My 2025 high-end Linux PC

Idle power almost always goes up with higher resolutions and refresh rates [1], and AMD cards typically raise their idle clockspeeds more drastically than Nvidia cards [2] when resolution or refresh rate increases. The OP uses an 8K 60Hz screen so 45W seems reasonable.

[1] TechPowerUp and ComputerBase have the most thorough collections of power consumption measurements, but compare them to each other and you'll see how much it depends on the test setup.

[2] Nvidia's latest 5000 series cards buck this trend. The 9070 XT's direct competitor, the 5070 Ti, has especially high idle consumption for no clear reason.

Suspend to ram is same as sleep. Hibernate dumps ram contents to disc and completely turns off. Waking up from sleep (suspend to ram) is fast, from hibernation you need to read the whole file back to memory.

> It isn't clear to me but is the author indicating that Linux kernel support for 2.5GbE is still early stages, would it be better to wait a while before getting a motherboard with 2.5?

If you want to play it safe, waiting longer before buying new hardware is always a good strategy. As I wrote, though, aside from needing a new firmware package, I did not notice any issues with the 2.5G support in the end.

> There's a diff being presented between two lshw outputs? How is that diff shown?

I ran lshw > lshw-intel-285k-asrock.txt when I used the ASRock board and lshw > lshw-intel-285k-asus.txt when I used the ASUS board. Then I ran diff -u lshw-intel-285k-asrock.txt lshw-intel-285k-asus.txt and copy&pasted (parts of) the output into the blog post.

I have had pretty good luck with Realtek's 2.5gb chipset (PCIe card and USB 3 dongle) in TrueNAS, PopOS and Arch. I think the driver situation is pretty stable now.

I have had an Intel V225 fail on me but the V226 replacement has been working.