the monitor is quite sub par fir this build otherwise looks good. IMO fhd is for low end these days, but it can obviously be upgraded easily later
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Yeah, I planned on upgrading that later, I just don't have one at all right now. My current computer situation is a 2009 MacBook running Debian, with XFCE because any other DE would crash the poor thing, with it's whopping 4GBs of RAM.
If you're OK with a dead-end platform, you can get insane cost-performance if you get a Zen 3 X3D CPU. Even now the Zen 3 X3D CPU's are competitive with current gen CPU's, and you can shave off some money because the motherboard and RAM are older too. The motherboard that you selected seems really expensive for a motherboard - is there a particular reason you selected that one?
I'm also firmly in the camp that stock coolers are sufficient, so if you can get a CPU with a stock cooler, that'll shave off some cost as well.
I'm not entirely sure why you went with 2 1TB NVMe drives. If you need tons of storage space, the most cost-effective option is still to pair an SSD and a hard drive. For instance, you could replace 1 of the SSD's for a 2 TB hard drive at the same cost. Me, personally, I would go for 500 GB SSD + 1-2 TB hard drive. But that'll depend on how you prefer to balance speed and storage space
I'm not entirely sure why you went with 2 1TB NVMe drives.
I have two NVMe drives plus a slow HDD in my gaming PC so I can keep my games on fast storage without having to reinstall them whenever I install a new distro. I know I could have accomplished this with separate partitions, but every installer is a little different and I just cannot be arsed to re-learn how to do it every time. I sprung for the extra 1 TB stick ($50 or so), and now I don’t have to spend hours googling and watching youtube tutorials whenever I want to install a new distro—I just let the installers blow away the entire OS drive and do their thing.
Yeah, I can see your use case, I'm pretty familiar with with partitioning though, plus I'm not a big distro-hopper. I can always upgrade later!
Just for future-proofing, I'm gonna stick with the AM5 platform. The advice about getting one with a stock cooler is a fantastic idea, unfortunately I couldn't find an AMD any cheaper on pcpartpicker, plus the cooler isn't too expensive. As far as the storage goes, I just kinda guessed that HDDs were on the way out, and I wanted 2TB in case I got any large games and/or flatpaks with redundant libraries, but I can step that down (so far the only flatpak I have is Space Cadet Pinball lol). So, awesome, good advice!
If you are looking to reduce the build's cost consider a cheaper motherboard or a used GPU. The Asrock B650M-HDV/M.2 is the lowest you should go if it has all the connectors you need. As for buying used video card it's always a bit of risk, but as the most expensive component you could save the most on that. Since all AM5 CPUs have an integrated GPU you could build without the dedicated GPU first.
Great advice on the mobo, I've got that and a WiFi card for less than the one I had previously! I don't feel like I know enough about the GPU market to buy used, but if the integrated one is good enough for gaming, then that would be huge. The big game I wanna play is BG3, do you think it would work for that purpose?
if the integrated one is good enough for gaming
No, the iGPU is only meant for testing and basic desktop usage like video playback on the 7000 series. There are 8000G series with better integrated graphics but even those are much weaker than any dedicated GPU.
So, definitely yes on the GPU, got it.