AMD or Intel for Linux

[HeavyMental]

Hello Guys,

I hope you are all doing well.

Before I go to my question I just want to say that I have little to no experience with Linux.

So I'm building a new PC at the moment - waiting for hardware to arrive - and I would be running the following:
Intel I5-126000KF
MSI Z690-A Pro WIFI DDR5
AMD RX6800XT

I'm quite disappointed in the direction, which MS has taken Windows and from what I see from the LTT videos recently gaming and multimedia (running blu-ray movies on PC with a cable towards a TV) has improved quite a lot and honestly the only thing that is stopping me form moving to Linux is lack of support of World of Warcraft., which leads me to my question. While I was searching for info on possible way to run WoW with addons on Linux and reading upon Proton I saw mentions that if you want to have a good Linux gaming experience you need to be on an AMD system due to drives etc. So I understand this from GPU perspective and Vulkan, but does the CPU manufacturer play a significant role here as well.

I spent the extra cash on high end MOBO with DDR5 support with the plan to use this system with little no changes for years to come and now I'm concerned that I have made the wrong decision from OS stand point of view.

Any feedback would be appreciated on that topic in general, as I'm a Linux Noob 


Kind regards,

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, HeavyMental said:

but does the CPU manufacturer play a significant role here as well.

Not really, both AMD and Intel are pretty supportive of the open source community on Linux. AMD is to a bit more of an extent IIRC, but I'd only really worry about going for the fastest CPU, not what manufacturer makes it. The only thing I'd be concerned with for going 12600K is that most Linux schedulers aren't really designed to take advantage of the heterogeneous architecture, and while support is definitely getting better, IIRC it's not quite there yet. Still, that should be ironed out in due time, so as long as you're fine with a little bit of weirdness for a couple more months it should be great. It's not something that would make me want to return it.

 

With GPU it does matter since Nvidia's Linux drivers are kinda bad (hopefully they'll get better with their partial open sourcing), and AMD is the best by far. 

 

 

If it makes you feel better, Linus Torvalds ran Intel CPUs for a while since he didn't feel like sourcing a GPU and just used the iGPU, only going team red a year or so back because he wanted more cores. 

[Eigenvektor]

CPU shouldn't matter too much. Had an Intel CPU for my last build, currently using AMD, no issues with either under Linux. But as @RONOTHAN## pointed out, the new architecture with P- and E-cores will probably take some time before Linux can make full/proper use of it.

 

GPU wise I've so far been sticking with AMD, because they have open source GPU drivers (included into the Linux kernel), which makes things easier to set up. Let's see what the recently announced Nvidia open-source efforts turn into.

 

DDR5 isn't really worth the premium as of yet, imho. By the time faster speed/lower latency sticks come out, you might need a new CPU/board to take full advantage. But you shouldn't be losing anything over DDR4 either.

[HeavyMental]

11 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

CPU shouldn't matter too much. Had an Intel CPU for my last build, currently using AMD, no issues with either under Linux. But as @RONOTHAN## pointed out, the new architecture with P- and E-cores will probably take some time before Linux can make full/proper use of it.

 

GPU wise I've so far been sticking with AMD, because they have open source GPU drivers (included into the Linux kernel), which makes things easier to set up. Let's see what the recently announced Nvidia open-source efforts turn into.

 

DDR5 isn't really worth the premium as of yet, imho. By the time faster speed/lower latency sticks come out, you might need a new CPU/board to take full advantage. But you shouldn't be losing anything over DDR4 either.

Thanks for the reply. 

 

On the DDR5 Memory I bough 2x16GB clocked at 5600Mhz with CAS40 at a discount and it was like 35% more expensive than DDR4 at 3200Mhz CAS16 and the the Intel 13th Gen would scale up to 5600Mhz DDR5 + the Mobo that I got was on the same price as the MSI Tomahawk B570 that I was looking at, which was the primary reason why I went with Intel over AMD as AM4 is done.

Couple of months waiting for proper support on P and E cores is not an issue at all, hell I don't mind waiting an year as long as everything would work in general sense of the word before switching fully to Linux as I would need also to learn the OS from scratch and figure out how to run WoW. What I wanted to make sure is that 12th Gen Intel CPUs are actually functioning or will be in the future under Linux/Pop_OS, opposed to, this architecture(P and E cores) is worth developing and/or Intel drive support under Linux is crap

 

[RONOTHAN##]

24 minutes ago, HeavyMental said:

hat I wanted to make sure is that 12th Gen Intel CPUs are actually functioning

They are fully functional, no issues. The scheduler does work as well, it's just not super polished at the moment so there are a couple bugs here and there. 

 

I wouldn't be afraid to try it now if you want to, odds are you won't notice any issues, it's just that occasionally stuff will be run on the wrong thread. 

[HeavyMental]

Perfect, all components should arrive until Friday so I will definitely install it on a VM or try to do dual boot(never done this before), not sure which one would be better to judge performance, and start learning 

[Eigenvektor]

22 minutes ago, HeavyMental said:

On the DDR5 Memory I bough 2x16GB clocked at 5600Mhz with CAS40 at a discount and it was like 35% more expensive than DDR4 at 3200Mhz CAS16 and the the Intel 13th Gen would scale up to 5600Mhz DDR5 + the Mobo that I got was on the same price as the MSI Tomahawk B570 that I was looking at, which was the primary reason why I went with Intel over AMD as AM4 is done.

My experience with CPU upgrades so far has been: By the time the current CPU is too slow, going to gen+1 isn't really worth it anymore because it's such a minor upgrade compared to getting a whole new board + CPU. AMD with AM4 has been somewhat different, because you could skip more than one generation, but with Intel you will most likely be able to go from 12th to 13th, but no further. Hence why I had no issue buying a B550+5900x to replace my 3570K, despite AM4 being EOL

 

Transfer speed of DDR5 5600 is definitely higher than 3200. Though latency wise, CL40 @ 5600 MT/s (=14.2 ns) is roughly 50% higher than CL16 @ 3200 MT/s (= 10 ns). Though you'd have to run benchmarks (for WoW in particular) to see whether (and how much) that actually matters.

 

22 minutes ago, HeavyMental said:

[…] and/or Intel drive support under Linux is crap

Intel is typically a fairly safe bet for Linux drivers, probably even more so than AMD. Though CPUs generally don't need/use drivers. The thing that isn't fully optimized is the scheduler that is responsible for distributing work across cores. With P-/E-cores a scheduler can't treat all cores the same, so you need more logic to determine whether something should be running on a faster or a more power efficient core. Until that is the case, you might get sub-optimal performance and/or higher power use than strictly necessary, but that's unlikely to matter in most situations.

 

WoW: No personal experience with it, though online games can be tricky and sometimes stuff like Proton/Wine can incorrectly trigger anti-cheat systems, resulting in a ban. Speaking of which: There were also issues with the new Intel architecture on Windows, that incorrectly triggered some DRM systems into thinking something fishy was going on due to the CPU having different core types. So I'd make sure to read up on the current state of Wow on Linux before experimenting with it, especially in combination with the new Intel architecture.

[10leej]

World of Warcraft has always worked fine using WINE. It easier nowadays with the kutris installnscriot too.

[FUIT1985]

3 hours ago, HeavyMental said:

Hello Guys,

I hope you are all doing well.

Before I go to my question I just want to say that I have little to no experience with Linux.

So I'm building a new PC at the moment - waiting for hardware to arrive - and I would be running the following:
Intel I5-126000KF
MSI Z690-A Pro WIFI DDR5
AMD RX6800XT

I'm quite disappointed in the direction, which MS has taken Windows and from what I see from the LTT videos recently gaming and multimedia (running blu-ray movies on PC with a cable towards a TV) has improved quite a lot and honestly the only thing that is stopping me form moving to Linux is lack of support of World of Warcraft., which leads me to my question. While I was searching for info on possible way to run WoW with addons on Linux and reading upon Proton I saw mentions that if you want to have a good Linux gaming experience you need to be on an AMD system due to drives etc. So I understand this from GPU perspective and Vulkan, but does the CPU manufacturer play a significant role here as well.

I spent the extra cash on high end MOBO with DDR5 support with the plan to use this system with little no changes for years to come and now I'm concerned that I have made the wrong decision from OS stand point of view.

Any feedback would be appreciated on that topic in general, as I'm a Linux Noob 


Kind regards,

Hi, 

I advise you not to abandon Windows entirely. The world of free software is quite interesting (apart from Warcraft). You can also install Linux on an external sata drive, while Windows on the internal drive. Or you can partition the internal disk or you can try a live USB (creating it with Windows and with the etcher program - https://www.balena.io/etcher/ ). For games there is also Steam.

 

You have already purchased the hardware. So if you have compatibility problems with a Linux distribution, you can always switch back to Windows.

 

In any case, you can refer to the official or unofficial online documentation for installation of a Linux distribution.

For example:

 

Debian 

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual.en.html

 

Fedora

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/install-guide/

 

Manjaro

https://manjaro.org/support/firststeps/ 

 

Mint

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

 

Ubuntu

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overview

etc.

 

Good Luck. 

[wasab]

On 5/15/2022 at 4:24 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

With GPU it does matter since Nvidia's Linux drivers are kinda bad (hopefully they'll get better with their partial open sourcing), and AMD is the best by far. 

heck no, for gaming purposes nvidia is far ahead of AMD. i recall none of the 6000 series amd card works on my linux desktop but pop in a rtx 3070 and install the propietary driver, everything works great. It gets a bad rep simply becuase of the open source community thumbs it down for ideological reason. Maybe some other things like a pain in the butt for other developers like those working on wayland to develop for but otherwise solid. 

[BionicSeaSerpent]

AMD for everything RN. in a few years Nvidia will go open source but until then its all AMD

[10leej]

AMD for performance, however intel has hands down the best driver support on linux.

[Sprawlie]

Recently converted my home desktop to linux. 

 

I try it out every few years. I will say, that right now we're pretty close (Some Caveats depending on your needs)

 

World of Warcraft plays flawlessly. And is very very easily to install using Lutris. Only thing that doesn't work is RTX.

 

I went this time around with Ubuntu 22 LTS and so far it's been the most compatible Linux I have used in the desktop space in 25 years of IT. Out of the box, all drivers were detected, found and installed, including Nnvidia. Nvidia X Server is runnin driver 510.73.05.

 

I can't comment on anything blueray related. However as long as all your devices in the chain are HDCP, I cannot see why there'd be any different experience. I'd only be concerned about the lack of bundled licensing that is often required for blueray support that linux may not include.

 

the only issue I have ran into is my audio device constantly resets itself to SPDIF instead of HDMI on device changes. but I just created a small script to autoswitch it back.