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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.