[ale] upgrading desktop

Steve Litt slitt at troubleshooters.com
Mon Aug 3 05:30:56 EDT 2020


On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 22:45:14 -0400
David Jackson via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I tend to build a lot of systems, so my perspective is influenced by
> this bias.  But I'm unclear about your priorities.
> 
> If you were doing something demanding (say rendering videos or doing
> heavy computation or competitive gaming or whatever), you would be
> well beyond a 3rd gen i5 cpu.  Since 3rd gen Intel level of tech
> seems to suit you fine, it seems to me your performance requirements
> are rather low.  Another thing I'm curious about is how much change
> are you willing to tolerate.  Would a lot of added performance be a
> bad thing or a good thing?
> 
> I think you might be missing how easy it would be to get a *massive*
> performance upgrade with a relatively slight effort or cost by
> upgrading all your whole architecture.  

The OP can get improved performance by buying a $50 SSD. Perhaps
he'll need to buy a $25 PCIe to 4xSATA converter. 

The minute he buys a better processor (probably over $100, he needs to
buy a new mobo (probably over $80), and all new RAM (about $400 to do
things right, as opposed to slightly improving what he has right now),
as well as the SSD he's contemplating. He might need a new power
supply. Probably new fan connectors and gender benders. If the
processor runs hotter, he'll need more and bigger fans. 

He already has enough power to author computer programs, write 300 page
documents, and use his computer as a voluminous and well organized
filing cabinet. For $50 to $75 he can make it a fair amount faster,
which is fine if he closes browser tabs when he's done with them, isn't
a gamer, and doesn't do frequent audio or video processing.

Even if he decides he needs huge power and goes for a new system, using
his current system as a spare or server or whatever and equipping it
with an SSD is very cost effective.

> A LOT has changed since 3rd
> gen Intel was current.  For about the cost in difficulty and dollars
> in upgrading your 3rd gen architecture, you could probably find a
> more current Ryzen system that would give this massive upgrade.
> What has changed a lot very recently is that AMD Ryzen normally beats
> Intel in terms of performance per dollar (bang for the buck)
> nowadays.  (I'm trying to keep it simple here.) And the surrounding
> architecture has massively improved as well.  Current gen platforms
> are much more efficient and performant overall than a 3rd gen i5 was.

The preceding is what I contemplate doing in the next year or two. The
insane bloat of youtube-capable browsers, plus the fact that you pretty
much need Firefox or Chromium (probably both) to participate in today's
world and job market mean that eventually I'll need to combat the bloat
with raw power, even though my current six year old dual core  AMD
A6-6400K with 16GB six year old RAM with several TB of spinning rust
and 128GB of SSD mounted as / and an Openbox WM performs outstandingly
when browsers aren't gumming up the system.

[snip]

> 
> I tend to think the most "bang for the buck" system today (in my mind)
> would be a B450 motherboard with a Ryzen 5 3600, 16G RAM at about
> 3200 or faster, and I would go for an NVMe M.2 SSD at around 500G.
> You can use a cheap video card (about $35) and the case and power
> supply as your budget and preference dictates.  Power supplies and
> cases are a bit more expensive these days, thanks to COVID-challenged
> supplies, but memory, ssd's and CPUs are relatively cheap.  This
> system would cost you about $550-600 or so, depending on your
> choices.  One example:
> https://pcpartpicker.com/user/deepbsd/saved/#view=6tqG3C I wager this
> system would make you grin each time you sit down at your PC. I'd
> also wager that the "grin factor" would quickly offset the dollar
> damage.

I'll be keeping the preceding paragraph as advice for when I build my
next system, which shouldn't be too much longer. Of course, I
already have 16 GB RAM, so I'll get either 32 or 64GB. I'll
probably also boost my disk space to something exceeding 10TB. 

Earlier I heard Ryzen wasn't totally compatible with Linux. Have those
issues been solved?

SteveT


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