similar build but last gen (5950x, x570 taichi) but with 128gb ram, 3070/1070 and a power hungry 10g nic. Its 1k psu is overkill even for this with plenty of hdds/ssds attached as well. The power supply was better fit for the original 350w idle dual Xeon monster I had ages ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a gaming machine you've picked the parts for there, not a dev machine. Swap out the 64 GB of gamer's RAM with 128 GB of bog-standard Corsair for the same price, replace everything else with something that costs half as much, throw in a third monitor so you've plenty of space to look at code, make sure you've a top-notch keyboard, also webcam and microphone for those stand-ups with your team.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I get the idea, but unfortunately none of this fits my usecase:

I've purposefully downgraded from three to two displays because I found that I didn't use the third one very much, even though it makes sense in theory. Just personal preference. Similarly I've went from 4k to 144hz 1440p, fits me better.
This is a machine for private use, so no standups. Professional work happens on my employer supplied m2 macbook. Which is one reason why I consider upgrading, I can tell that CPU performance has made a big enough jump to consider a personal upgrade as well. An AT2020 USB is already here and my current periphery is fine. Webcam not needed on this one.
I think 64 gigs is already future proofing it considerably, but I would use it regularly enought to make it worth my while (currently on 32, gotten close a few times). 128 gigs I can't foresee ever using. But should a killer usecase for that come around the corner it's easy to buy another set of RAM and chuck it in. Though I'm thinking about a different set to save a few bucks and spend them on something else. Arguably low timing RAMs are not as critical here, you're right about that.

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