Dear fellow enthusiasts,
my wife and I finally got stable enough in our living situation, that we can buy some new hardware (ours is 7+ years, while hers is a laptop). So I went out into the wild wild web to catch up with 7years of hardware progress (I am technological affine, but not following the trends in any way) and wanted to run by my first iteration of a setup with the infinite wisdom of this community.
For the background: both of us only use Linux at home and at work and do not plan to change this. We do not play AAA games, the most demanding game we play as of late is probably Dota2, ARK and GTNH (a Minecraft mod pack, that eats your ram for breakfast). Hence we won’t need cutting edge hardware, more like an upper end budget setup. Anyway, with my last PC I had tons of troubles with the mainboard, the GPU (nvidia) and other stuff, even though I thought I checked stuff in advance, so I wanted to have an outside opinion.
TL;DR: here my draft, with prices from an online store:
- Mainboard: ASRock B650M-H/M.2+ 97.90€
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7™ 7700, 8 core, 3.800 MHz base, AM5, 32 MB L3 cache 227.90€
- GPU: XFX Radeon RX 6650 XT Speedster SWFT 210 Core Gaming, RDNA 2, GDDR6, 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI 2.1 249.90€
- RAM: ADATA DIMM 32 GB DDR5-4800 (2x 16 GB) Dual-Kit, 84.90€
- PSU: be quiet! System Power 10 650W 61.90€
- Storage: Crucial P3 Plus 1 TB, SSD PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe, M.2 2280, Reading: 5.000 MB/s, Writing: 3.600 MB/s 69.99€
- CPU cooler: be quiet! Pure Rock 2 Black 39.89€
- case: generic 50.00€
sum: ~880.00€
we don’t mind to pay a little bit more here and there, but I do not see any real benefit to it. Even storage should be fine for our purpose and can be easily expended (the MB has two M.2 slots, and even Sata3 should be fine for raw storage).
ah, and we would buy two of those… My first idea was to buy one PC with two GPUs with passthrough of GPU and USB input (sitting anyway close), but I got the impression, that is at this moment more something to tinker, then to run “in production”.
Best wishes, me
PS: if this community is not correct, I apologize and would kindly ask for the better fit.
If you’re not playing AAA titles, this is a bit overkill. Different suggestions: Why not just get a Steam Deck for each of you? You’ll get everything you want in a portable package.
Honestly, that is a great idea. BUT…he mentioned that he likes to play modded MC that needs lots of RAM, and the deck isn’t ideal for that.
you already wrote, what I wanted to answer, I might also get into development myself again at some point. Further my hardware usually lasts for 5-10 years, so it should have some upgrade potential :) and both of us are not so much into “mobile” gaming, somehow that sounds for me, like playing with a gameboy on speed, but that might be my age speaking ;)
It IS a full PC, though. Just hook up a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and whatever else and you’re ready to go. Memory limit is a deal killer though.
Yeah, I plug it in my laptop’s dock- with screen, KB&m, ecc, but you cant even have a yt video open when playing a memory intensive videogame so… Meh
Sounds like we’re similar. I own one, and it’s not really like a Gameboy, except that it plays games. Because it’s a Linux computer underneath, and you can install other distros on it, some people use it as a very portable computer to do work and gaming while traveling. One user said they bought one for each kid in their household, and they use it for both gaming and homework.
Think of it more like a gaming-capable netbook laptop rather than a Gameboy.
Agreed. Even a few mods on the Deck can cause it to really bog down. It’s not really a good use case for CPU-heavy games like modded MC.