[ale] art/science of choosing cpu, motherboard, mem for a pc, some guidance

[DJ-Pfulio]

Look at other builds on other sites.  Look at their parts list.  Do you
have all those things?
Case, PSU, compatible video card, HDDs, cables, power cords, .... CPU
thermal paste?  Oh - and a CPU cooler?  Some CPUs come with a cooler,
others do not.  Usually old CPU coolers cannot be used, but old ATX
cases and ATX PSUs work fine, unless you have a $500 GPU that needs 2
extra power connections to work.

I have never needed more than 10G of RAM. My main VM server has 16G, but
8G is always used for disk buffers. I think having more is a waste,
unless it is cheap.  DDR3 is fairly cheap.  DDR4, not so much.  My media
center server (not a player) has 8G.

OC is 100% optional.  You only need a MB that supports it if you want to
do it.

Did you leave CPU performance overhead for the extra non-transcoding
things you want?  You might be able to assign specific CPUs to specific
VMs, if that works on these AMD CPUs.

Did you consider the CPU watts in your calculations?  AMD has a history
of using 30-50% more power.  Is that acceptable?  The newer Ryzen CPUs
were 125, 95, and 65W (I think).  I was specifically picking a 65W
version that included a CPU cooler.

I would search for Linux compatibility for that motherboard and whatever
GPU you've got.  Support for some older AMD Radeon GPUs has been dropped.

On 09/04/2017 06:02 PM, Narahari 'n' Savitha wrote:
> Need to pick your brains on finding the best CPU/MB/MEM combo.  Please help.
> 
> Let me start off saying I am taking a cheap route.
> 
> Went to get Passmark of 5500 and above from
> https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
> 
> Cheapest reasonable cpu at Microcenter with these ratings.  Prices below
> are at Microcenter.
> 
> Intel Core i3-7100 @ 3.90GHz 5895 $96
> AMD FX-8320E Eight-Core     7509 $80
> AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core  8942 $100
> 
> If I pick the cheapest one at $80, I work from there to motherboard on
> pcpartpicker.
> 
> Here I see many, but what criterion for motherboard, Star ratings ?
> Dont know if video is built in?  I dont need video builtin since I have
> vid card
> 4 mem slots is good.  Atleast 32G supported is a good thing to consider
> right
> 
> I picked Gigabyte
> (https://pcpartpicker.com/product/T69KHx/gigabyte-motherboard-ga78lmtusb3)
> for $55, comments say not overclockable but CPU in microcenter is Black
> Edition aka Overclockable, so need OC board right ? (cant find that info
> on the summary page though for mother boards.)
> 
> From here I worked towards DDR3 2400 memory.  This is Corsair 16G $120.
> 
> Is this pretty much it ?
> 
> My cost is coming to $260.
> 
> Is the approach I am taking correct ?
>