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I've been a laptop man for the last ~20 years due to A. mostly computering in bed, and B. never really feeling like I was planning to stay in a place. I now have a new house with an office. I'm probably still going to mostly computer in bed, for playing games and poo poo, but I already have a laptop for that. But that laptop is a bit crumbly for moving between rooms at this point, and isn't actually very good as a work machine. So I'm thinking of adding a new computer for my office, for programming stuff, and not for games, so I can avoid all the fuckery with GPUs. I program games, but I don't want to make GPU-intensive games, that's not my thing, so an integrated GPU should be fine. So I want a machine that's good for running emulated phones, and quickly compiling stuff, basically. So a good CPU, fast storage, plenty of RAM, and probably also some slow-but-large storage. I haven't thought about a desktop PC in a long time so I have no idea what's poo poo and what's okay these days. Is AMD still basically off the table for desktops? Do I even want a desktop for this purpose or would I be better off getting a fanless mini-PC like this one (2.9GHz i9, 32GB, 1TB SSD for $930) and just putting an external USB3 hard drive next to it for the "more storage" step? Will that thing just overheat under any load? If I'm better off building, where's the value-point for each component where it's good enough and going any higher is giving you diminishing returns, these days? Edit: oh, and I guess it might be relevant, probably gonna go Linux on it for all that Serious Business of programming stuff. I think all my most likely development environments prefer or at least support Linux these days. Edit: What kind of lake of CPU do I want? 
roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Apr 30, 2021 |
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Apr 30, 2021 03:16
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HappyCapybaraFamily posted:Wow, looks like my reasonably priced 2TB SN550 purchased from B&H is delivering today So I was playing around on pcpartpicker trying to scope out the vague ballpark of what I want, and now I have more questions. Last time I had a desktop PC the way of things was the motherboard had a lovely GPU on it. Now I see people are talking about whether the CPU has an integrated GPU - does that mean motherboards don't, or is it just different tiers of lovely? I was looking at this ASRock B550 which in the specs says "Integrated AMD Radeon Vega Series Graphics in Ryzen Series APU*" but then the asterisk says "Actual support may vary by CPU", what does that even mean? How do you tell if a PSU is any good these days? Another thing pcpartpicker was keen on doing was saying the PSU I selected didn't have a 4 pin connector that the motherboard wants and maybe that's okay. I was selecting Antec because ten years ago that was how you get a PSU that won't burn your house down, but to get one with that connector I ended up selecting a "Power Master", which sounds like a terrible idea.
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May 1, 2021 02:22
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CoolCab posted:think you have a slight misconception - it's not the motherboard that has an integrated GPU (I was saying it *used to be* that the motherboard had a GPU on it, this was >10 years ago, everything is clearly different and confusing to my old man brain. Having motherboard descriptions saying they do GPU stuff is extra confusing because last time I was looking at these things that was true, I started out pretty sure now it's not, but those descriptions were making me doubt my understanding of the way things had changed.)
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May 1, 2021 02:49
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So taking what I've learned so far from this thread, which I'm sure is not enough, I've proposed this bucket of bolts - what horrible mistakes have I made? Dubious assumption 1: Ryzen 3 3.6GHz with 4 cores would perform almost-comparably to a higher-end 3.6GHz Ryzen with 6 cores for most tasks, and at approximately 2/3 the performance for highly parallelizable tasks. Dubious assumption 2: Integrated graphics won't significantly impact CPU performance. Dubious assumption 3: The case is basically irrelevant if you don't care what it looks like, so long as air-flow isn't a disaster. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/22WKTJ
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May 1, 2021 15:31
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Mu Zeta posted:A Ryzen 3 3200g and 64gigs of RAM is an odd combo. You also have the wrong WD SSD. You want the SN550 which is an NVME drive. Not the SATA version like on your list. What was this pc for again? I think you can save some money on the motherboard and psu as well but just want more info. The main intent of the PC is for software development - most likely I'd be running several android emulators, compiling stuff and running the IDE. I like a lot of RAM for compiling stuff because, well, it's never a bad thing anyway of course, but I also like to also configure stuff so the temporary files go on a RAMdisk, which speeds up compiling by a lot and also eliminates some unnecessary wear on the storage. 64GB might be a bit overboard even with that in mind, but I think it can probably help out with spinning emulators up and down too. Maybe the odd virtual machine as well. The lower-powered CPU seemed to be the only way to get a CPU with integrated graphics, which seemed to save a lot of money by not requiring also spending $100 on a graphics card that's not worth $20. If there's a better idea on this front I'd be happy to take it. 
roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 18:10 on May 1, 2021 |
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May 1, 2021 18:08
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vanilla slimfast posted:For software dev, the 5600X (6c/12t) or 5800X (8c/16t) are going to be great choices, depending on your budget So new picks based on suggestions here, going Intel because of the iGPU as suggested by some, and because cpubenchmark.net puts this one at the top of the list for "sorted by value" (determined by rating-per-dollar). I think the suggestion "Intel 1100" was probably supposed to be "Intel 11400"? I realize benchmarks are weird and not necessarily indicative of real performance, but given how much trouble I have making any sense of what it means to have more threads / cores / MHz, I figure benchmarks are probably a better approximation than me guessing, and going with the 11400 with iGPU more than doubles the benchmark score for somewhat less than doubling the price I was previously looking at, and means I can get a cheaper motherboard too so the total price is only slightly changed, for about a 2.5X benchmark score improvement. (Though the motherboard change also goes from ATX to micro ATX and loses the spare RAM slots - but 64GB seems like I'm unlikely to need to go up further so that's okay.) https://pcpartpicker.com/list/TP9X7X (Would it be worth going another $40 up on the motherboard for more RAM slots and the addition of a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 header and 2.5Gbps ethernet? I don't have anything that uses those things right now, but future-proofing in the direction of peripherals seems more reasonable than other kinds of future-proofing.)
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May 2, 2021 03:47
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Saukkis posted:How have you identified that amount of RAM is the bottleneck on your current system. Based on your usage description my gut instinct would have been to concentrate on CPU performance and core count instead of RAM. I haven't done large scale compiling, but I wouldn't expect it to need that much RAM. Android emulators might change the situation, but do they need that much RAM and how many of them would you want to run simultaneously. So it's not so much that I think RAM is a bottleneck, as that it can be applied to remove *other* bottlenecks. I'm not generally doing that large scale of compiling, so it's definitely not RAM being its own bottleneck, and even with that ~16GB of expected allocation I'm not sure 32GB total wouldn't be fine. Even with all that and also another 2GB assigned to the iGPU, 32GB would still leaves 14GB for the compiler and IDE and operating system and a bunch of chrome tabs, which is probably plenty. But it's closer than you'd have thought.
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May 2, 2021 16:50
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Comatoast posted:What about if you nix the ramdisk and the extra ram, and instead upgrade to a top of the line ssd with 2000-3000mb/s read and write. The SN550 you have chosen has 1/3 of that write throughput. From other suggestions, downgrading the RAM seems like I'd want to go to a 4 slot motherboard in case I want to upgrade in future, and that change adds $50 to the motherboard price, and 2x16GB RAM is slightly more expensive per GB than 2x32GB, so this change would end up saving not that much after all, for a change that *might* also have a negative impact on the performance outcomes. The suggestion that throwing a bit more money at the processor would be worth it made me look closer at going to the i5-11600k rather than i5-11400, which it seems like isn't *that* much of an improvement for the $60 price increase, but it does significantly improve the iGPU, which I'm concerned might end up being a bottleneck for some things, so maybe a good idea. But then it also increases the TDP and requires selecting a separate cooler. So I took a look at the suggested i7-10700, which doesn't improve on the iGPU but does seem like the additional cores would play well with the "bunch of crap in parallel" workload I'm most likely to be doing, and is still cheaper than most of the suggested AMD options, and still doesn't require adding a graphics card. So I went with it. So now I'm up another $100 but I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable with most of my choices. Someone said I could probably save a few bucks on the PSU. Got any specific suggestions on that front? I find all the brand names of PSUs sound like "piece of crap that will burn your house down" or "generic nameless set of letters that plans to go out of business before you sue them", and I don't know how low on wattage it's okay to go, so advice on this topic would be most welcome. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/rv8s7X (If I had to take a guess I'd go with the "Enermax CYBERBRON", because the name makes me laugh.)
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May 3, 2021 04:51
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Helter Skelter posted:You don't want to go too cheap on your PSU as that's a good way to end up with fried components.
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May 3, 2021 12:19
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Helter Skelter posted:Oh no, please do not buy a PSU with a 3 year warranty. That is going Too Cheap.
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May 3, 2021 14:33
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Helter Skelter posted:So, yeah. Look for deals, but buy quality when it comes to your power supply. The additional rated-efficiency of going to a gold-rated PSU seems like a worthy win though. Probably saves about $15 a year in electricity if the machine is on 24/7.
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May 3, 2021 14:57
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Just assembled my new machine, haven't turned it on yet because I can't find the power supply for my old screen right now, but there were a few interesting quirks that were new to me. I had originally picked a non-modular PSU because I wasn't familiar with modular ones, but now I'm glad I ended up with a modular one - only having two bundles of wires instead of 8 or whatever makes the case much neater. (The two being a SATA one and the motherboard power.) Is there something you do for case fans when the motherboard doesn't have enough fan headers? There's just a CPU one and one other, and the case has a fan front and back. I doubt I need them both powered anyway, but it seems weird to not be able to. There's a "peripherals" module for the PSU, but none of its various connectors maps to a fan header. The Intel CPU installation is comically easy compared to how it was in the old days. I enjoyed the bit where you leave the cover attached throughout the process, then when you pull the lever down to seat the processor, the cover just leaps off. The motherboard manual and/or M2 drive manual were super unhelpful. The M2 drive manual said you hold it down with a screw. The motherboard manual just said where you can insert the M2 drive. I asked the internet and found a guy saying with one kind of motherboard you get two screws that are attached to the motherboard somewhere totally different, and you unscrew them both then screw one into the top of the other to form a screw-and-separator, so I went looking for anything like that, still no luck. Eventually I found that one of the extra little baggies in the box was labeled as an M2 something - it contained a weird piece of plastic that looks kind of like a ziptie crossed with a ringpull. Turns out that was the thing, you push a clip part of it into the motherboard as the spacer, fold the M2 stick down on top of it, then the ringpull end has a 'pin' on it that pushes into a small hole in the separator. Pretty cool, but not very user-friendly to not have documented it at all. Disappointed that that loving "power, reset, LEDs" bullshit area is still just as bullshit fifteen years later instead of being some kind of standard keyed connector.
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May 12, 2021 03:56
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Pilfered Pallbearers posted:Are you sure there’s only one fan header? I didn’t look at your board, but that’s uncommon. What board do you have?
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May 12, 2021 12:34
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Butterfly Valley posted:Tbh all of these problems sound mainly like cheap motherboard and case problems. My ITX motherboard has 3 fan headers, one of my fans came with a splitter, and my front power/led/whatever jumble of cables came pre-sleeved so it was just one thing to plug in instead of 12. Annoying, but you get what you pay for.
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May 12, 2021 12:52
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Pilfered Pallbearers posted:Woof. The machine is for software development (and not gaming), so I was aiming for "budget with decent performance", it was discussed with this thread a few pages ago. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/pc4WsX
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May 12, 2021 17:43
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Pilfered Pallbearers posted:Give me some time to peek at some other boards. Just tried with the VGA-shaped port (I think they call those RGB nowadays?) too, still nothing. Probably going to go with returning the motherboard. Couple of other things I noticed, the case fan didn't actually spin fully, it only spun for a fraction of a second on power-on, and twitched on power-off, which I'm told is sometimes the behavior when the motherboard is detecting a power fault. As I dismantled it for returning I noticed the main motherboard power supply connector wasn't super firmly seated (visible millimeter-or-so gap, clip was not hooked into place) but I tried shoving it extra hard and it wouldn't seat any more firmly - that seems like most likely a defect on the motherboard end too (and I guess if that issue is on the cable's side I'll find out when I have a new motherboard!) Any obvious issues with Gigabyte B460M DS3H Micro ATX?
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May 12, 2021 23:12
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FlamingLiberal posted:Crypto being banned in China is very bad for its future (but good for the rest of us). I assume really it's just the chinese government['s family members] sold all theirs and shorted it then banned it temporarily.
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May 20, 2021 02:22
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Apparently I am a stupidface. When my new machine wouldn't start up, it appears the problem was that when the motherboard manual said you only have to connect one of the two power connectors, either it meant "only the small one" or it was lying. I foolishly assumed the big one was the important one because that's what the *only* power connector was like last time I built a desktop. With the new motherboard the manual said you definitely have to connect the small one (and didn't say much about the other one). With both connected, it works (and with only the large one connected it had a similar but not identical failure pattern to the first motherboard's behavior.) I say works; I only got as far as "something on a screen" so far, the something was "gently caress you you should put the memory into the first and third slots not the first and second slots, do it right, jackass," and it was late, so that's step one for tomorrow. Also, the new motherboard+same RAM is a terrible pairing with the case. The RAM slots with the tall RAM block two of the three hard drive spaces (they did not with the other motherboard). And the third hard drive space (screwed to the bottom of the case) makes that control pin block with the power/reset pins hard to access. Luckily that one slot is still usable so long as the pins are connected first, and I only wanted one HDD.
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May 20, 2021 03:42
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:You need the big one (it powers the board) and one of the possibly two small ones (they power the cpu). Some PSUs / motherboards have two four-pin connectors for the cpu, but you only need the second if you're doing serious OC. quote:Its also often second and fourth slots for two sticks, I'd double check the manual before you go swapping things.
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May 20, 2021 04:06
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So after finally sorting out that power-startup thing and the issue where you can't fit hard drives *and* tall RAM in the same case, I spent like 5 hours loving around with BIOS settings trying to install Ubuntu from a USB stick. It was clearly detected, reported itself as UEFI, then would not boot. I tried to update the BIOS from it, and found it was listing no files. I tried to save the current BIOS to it, which showed a working progress bar and reported success, but then did not actually write a file. Finally sorted it out the next day by burning the same Ubuntu ISO to a DVD in my ancient USB DVD-RW drive, which then booted successfully first time. So I guess the problem was nothing to do with BIOS settings, the machine just hated that USB stick. (After it was working I tried plugging the USB stick in; the first port I tried had it detecting and removing itself repeatedly, the second port worked. Of course I had tried many ports while trying to install from it so that wasn't the *only* problem, but yeah, seems like a sign that probably that stick just kinda sucks. And maybe one of the USB ports does too.)
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May 22, 2021 00:08
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PRADA SLUT posted:$4117 The $2000 GPU and $1000 CPU seem ridiculous to me though. Apparently MSRP for that GPU is/was $649.
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May 29, 2021 22:50
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BrainDance posted:Having a ramdisk and actually using it in a super-nerd optimizing everything way is really awesome though.
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Jun 6, 2021 03:41
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