My 2022 high-end Linux PC | Hacker News Reader

My 2022 high-end Linux PC

michael.stapelberg.ch

33 pointssecure17 comments

I'm surprised someone building a high-end Linux-specific PC would go with an Nvidia GPU when it's AMD who has the performant open source GPU driver.

If he's still running the Dell 8K display, it requires two DP 1.4 cables and "display tiling" GPU driver support and he found that only nVidia's Linux drivers do the proper tiling for this:

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2017-12-11-dell-up3218k/

Yep, that’s still the reason :)

Most benchmarks still put Nvidia ahead of AMD, especially when it comes to compute and ML. And, based on personal experience, Nvidia drivers are at least as stable as AMDs, despite being closed.

Nvidia has better AI/ML features.

It's really crazy how much expensive are the RAM modules, compared to a almost high-end GPU and high-end CPU.

64 GB is a lot of memory to put in a PC. Ten years ago that amount of memory would have cost you about $64000.

EDIT: Er, sorry it looks like I misread the chart, I think the price 10 years ago was much lower than that. It's still a lot of memory though, compared to what a typical PC ships with.

As someone who owned a computer in 2012, I can confirm RAM was not $1000/GB or even $100/GB or even $10/GB (that could maybe be reasonable for very high end RAM).

I'm pretty sure I was building workstations 10 years ago with 16gb of RAM, and I sure wasn't spending 16 grand on the modules - maybe 1/100 as much. As for amount, I don't think two doublings in 10 years is unreasonable.

It's because it's DDR5. Not worth it at that price, IMO. DDR4 has gotten incredibly cheap.

I’m sad that a high end pc in 2022 is made from 2018 parts (gpu)

It’d be wasteful for my use-case to put in a newer GPU.

I do have a newer GPU, but it’s in my gaming PC. Using the previous-gen gaming PC in my desktop PC makes sense for me.

Why all the empty space in the case?

Airflow

All the empty space isn’t necessarily my choice, the case just doesn’t come in a smaller version. That said, it was really easy to build the machine when there’s enough space to maneuver :)

I came here to post this. These days with one or two M.2 slots on the mainboard and optical drives going out of fashion, cases could/should be vastly smaller.

If you're happy with an iGPU, the Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny M75q with their 1 litre cases are very appealing. You can't really buy such small cases for DIY builds, unfortunately.

Unless you start hitting on the CPU and their laptop-style turbine gets fairly annoying.

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