Ryzen Linux box

[SnowyMus]

A year ago, I built this PC because I was tired of having only a quad core i7-6700K CPU, and I was tired of dealing with Windows 10 as my daily driver. So, I fixed both issues with one new PC.

 

Parts

Here are the parts and the prices I paid:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 3.4 GHz 6-Core Processor  (Purchased For $159.99) 
Motherboard: MSI B450M MORTAR Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  (Purchased For $79.99) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  (Purchased For $226.99) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (Purchased For $116.99) 
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 580 8 GB PULSE Video Card  (Purchased For $235.11) 
Case: Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case  (Purchased For $69.99) 
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G3 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (Purchased For $49.99) 
Total: $939.05
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-01-26 16:48 EST-0500

 

Obviously, prices from over a year ago are very different than they are now. I got a really good deal on the PSU, paying only 46% of the price it is now, but I got bitten pretty hard on the SSD and RAM side, paying 133% and 175% of their current prices, respectively. I guess DRAM prices were still pretty bad back then. Now it's PSUs that are really pricey.

 

The Ryzen 5 2600 CPU is pretty good at what I need it to do - gaming, compiling, and encoding. It's not the best at either of those things, but it's pretty good at all of them, and even today, it's still very much a budget monster. I highly recommend this CPU if you need an affordable, recent 6 core CPU.

 

The motherboard is pretty good. Unfortunately, updating the BIOS to support Ryzen 3000 CPUs meant that they couldn't fit the standard BIOS in, so the newer, lightweight BIOSes are actually much different than shown on the manual. It still does what the older BIOS did, but it's a bit less graphical, especially when configuring stuff like fan curves.

 

The RAM is useful. Having 32 GB of it is quite good for what I need, but I probably should have gotten faster modules. My older PC had 16 GB of RAM and I frequently ran low on it during some workloads.

 

Like my last PC, I opted to not get a hard drive, because those are pretty terrible for boot drives. This time, I went with an NVMe drive, and the 500 GB Samsung 970 Evo is quite good.

 

The video card listed is an RX 580. I originally used the much faster GTX 1070 from my older i7-6700K PC in this PC, but then I remembered that Nvidia drivers are actually pretty bad on Linux when I encountered freezing and screen tearing issues. At first, I blamed the motherboard, but installing an RX 580 and a new OS fixed the issues entirely.

 

I got the case sometime around 2015 or 2016 at a discount on Newegg. It's a good case to build in, even if cube cases look pretty strange compared to other PCs.

 

Lastly, the PSU is, well, adequate? I'm well aware of where the EVGA SuperNOVA G3 is on the PSU tier list, and admittedly, I should have done more research, as it apparently doesn't have good OPP, noise, or value. However, it really doesn't matter given that this hardware will rarely even use half of the maximum 650 W, so the OPP issues aren't something I need to worry about. Noise isn't a concern, either, since the fan doesn't turn on until the PSU reaches a certain threshold. Lastly, for value, I'm certainly not complaining about spending $50 on a pretty efficient 80+ Gold PSU.

 

Pictures

Here's the board before I put it in the PC. My table is a bit dusty, and my camera isn't very good, but you can make out the RAM, cooler, and SSD pretty easily. You can also see the packaging for the SSD on the right, too!

 

Here's the PC assembled. The speakers fell over, but you can see my capture card and my MSI Gaming GTX 1070 (both are now back in the old 6700K rig), as well as a couple friends sitting on top of the case.

 

What distro?
I originally used Ubuntu 17.10, but I switched to Arch Linux because, as a software developer who resides in his mother's basement, I found getting the latest software on Arch Linux to be much less of a hassle.

 

How is Linux?

Note that this is a build log first and foremost, so this isn't the best place to get the answer. However, in case someone asks this question, I've written a few paragraphs in the following spoiler box to explain my thoughts about Linux based on my experiences with this PC while using a spoiler to keep the focus on the build log.

Spoiler

Let's start by saying that some people get along fine without using Windows for literally anything PC-related. I am not one of those people and neither are a lot of other people, probably. Things are pretty good when you use native Linux software and games, and even when it isn't, a lot of it is just issues with dependencies which is usually easily fixed. This is, in fact, one of the main reasons why I switched to Arch Linux, since its package manager is quite good, and installing the latest software was a bit of a pain on Ubuntu. Also, hardware that was intended to run using Windows-only (or Windows and macOS-only) drivers, such as various tablets and gamepads, will work fine on Linux, too, with little or no setup. My capture card, sadly, was not such a device, and neither was my USB sound card, hence why they're now back in the old PC.

 

Next, Nvidia drivers are not very good on Linux. This is troubling because, if you want the fastest gaming performance, Nvidia is technically the only option for that. It's not that games aren't fast with Nvidia on Linux (they are!) but that there are just a lot of display issues with the closed source binaries. In fact, running Windows software on Linux just plain sucks. Wine works a lot of the time, but it also often times does not work, or it's really slow if the game uses DirectX and you don't have a native implementation of it (e.g. Gallium Nine). Most notably, anti-cheat software has the most problems. Using a Windows VM can solve the issue sometimes, and KVM is phenomenal with this, but some anti cheat software will detect and block VMs, too, including the "Respondus" software my college uses for testing.

 

Suffice it to say, I personally can't not have dedicated a Windows PC. Wine sucks, dual booting sucks, and VMs don't solve every problem, and it's probably why a lot of people try it and go back to Windows regardless of which solution they liked more. That said, stuff like Bash, good I/O, and a great package manager are why I use Linux as my daily driver and I only use Windows when I need it.

If you have any further questions, ask me on my profile's feed or private message me. When replying to this topic, keep the discussion on the build, itself, please!

 

Should you get these parts?

Since it's only been a year, I can still easily recommend most of these parts, including the CPU, SSD, and GPU. The CPU is $120, the SSD is $88, and the GPU is $180 (with a $10 offer code on Newegg). If the motherboard was still sold, I'd recommend that, too. The case and PSU, however, cost so much that I can't recommend either. The RAM, on the other hand, is good, but you can do better than 3200 MHz if you're on Ryzen. I'd go for 3600 MHz, personally, especially if you're on the newer Ryzen 3000 CPUs which are more likely to support the full speeds with two sticks.

 

Final thoughts

Overall, I consider this PC a fairly solid upgrade over my previous PC. It might not be as fast in gaming, but I still have and use my older PC for that, so that isn't a problem. However, for general productivity, I've found myself to be a lot more productive on Linux especially with the increased CPU cores and RAM capacity.