My laptop is running out of storage space and I don’t have anything I can remove anymore to increase it by much, so I’m thinking about building a pc. I’d also like to find a better gpu for doing video editing.

It will be the first one I’ve built, so I don’t really know what I need. Also, does it matter for compatibility for Linux whether I go with AMD or Intel?

The high end of what I want to use it for is video editing with Kdenlive or Davinci Resolve, some modeling and animation in Blender, and some light gaming, like Minecraft or TUNIC.

I figure one of these guides might be useful, but I don’t really know which.

Is there anything else I should know for setting up a PC to run Linux?

Edit: Maybe these guides from Logical Increments can help actually.

  • Whatever you do, do not get an Nvidia GPU. I’ve only ever had problems with Nvidia drivers on Linux. Meanwhile, the AMD drivers (both the ones baked into the kernel and proprietary) work nearly flawlessly.

    Intel’s most recent generation of CPUs were also frying themselves and Intel (at least last I checked) were not accepting RMAs from affected customers. Something to consider for your CPU at least.

    • I only ever had Nvidia GPUs (for Blender 3d work) and while it can be kind of a hassle still it has gotten soooo much better, I ran Bazzite for a hot minute (not anymore since my graphic tablet doesn’t work with it) and it just worked ootb. On Kinoite now which was the usual “install these 500 packages via commandline” (but this time via rpm-ostree) but it still works fine.

  •  Julian   ( @julianh@lemm.ee ) 
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    162 months ago

    Some build advice:

    • Be safe - don’t wear socks, stand on a hard floor if possible, ground yourself if you have a wrist strap for that, and discharge any static by touching metal and/or the case before touching any components. And no matter what, DO NOT open the power supply, and definitely don’t touch anything in it!
    • The huge motherboard connector probably requires more force than comfortable.
    • Watch through at least one build guide before starting. That way you know the process.

    Hope that helps, and don’t let it scare you away - it’s really fun to do and if you’re careful, chances are nothing major will go wrong.

  • The latest beginner guide from LTT is really good. So good that I was somewhat baffled. Whoever did the script for that episode deserves a raise. It is information packed but beginner friendly and has plenty of infographic detailing stuff.

  • You only mention your laptop is running out of space so you need to get a new computer? does your laptop have a soldered SSD? If that’s not the case, I think the reflex should first be to see what storage you can get your laptop so that you can keep using it rather than discarding it :(

      • Can someone chime on who has used Blender with both and AMD GPUs vs Nvidia? Everything I could find out (which is surprisingly little) is that AMD is much slower (no real Cuda/Optix equivalent?) but I have no idea if that is true.

        • Mh, taking another looks at Blender benchmarks ( https://opendata.blender.org ), highest Nvidia median score is 12k (4090), the one I have atm (4070) has a score of 7.2k, had a laptop with a mobile 4080 before (5.7k). I haven’t really noticed any difference between them, tbh, so take this next bit with a giant bit of salt: Highest Amd score is 3.9k for a AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (I know nothing about Amd GPUs, most reviews are from 2022/23), not really sure what to make of this but it doesn’t look too good for Amd?

          • High use Blender users tend to avoid AMD for the reasons you point out.

            This leads to less updates due to amd users not being to interested in the community.

            It is an issuw without any practicle solution. Because as I need a long overdue update. Again nvidia seems the only real choice.

            Everyone is sorta forced to do that unless we can convince amd users to just try out blender and submit results.

            So hi any AMD users who dont care about blender.

            Give it a try and submit performance data please.

  • My first question is about your laptop; is the SSD removable, because if so, even a pretty large SSD is cheap these days.

    Also, the GPU question is complicated. For most use cases, AMD is better on Linux. However, since you’re doing Resolve and Blender, that gets a bit murky. It depends on if ROCm support is less dismal on later AMD cards - I have an RX 580, which AMD quickly dropped support for and I am bitter about.

    This is not to say I like NVidia, but for fast video encoding and rendering, as far as I know, it’s the easier option. Someone correct me if I am wrong, please.

    As for actually building the thing, you’d start by look for what CPU you want, then find a compatible motherboard, then read the board’s compatibility list for RAM. They usually have compatibility lists for storage - those don’t matter, as it’s pretty universal. Then choose a graphics card, a case with the right form factor, a PSU, and a cooler. I tend to go with liquid cooling, as it’s not that expensive anymore.

    Like others have said, check kernel support for your hardware, but also, it’s generally much easier on desktop. The main things to look out for are ethernet and WiFi controllers. By the way, what distro do you prefer, because that’s definitely a factor.

    • Thanks for the information, it’s all very helpful. I’m thinking of just using my laptop as a secondary device when I’m out of the house, so a hard drive upgrade won’t be necessary, but I’ll definitely keep that in mind. As for a distro, I’ll most likely be using Fedora.

  • I’ve noticed that when I am specking out a new computer I typically fall into the trap of wanting the absolute best computer I can get for the money.

    I’ve always been on the cheaper side, so I have found myself spending days or weeks researching various parts at various quality levels at various prices.

    It becomes a huge drag.

    Set the budget that you’re comfortable with, find the motherboard that has the features that you want, then get a CPU that fits in that price range, a case that fits your use cases, and then if you’re going to splurge on anything splurge on the power supply as a good power supply can last you through multiple computers.

    If you have to save money somewhere, save money on RAM as you can always order more or upgrade the rim that you have relatively inexpensively. Maybe if you’re going intel, purchase an i5 CPU and then consider upgrading if you max out its abilities or you find yourself frequently running at 100% utilization.

    And don’t overlook pre-builts. There are lots of refurbished computers that you can purchase for far less than the cost of the individual parts that have all of the minimum specs that you want in exchange for little things like only having a single stick of ram or having a low quality SSD.

    There’s nothing that stops you from upgrading later should your use case change.

  • ebay, ebay, ebay (and also pcpartpicker).

    Unless you want to frag people at 4k@140Hz in the latest AAA game, you probably don’t need the latest generation components (and I’d say your requirement are quite low here, consider how the only thing you complain about is storage space).

    Unless you really want to assemble everything by yourself, consider buying one of the second-hand, previous-gen gaming rigs on ebay (but watch out for scams!). Even if you do want to assemble the PC yourself, consider buying used parts on ebay (or buying a full PC to cannibalize reselling the excess).

    What are the specs of your current rig? Except for storage, are you satisfied with how it runs? How much storage do you need for the projects you are working on? How much to archive things? Do you want to do anything about backups? Is a full size tower ok? How good a video do you want? What is your budget?

  • pcpartpicker.com is a good place to start and can help you know if specific parts are compatible but it’s just a place to start and is often still missing important info.

    So you still need to do due diligence and do things like check measurements to make sure, for example, your video card will actually fit inside your case, etc.

    Also, since its your first time, you want to avoid any motherboards that require you to do a BIOS update to handle a newer processor, because that’s just complicated stuff that you’re going to want to skip as a beginner.

    It’s more expensive but go for a newer motherboard that is compatible with your processor out-of-the-box. BIOS updates are a pain and scary even for advanced users.

  • you are getting advice that will make a good gaming pc but not a good workstation for what you said you’re gonna do.

    do the opposite of what most everyone in this thread is saying:

    intel over amd (this could actually go either way depending on the price point), nvidia over amd, start at 32gb of ram and go up from there. prioritize cores over threads, sneak a rotational hard disk in, spend more on your power supply than you planned to.

    plan on not using wayland.

      • You mainly want to be able to do 3d and video editing right?

        Those two, specifically with davinci resolve and blender, work best with nvenc and libcuda(?), the software libraries that let you take advantage of your nvidia cards encoders and cuda cores.

        So if you were building for that workload, you’d have an nvidia card and many problems people encounter in Wayland come from using it with an nvidia card.

        So yeah it’s the nvidia support. Most people will say “fuck nvidia, just don’t buy their hardware” but it’s the best choice for you and would be a huge help, so choosing between Wayland and nvidia is a no brainer.

        It is a bummer that you’ll need to install x specially, but I’d be really surprised if there isn’t decent support for that.

        There’s always the hope that Wayland will get better over time and you’ll be able to use it in a few years.

        E: a word on encoding: both amd and intel CPU’s have video encode and decode support, but the intel qsv is more widely supported and tends to be faster most of the time. When people suggest intels arc gpus they’re saying it because those gpus use qsv and for a video editing workstation they’d be a good choice.

        Part of the reason I put intel and amd cpus on an even footing for you is because any cost savings you get from going amd would likely be offset by the performance decrease. Theres some good breakdowns of cpu encoder performance out there if you want to really dive in, it remember that you’re also in a good place to buy intel because of the crazy deals from sky is falling people.

        That kinda ties into the cores over threads thing too. If your computers workload is a bunch of little stuff then you can really make hay of using a scheduler that is always switching stuff around. One of the things that makes amds 3d processors so good at that stuff is that they have a very big cache so they’re able to extend the benefit of multi threading schedulers up to larger processes. You’re looking at sending your computer a big ol’ chunk of work though, so you’re not usually gonna be multithreading with that powerful scheduler and instead just letting cores crunch away.

        Part of the reason I didn’t suggest intels arc stuff is that you’re also doing 3d work and being able to take advantage of the very mature cuda toolchain is more important.

        Plus nvidia encoding is also great and if you were to pair it with an intel cpu you could have the best of both worlds.

        You’re really looking to build something different than most people and that’s why my advice was so against the grain. Hope you end up with a badass workstation.

  •  Eugenia   ( @eugenia@lemmy.ml ) 
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    52 months ago

    For DaVinci Resolve, you will need an nvidia gpu, even their amd support is half-ar3ed, and intel doesn’t work at all (they don’t support it under linux, while they do on windows). So you need to decide if you’re going to use resolve, or kdenlive (that works with everything, since it’s not really accelerated – it’s slower (their acceleration is buggy)). However, if you’re going with nvidia, you will probably experience problems on the everyday desktop. So I’d suggest an amd gpu and cpu possibly.

    Alternatively, just get a refurbished Dell laptop, or an older Zenbook. These usually work great with Linux.

  • Blender and DaVinci Resolve work better on Nvidia. AMD might work, but it will be a hassle and you’ll likely need the proprietary AMD drivers anyway.

    With Nvidia supporting Wayland and the open-source NVK continuing to get better, you could even switch to open source drivers for gaming at some point, if you prefer.

    Edit: I’ve had enough issues with AMD GPU’s clocking down while gaming, leading to micro stuttering. So don’t buy AMD just because everyone tells you they work flawlessly.

    For CPU and mainboard, everything works well — just don’t buy a random unknown SSD from Amazon, then you’re asking for data loss and random issues.

    • Stay clear from nvidia. AMD if you buy a graphics card, if you just use integrated graphics both AMD and Intel are fine
    • When picking a motherboard, look what wifi chipset is used and check Linux compatibility. Some wifi chipsets require to manually install drivers, and some just don’t work at all
  • I’d avoid a 13th or 14th gen Intel processor right now because they’ve had a lot of problems with their manufacturing process. Otherwise, there’s not really much difference between AMD and Intel in terms of like, OS compatibility or anything.

    I’ve done some basic work with Davinci Resolve on linux and I haven’t really had any issues with my Radeon 7800XT. I can’t really speak for using the proprietary drivers for AMD, but with the open source drivers, as long as you install rocm-opencl through your package manager, Davinci Resolve should be fine. Overall, I’d recommend an AMD GPU. Edit: You mentioned blender in a comment. For AMD’s open source drivers you’d need to install rocm-hip for Cycles to work

    Edit 2: I hadn’t tried blender in a bit and I realized apparently at least on Fedora 40, you also need rocm-hip-devel at least as of 09/24/24 for supported AMD GPUs to show up in Blender. Idk how that would translate to other distros

    PC Part Picker is good cuz when you start a new build, you start with the CPU and then it’ll only show you parts compatible with that CPU. As someone else mentioned tho, its not perfect and you still may want to check clearances between parts, like that your CPU cooler isnt too tall for your case, or that your Power Supply isnt too long (been there, lmao)

    From my own personal experience with buying brand new RAM and it being bad a few times, I’d probably run memtest86+ for a few hours once the computer is together to make sure that the RAM actually works. You can download the linux ISO w/ GRUB option and make a bootable flash drive out of that and let it run. Afterwards, I usually install my OS. Might save you a few headaches down the road if you get into your new OS and things behave strangely, but its up to you.

    Other than that, the setup shouldn’t be too hard.

  • As you have in your post, Logical Increments is a good place to start.

    As others have said, AMD is your best bet currently, mostly because of raw performance compared to recent Intel offerings. If you have no limited budget or power requirements, here are my recommendations:

    If you have the paid version of Davinci Resolve, AMD does not have the best selection of hardware encode/decode options, but people have reported that Intel Arc GPUs work, so I would get and Intel A310 as a secondary GPU if that is something that you need.

    If you want the best of the best GPU, without going Nvidia, the AMD RX 7900XTX is it. Also, AMD has stated publicly that they are moving away from high-end GPUs, so there probably won’t be a better one coming out anytime soon.

    If you want to plan for more gaming than you stated in your post, the Ryzen 7800X3D is the best gaming CPU on the market, so I would get that. If you plan to focus on video editing, the 9950X is the best, but probably not worth the cost compared to cheaper 9000 or 7000 chips.

    If you go with a Ryzen 7000 or 9000 CPU, get DDR5-6000 CL30 memory.

    If you’re getting an air cooler for your CPU, don’t pay more than $50. There are a ton of great, cheap options these days.

    Get either the new Antec Flux Pro case (when it’s available, probably this month) or the Fractal Torrent if you care about best thermals and quiet operation. Everything else is a compromise.

    If you need HDMI 2.1, you’ll need a DP -> HDMI adapter on an AMD GPU because of a licensing squabble.

    Those are things I could think of off the top of my head. I don’t think I missed anything big.