First PC Build - Whaddya Think?

[Lucas S]

So this will be my first PC build if I choose to do it. It looks pretty fine to me, but I was told it would be a good idea to run this by the LTT Forums and maybe get a couple pointers or some advice. This is going to be a budget Skylake build running Linux (although the OS really has nothing to due with the build itself). 

 

Here are the parts broken down:

 

CPU:   Intel Pentium G4400

Motherboard:   Gigabyte H110M-A

Video Card:   EVGA SC 750 ti

Ram:   Kingston HyperX Fury Black (2 X 4 gigs)

Storage:   Samsung 850 evo 500 gig SSD

Case:   Cooler Master N200 Micro ATX

Power Supply:   EVGA 500 watt non-modular ATX

 

Here's a link to pc part picker for a cleaner and more detailed description of the parts: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/YGzPsJ

 

So how is it? I'm open to any and all feedback; I wanna know what you think!

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/GvZFd6
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/GvZFd6/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor  ($110.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Motherboard: MSI H110M Pro-VD Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($49.99 @ Micro Center) 
Memory: G.Skill NT Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($29.98 @ Newegg) 
Storage: MyDigitalSSD BP5e Slim 7 128GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($39.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($47.49 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 2GB Superclocked Video Card  ($113.99 @ NCIX US) 
Case: Cooler Master N200 MicroATX Mid Tower Case  ($34.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  ($39.98 @ Newegg) 
Total: $467.40
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-26 20:21 EDT-0400

You had a great start to a build however it needed some improvements, namely you spent WAYYYYY to much on that SSD, a cheaper SSD / HDD combo will give you a much better bang for your buck. I also upgraded you to a i3-6100 for significantly better mutli-tasking capabilities as well as a GTX 950 for far superior gaming performance.

EDIT: Also why run Linux on it? The gaming performance is terrible unless you're running Windows in a VM where you loose performance anyways.

 

EDIT 2: Welcome to the forums!

[Lucas S]

Linux is more of a personal choice - and more often than not games run at the same speed or better due to the very low system resource usage in Linux. Games that due run worse are due to them being poorly ported to OpenGL - despite OpenGL outperforming DirectX. The gaming performance overall in Linux is the same if not better - And running games in a Windows VM isn't even a thing unless you use KVM GPU pass through and you happen to have an extra video card lying around. The best way to run windows games in Linux is through wine, as it has little to no overhead and runs the software completely natively as opposed to a virtual machine. I'll be playing games on steam mostly tho as pretty much all the games I play are available for Linux.

 

I'm very thankful you caught me on the ssd as that was the most expensive single component in the build. The 950 is prob worth it too. The i3 tho isn't really worth considering its almost double the price of Pentium with only slightly improved performance. 

[Streetguru]

43 minutes ago, Lucas S said:

 

Ditch the SSD and get an i3 + RX 480
 

It would be a waste to buy a dual core CPU in this current year, a dual core can hurt your minimum fps, and some games really need 4 threads to run properly

also can't you do a GPU passthrough using the integrated graphics for your main OS?


I still wouldn't say gnu/linux gaming is very viable, you need to do work arounds like play on linux or the passthrough

[Lucas S]

Lol - no workarounds. You go to steampowered.com and download the steam client for Linux. As stated all my steam games work in Linux. As of writing about 2000 steam games for linux are available, or 1 in 4 games have a Linux version. Also, as of right now, AMD gpu's in Linux are a no-go. AMD is currently working on a new open-source driver for Linux but it is still currently in heavy development. Old catalyst AMD drivers in Linux are incompatible with newer versions of x server and Xorg. The new AMD drivers should give killer performance, when they're done that is. Right now Nvidia cards have absolute 100% perfect performance in Linux and their drivers are as good as it gets. Nvidia Linux performance is really good - In many cases (such as OpenCL) they can outperform the Windows drivers. In other cases they are pretty much identical to the Windows drivers.

[Streetguru]

14 minutes ago, Lucas S said:

 

Then wait for the 400 series anyways because it'll force a price drop on the 960 and below.

[Lucas S]

14 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Then wait for the 400 series anyways because it'll force a price drop on the 960 and below.

Good idea, I didn't think about that. Thanks for helping me out, I am new to this whole thing.