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.
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.
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.