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Re: [LUG] [External] OT: Hardware upgrade time - run VMs at home

 

Gigabyte Micro ATX B450M DS3H
AMD Ryzen 5 3400G 3.7GHz quad core
2 x 8 Gb Crucial DDR4 2666 mhz
Gigabyte GC-WB867D-1 PCIE Wifi card*
Radeon RX Vega 11 chip on board


Interestingly you guys all seem to be independently arriving at nearly identical builds - you're all in the right spot as well, I've built stacks of systems along these lines for people over the last year or two. I'm using one not much different myself right now and it's fantastic.

Some (hopefully helpful) remarks:

1: The Gigabyte B450 series of boards are a rock solid bargain choice
2: These are all AM4 builds so they have a LOT of headroom for cheap Ryzen CPU upgrades in the future as prices tumble 3: Speaking of Ryzens, the bundled coolers are atrocious (and noisy). Budget £20 for a proper cooler if background noise or CPU temps are important to you
4: Overclocking is dead, stable is the new king (it always was really)
5: Cheap RAM is only stealing from yourself. Spend another £10-£20 to get decent 3200MHz DDR4 and flip on the XMP timing profiles in the BIOS 6: Speaking of BIOS if you run these machines in actual legacy BIOS or CSM mode instead of the UEFI+GPT mode modern computers and operating systems are setup for you should lose your internet privileges 7: Don't even bother evaluating competing Intel based systems for the moment unless someone is literally giving you free parts - they haven't been in the game for a couple of years at this point

What does interest me is that you're all clearly emphasising the absolute lowest possible price/performance ratios you can scrape by on - non XMP budget RAM, literally the lowest spec Ryzen parts with integrated GPUs money can buy... I mean fair enough but seriously what is going on with you lot and SSDs? Are you all from the Reformation or something?! SSDs are very, very cheap indeed and if you're not budgeting for them to run at a minimum the OS drive you're basically taking all that performance, screwing it up into a ball and throwing it straight into the bin.

By buying the absolute lowest cheapest spec of everything you're doing yourselves some mischief here. Might as well buy a brand new sports car and then never take it out of "delivery mode" so it's locked at 20% output.

If you're only buying one main PC every 10 years or something shaving 10% off the cost and then kneecapping the result with (pause to stifle laughter) operating systems booting off rotational hard drives is a very poor decision.

For the love of god buy a £25 Kingston 240Gb SSD people. You'll thank me later.

For those considering not being hopelessly crippled by their terrible storage purchasing decisions go crazy and spend a whole £50 on a NVME drive instead - even the £50 B450 boards have a 4x lane PCIe M2 slot ready for them.

Also what is a "DVD" and why would anyone want one of those any more?

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