New workstation purchase

Help Desk Hardware Help
1

Hello lovely people,

I need your help ! I want to buy a new workstation, but I have no real hardware knowledge.
Here is some background:

I am going to use it mostly for development. The main apps I use are firefox and intelliJ on fairly heavy applications. A heavy multi-docker based application, and some VMs (nothing crazy). It also needs to run 3 screens, 2 of them Ultrawide (but not 4k). And I will pay extra not to have to deal with displaylink ever again. So I will need a graphic card.

Everything needs to work (preferably) ootb on linux. That’s why everything is AMD. And I would rather the machine stays relevant for the next 5 years.
Budget: under 3000euros.

Bonus points if it can run Baldur’s gate 3. Otherwise I won’t use that PC for gaming. And definitely not for video streaming.

Here is what I found so far:
from csl-computer :
2987,50 EUR

OS: none
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 16x 3400 MHz
Watercooling: Corsair iCUE H100i RGB Pro XT WasserkĂĽhlung
graphic card: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, 12 GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DisplayPort (Hersteller nach VerfĂĽgbarkeit)
Mainboard: GIGABYTE B550 AORUS Elite V2 0,00
RAM: 64 GB DDR4-RAM, Dual Channel (4x 16 GB), 3600 MHz, Kingston HyperX Fury RGB
Hard drive 1: 1000 GB M.2 PCIe SSD Samsung 980 Pro (Lesen/Schreiben: max. 7000 MB/s | 5000 MB/s)
Hard drive 2: 2000 GB SATA Festplatte
Case: Corsair 4000D mit Sichtfenster
power suply: 850 Watt Corsair RMx Series, 89 % Effizienz, 80 Plus Gold zertifiziert
Network card onBoard LAN
Soundcard onBoard HD Sound
3 years warranty

But I am not sure if the RAM works best with that processor, I am not sure about the watercooling and the power supply. there’s a lot of options. I did some internet search and selected the “recommended” ones.

or from tuxedo:
2.915,00 EUR

RAM 64 GB (2x 32GB) 3200Mhz Corsair Vengeance ( +380,00 EUR)
Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (3.40-4.90 GHz 16-Core, 32 Threads, 72 MB Cache, 105 W TDP) ( +640,00 EUR)
HD1 1000 GB Samsung 980 PRO (NVMe PCIe 4.0) ( +210,00 EUR)
HD2 2 TB HDD (Seagate / 7.200 rpm / SATAIII) ( +20,00 EUR)
Case CORE One mATX Tower
Graphic card AMD Radeon RX 6600 | 8GB GDDR6 | 3x DisplayPort 1.4 + 1x HDMI 2.1 ( +650,00 EUR)
Motherboard Gigabyte AMD B550 Chipsatz
powersuply Ultra Silent 750 (80+ Gold | 135mm | 750 Watt | Modular)
OS TUXEDO_OS 20.04 LTS (Empfehlung)
Warranty 24 Monate / 2 Jahre Garantie
There is way less option so there I guess that’s okay?

If any of you would be so kind as to check this config, I will happily send you beer money (paypal) as a thank you.
I never had a workstation before, I always work on shitty laptop but I saved up for this.

Have a great day.
Best !
z

1 Like
2

Have you used PC Part Picker? This site will let you build the system you want, give you prices for all of the parts, give you user ratings, and warn you about possible conflicts – such as BIOS upgrades, cooler mismatches, etc…

Put your parts list from the 2 builds above and see what they say.

4 Likes
4

Wow cool thank you !
It reports nothing. So I guess it’s a good build

6

So after talking to the good people on DLN Matrix, here’s the latest version.

os none
Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 16x 3400 MHz
Processor cooler Corsair iCUE H100i RGB Pro XT WasserkĂĽhlung
Graphic card AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, 12 GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DisplayPort (Hersteller nach VerfĂĽgbarkeit)
Mainboard GIGABYTE B550 AORUS Elite V2
RAM 64 GB DDR4-RAM, Dual Channel (4x 16 GB), 3200 MHz, Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO
1. HD 1000 GB M.2 PCIe SSD Samsung 980 Pro (Lesen/Schreiben: max. 7000 MB/s
2. HD 2000 GB SATA Festplatte
Gehäuse Corsair 4000D mit Sichtfenster
Power supply 850 Watt Corsair RMx Series, 89 % Effizienz, 80 Plus Gold zertifiziert
Warraty 36 Month

total 2953,40

@astronautsupplier unfortunately both providers only offer that board. But VMs are not that important to me. If I can run them to test out distro, run a quick software here and there, it’s enough.

1 Like
7

Those specs are far better than anything I have. I say, buy what you can afford. If this is in your price range, I don’t see any problem with it. I am very happy with my AMD systems, I am also happy with my Intel systems. :man_shrugging:

2 Likes
8

Alright, Thank you. I shall go ahead with this then. Hopefully I’m good for the next 5+ years.

9

I do most of my work on hardware (excluding drives) that is approaching 11 years from release. I expect that next year I will be upgrading as you are. Let us know how it goes.

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10

I definitely second MarkofCain’s choice with PC Part Picker. They have a variety of systems that cover every budget.

You learn so much by building a PC as well, as opposed to buying a prebuilt one. You become better at diagnosing hardware problems and learn what each component does and the use it has in your system.

If you do decide to build a PC, here are my recommendations:

  • Buy the highest rated power supply you can that is within your budget. This stops your system from potentially being underpowered and having components fried / the power supply blowing-up on you.
  • While water cooling does give you the absolute best performance, air cooling your system is much cheaper and a decent air cooler can give you nearly the same cooling as water cooling in my experience. You also don’t have to worry about a custom water loop or any leakages.
  • As for the other components, I would buy the best you can in your budget. If you go with an AMD Ryzen CPU, make sure it has the Zen 3 architecture and that you pick up RAM that has a high frequency to support it (the Ryzen series works well with high frequency RAM).
  • Buy an anti-static strap - they are cheap and reduce the (albeit low) risk of you damaging a component through static electric. Connect the strap to the fan grill of your power supply, switch it off and plug it in the wall so that you are properly grounded.
  • When placing the components into your motherboard, you can put your motherboard on top of its box to stop static damage. You can of course also buy an anti-static mat, which does the same job.

I am also on a laptop only currently, but will build another PC at some point, it is just so much fun.

Best of luck with your build and enjoy your new PC! Keep the beer money for yourself :wink:

11

I finally received the workstation last week, It took a while to get all the parts.
And it took me about a week to debug random bugs. I have to say, even with full AMD, you still need to get your hands dirty. (not a complaint though it was fun)

If it can save anyone else’s time: If you get a tower pc (as in not a laptop), and you get random crashes that you can’t recover. You have to hard reboot: disable C-States. I learned this by randomly stumbling on a LTT video about it.

There is also a bug between MESA and Picom for amd GPUs. I have not found a solution for that yet. I opened bug reports for now. If you see some glitches on the screen, zalgo style, that’s the bug.

So until this gets resolved, I am using KDE (mostly because Michael keeps mentioning how amazing it is haha). I am actually pretty impressed. I spent a few days making it behave like i3. And it’s pretty good. Some feature are clunky but all in all, definitely happy. I would say it’s setup 30% like I want it ootb, now I am at 95%. (meta shortcuts, bismuth, 10 workspaces, pinning a window to fix one application on the extra screen. Removing all the panels, widgets etc, and make them look like i3bar)
I still need to make applications open in their respective workspaces/screen.
And I need to find where all my setup is saved to make a backup. I don’t think I will have the patience to ever do this again haha. Too many UIs to go through.

I also installed witcher 3 and cs:go. It’s working flawlessly. in Ultra mode and max FPS for my screen (I think cs:go shows over 400, my screen is at 75).
I might even try to get cyberpunk, just to see what the fuss is all about. (not at 60euros though)

Thanks people for your suggestions. I am really satisfied so far. Though I have not done any real work on it yet.

If you have any questions, want to test something, let me know :slight_smile:

1 Like