[ale] Back to new the desktop question

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 12/4/22 09:43, William Bagwell via Ale wrote:
> On Sunday, December 04, 2022 06:45:14 AM Leam Hall via Ale wrote:
>> and suggestions on a motherboard for a small tower?
> 
> Same boat, so will be following this thread closely. Have not built my
> own since 2007 and hate what I am currently using. Retirement is now on
> my radar so have about a year to plan and purchase.
> 
> Not wedded to any brand, but unless someone knows of recent declines in
> quality will look at ASUS first. My M2NPV-VM while pretty much useless
> today still runs after 15 years!
> 
> 17 inch mid tower(s) and Mageia here.

I have Ryzen 2600 and Ryzen 5600G systems. Just got a replacement $120 5600G (3 days ago) for the 2600.

Anyway, why did I get the 5600G instead of the 5600 or 5600X?  The onboard GPU is why.  I don't game and I found the built-in GPU to be faster, less costly than the low-end nvidia GPU and much, much, much, much less hassles that dealing with nvidia drivers.

Passmarks:
Ryzen 2600  = 13200
Ryzen 5600  = 21500
Ryzen 5600X = 21900
Ryzen 5600G = 19800 (GPU included)

The 5600G doesn't support PCIe 4-gen, that really doesn't matter to 99% of us in the real world. It doesn't to me.  I've seen the 5600 for $120 and got the 5600G for $120 last week.

As for motherboard.  I'm a realtek bigot. Don't want anything from them and actively seek out intel NICs. Those 2 Ryzen systems have Asus B450 ROG motherboards with identical firmware and a Intel i211 NIC each.  The second MB arrived last year with the correct support for the Ryzen 5xxx series, so any FUD about needing a BIOS update isn't really valid, unless you get it used.

At the time, the Asus B550 came with an Intel 2.5Gbps NIC, which wasn't working under my chosen Linux release, so I'd need to get an Intel GigE NIC to use while waiting for that support (2 yr old at that time) to finally get corrected by Intel. For my situation at the time, having identical B450 MBs seemed like a good idea. Today, I wish I'd gotten the B550 for a little more headroom even at $50 more cost.  I'm still pleased with the 5600G APU choice.  It is noticeably faster than the 2600 in heavy workloads. The iGPU it has is supported by Linux kernels 5.10 and later. It just works, though I really haven't logged in onto the console enough to matter. I've been frustrated by nvidia drivers the last 7 yrs. There's an issue often enough between the driver and the kernel and now with Wayland non-support, that I've had it.  I suppose for high end GPUs nvidia can make the hassles worth it. For medium and low-end, I don't see the point anymore.  When nvidia drops support for otherwise working GPUs and we are stuck with 1080p resolutions, that makes it clear they aren't F/LOSS friendly.

If you already have a GPU that you like, maybe the 5600X would be a good option. Same for the 5700?  Both are 65W CPUs. The performance difference between all the 5600 CPUs/APU is fairly small. Ref the passmarks.

Intel Core i5 CPUs are very competitive in performance and pricing, so be certain to look at similar performance Intel setups. AM4 has some CPU-only upgrades that can make sense for long-term users who don't change hardware too often. My 2600 --> 5600G upgrade proves that. 50% performance increase for 1 simple upgrade.

As for NVMe support and SATA ports.  The Asus B450 ROG MB supports both, but there are some caveats. They have a table for supported configurations which includes the GPU, number of NVMe drives (2 max) and the number of SATA devices, including m.2 SATA SSDs. Get the motherboard manual and look for 2 charts that show the allowed configurations.

Did a compatible RAM search on the Asus website for the B550 MB, 5600G CPU and found a few 4x32G RAM configurations in the tested APL, so I'd double check that 128GB of RAM is not supported, since it appears that it is.

Anyway, if you don't have a GPU already, get the Ryzen 5600G and get an Asus B550 motherboard with an Intel NIC. RAM and stability aren't an issue, once you get the RAM speed and timings correct.

$ free -hm
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            31G         22G        388M        160M        8.5G        8.3G
Swap:          4.3G        1.4G        2.8G

top - 11:39:48 up 15 days,  3:11,  5 users,  load average: 1.05, 1.41, 1.50
Tasks: 641 total,   1 running, 505 sleeping,   1 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  1.4 us,  0.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.3 id,  0.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 32867148 total,   406976 free, 23568816 used,  8891356 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  4460540 total,  2978496 free,  1482044 used.  8669012 avail Mem


that Ryzen is running 6 VMs, including an MS-Windows and a bloated Zimbra install.  It is also running 4 lxc containers.  As you can see, much of the RAM gets used for buffers and for some reason, about 1-1.5G is used for swap, always.

Hope this is helpful to someone.

Anyone interested in a well-loved Ryzen 2600 CPU + cooler for $50? Email me off list.