Hey hyjinx!
On Sun, 07 Sep 2025 21:15:56 +1200, you wrote:
It is that sort of timewasting that ruined my day. Yet, part of me still pines for Linux. Using a sweet machine with some decent CPU and graphics card that could play steamdeck games once in a blue moon, as well as run some workloads like my dev stuff in i3 or a similar light wm. Apple
Silicon is all very nice, but until x64 is completely dead and everyone moves to ARM, there are just some other things that don't work on ARM.
Less and less these days, but I do a lot of retro stuff, and
occasionally I want to spin up a Windows95 VM, or a Windows 11 box in proxmox or similar.
I'm just trying to understand more clearly before going further and ending up way off track. Is your plan to use this new Linux machine for your work related stuff? Or are you sticking with the Mac and using this just for 'tinkering', light gaming, and once in awhile doing some video editing?
So... if I was to do such a thing, can you recommend how I would go
about it? What hardware would you recommend? I am so out of date with
modern hardware, all the Ryzen's and i9's and so forth really mean very little to me. I would have no idea where to start to buy a motherboard,
CPU and gfx card that worked well with Linux. It would obviously need to have sound, USB C, WiFi 6, NVMe storage capability and a graphics card
that had enough heft to render graphics reasonably quickly. The NVIDIA appeal naturally is CUDA, being able to play with graphics models sounds cool, but as long as I can do similar stuff with AMD/ATI, I'm not
fussed.
I only ask the above, because if it's for work related stuff, I would probably recommend sticking with your Mac and continuing to upgrade when needed (because you know it works well and gets the job(s) done). You don't want to be stuck messing with constantly updating Linux with the possibility of breaking video drivers or whatever else could go wrong, that requires the extra time to look into the problem and fix it.
Otherwise for a 'side piece' or tinkering/fun machine that could /assist/ with your workload, and you want something newer that can handle anything you can throw at it, at this point I would probably recommend AMD. Depending on how close to the latest bells and whistles you want to go, the X3D line is pretty amazing (from the 5600X3D (budget friendly, lower end, all the way up to the 9950X3D (latest, released in March of this year). As far as which one you would need, you'd have to look at some benchmark reports or something to see what each one is capable of, but from what I've read, the 9950X3D is topping Intel's latest CPUs in both gaming and creator applications by a decent margin. Just as well, the current few generations of Intel chips have a lot of bad reports of having issues. So until they get their bailout and start making some better chips, I would probably steer clear of their latest stuff.
For heavy workloads, 3D rendering, and professional content creation (I'm leaving out heavy gaming because it doesn't seem like you care about that much), the Ryzen 9 series may be your best bet. Just as well, it's newer so it will probably last you longer into the future before needing to upgrade. On a more budget friendly level, though.. You may want to look into Ryzen 7 also. Still great performance there.
As for Intel, I'm not sure exactly when the problems started, but I have an i9-9900K that still handles whatever I throw at it in regards to newer AAA games (I just don't do video editing, so I can't give you information on that). I imagine there were even quite a few releases after mine as well that are great workhorses. But, (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong here), the 13th and 14th gen "Raptor Lake" (latest) models are seeming to have some major issues, and is why Intel is in the situation they are in right now.
Just as well, you may be able to find some great deals on some high end Intel chips that came before "Raptor Lake" (11th-12th gen maybe?) with the current state Intel is in right now. ;)
As for graphics cards, I don't have much experience with AMD cards as of late, but there are some that seem to be performing well. I currently use an Nvidia 3060 12GB that still seems to be keeping up with any heavy gaming I do (I don't go higher than 1440p, because I don't care to pay for 4k GPU and/or monitor prices). Once the 3060 has put in it's work and starts to show signs of fatigue, I'll probably upgrade to a newer (5060 or 6060 if I can make it till the next gen comes out).
CPU prices don't have nearly as much range in price, IMO, as graphics cards do. So this is where you need to find out what tasks you're going to do, and match it to a GPU that can do it. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever I need to spend over $1k for a graphics card (or really even close to that, to be honest). While the 3090, 4090, and 5090 GPUs are freaks of nature, and advertise great frame rates for gaming, that is and never really was the intention of creating those cards. They're flippin' powerhouses made for MUCH greater tasks above and beyond gaming, that I will never need to do. But, if you have the money to blow.. by all means have at it. ;)
Unfortunately I'm in New Zealand, so everything is like 15-20% more expensive down here, and I can't really buy it online from places in the USA, because by the time DJT puts on his tarrifs, or when it sits in our customs warehouse and gets even more import taxes slapped on it, costs
can be up to 30-50% more than ticket price, depending upon whether
Customs pick up on it or not. For me, we usually buy at places like https://pbtech.co.nz for imported goods. Much of it comes from China or
I'm not sure how these sites are in your neck of the woods, but I fully built my last (current) PC between Amazon, Newegg, and maybe even Best Buy (US based, but you can replace that with your site above). Whichever had the lower price of the specific part I wanted, basically. If one didn't have a deal on something, one of the other ones did.
I guess it all depends on your budget. My entire build cost me probably around $2k, and was about 5 (maybe more) years ago when most of the stuff was newer. Everything is still holding strong as far as playing newer games and whatnot. Hopefully it lasts another few years (in the gaming world, that is) but we'll have to wait it out and see.
I do like these fairly slimline boxes too. I have 3 NUC boxes in the
house and they are great for low power compute tasks, even the i5 one I
have is pretty reasonable actually, but it won't be sufficient for what
I'm going to be using this one for.
I can't say much about low power computing as it doesn't interest me any more, to be honest. I have 2-3 RPi2s here collecting dust as at one time I jumped on to that bandwagon and realized they were much slower than I needed/wanted. If I want low power computing, I'll run a VM on a much better host machine and give it lower specs. ;)
While I'm not completely "in the know" of all this stuff either, I read up a little on what's currently going on. I'd love to hear from people that have more knowledge on this subject, too!
Regards,
Nick
... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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