My laptop is running out of storage space and I don’t have anything I can remove anymore to increase it by much, so I’m thinking about building a pc. I’d also like to find a better gpu for doing video editing.
It will be the first one I’ve built, so I don’t really know what I need. Also, does it matter for compatibility for Linux whether I go with AMD or Intel?
The high end of what I want to use it for is video editing with Kdenlive or Davinci Resolve, some modeling and animation in Blender, and some light gaming, like Minecraft or TUNIC.
I figure one of these guides might be useful, but I don’t really know which.
Is there anything else I should know for setting up a PC to run Linux?
Edit: Maybe these guides from Logical Increments can help actually.
cpu wise both amd and intel are decent.
gpu wise stick with amd.
Just don’t bother with a 13th/14th gen intel right now. Either go 12th gen intel, or straight up AMD which is what I’d recommend.
Uh… are you not aware of the catastrophically bad lithography issues Intel has had lately across both the 13th and 14th gen, and the subsequent ass-tier fashion in which they handled it?
Do not buy a 13th or 14th gen Intel CPU.
Not to mention, iirc you should get a bit of a perf bump for the GPU due to AMD’s Infinity Cache, so long as you roll with (iirc) Zen2+ and RDNA2+
Whatever you do, do not get an Nvidia GPU. I’ve only ever had problems with Nvidia drivers on Linux. Meanwhile, the AMD drivers (both the ones baked into the kernel and proprietary) work nearly flawlessly.
Intel’s most recent generation of CPUs were also frying themselves and Intel (at least last I checked) were not accepting RMAs from affected customers. Something to consider for your CPU at least.
I only ever had Nvidia GPUs (for Blender 3d work) and while it can be kind of a hassle still it has gotten soooo much better, I ran Bazzite for a hot minute (not anymore since my graphic tablet doesn’t work with it) and it just worked ootb. On Kinoite now which was the usual “install these 500 packages via commandline” (but this time via rpm-ostree) but it still works fine.
My partner’s computer was running bazzite on a 2080 super and it gave her nothing but problems, especially with Wayland. Switching to AMD immediately fixed the Wayland issues, and also completely stabilized her system. It could be that it was a problematic GPU, I suppose. I admit that I haven’t personally used an Nvidia GPU since ~2020, however I did see the issues she had for sure.
For some reason my drawing tablet (Huion Kamvas 13) isn’t recognised by Ublue/Bazzite but works ootb on Kinoite. Some very helpful people on Ublue-Discord did some investigation and there’s a Github issue but it’s unresolved, there was speculation that it might be something to do with Surface tablet settings missing or overriding something, can’t quite remember.
pcpartpicker.com is a good place to start and can help you know if specific parts are compatible but it’s just a place to start and is often still missing important info.
So you still need to do due diligence and do things like check measurements to make sure, for example, your video card will actually fit inside your case, etc.
Also, since its your first time, you want to avoid any motherboards that require you to do a BIOS update to handle a newer processor, because that’s just complicated stuff that you’re going to want to skip as a beginner.
It’s more expensive but go for a newer motherboard that is compatible with your processor out-of-the-box. BIOS updates are a pain and scary even for advanced users.
You only mention your laptop is running out of space so you need to get a new computer? does your laptop have a soldered SSD? If that’s not the case, I think the reflex should first be to see what storage you can get your laptop so that you can keep using it rather than discarding it :(
I am applying for university soon so I will still be using it, I also just want more power for running blender and such, but thanks for the information.
Can someone chime on who has used Blender with both and AMD GPUs vs Nvidia? Everything I could find out (which is surprisingly little) is that AMD is much slower (no real Cuda/Optix equivalent?) but I have no idea if that is true.
Mh, taking another looks at Blender benchmarks ( https://opendata.blender.org ), highest Nvidia median score is 12k (4090), the one I have atm (4070) has a score of 7.2k, had a laptop with a mobile 4080 before (5.7k). I haven’t really noticed any difference between them, tbh, so take this next bit with a giant bit of salt: Highest Amd score is 3.9k for a AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (I know nothing about Amd GPUs, most reviews are from 2022/23), not really sure what to make of this but it doesn’t look too good for Amd?
I’d avoid a 13th or 14th gen Intel processor right now because they’ve had a lot of problems with their manufacturing process. Otherwise, there’s not really much difference between AMD and Intel in terms of like, OS compatibility or anything.
I’ve done some basic work with Davinci Resolve on linux and I haven’t really had any issues with my Radeon 7800XT. I can’t really speak for using the proprietary drivers for AMD, but with the open source drivers, as long as you install rocm-opencl through your package manager, Davinci Resolve should be fine. Overall, I’d recommend an AMD GPU. Edit: You mentioned blender in a comment. For AMD’s open source drivers you’d need to install rocm-hip for Cycles to work
Edit 2: I hadn’t tried blender in a bit and I realized apparently at least on Fedora 40, you also need rocm-hip-devel at least as of 09/24/24 for supported AMD GPUs to show up in Blender. Idk how that would translate to other distros
PC Part Picker is good cuz when you start a new build, you start with the CPU and then it’ll only show you parts compatible with that CPU. As someone else mentioned tho, its not perfect and you still may want to check clearances between parts, like that your CPU cooler isnt too tall for your case, or that your Power Supply isnt too long (been there, lmao)
From my own personal experience with buying brand new RAM and it being bad a few times, I’d probably run memtest86+ for a few hours once the computer is together to make sure that the RAM actually works. You can download the linux ISO w/ GRUB option and make a bootable flash drive out of that and let it run. Afterwards, I usually install my OS. Might save you a few headaches down the road if you get into your new OS and things behave strangely, but its up to you.
Other than that, the setup shouldn’t be too hard.
How is Blender on Amd GPUs compared to Nvidia? I always that it’s not really all that good but I’d love to be wrong here …
I personally don’t do a lot of Blender work outside of a super basic render with like one or two light sources and never really used it much when i still had an Nvidia card so I can’t really speak to it, unfortunately. I’ve never really experienced any crashes or issues or anything, outside of a regression in one of the versions of rocm-hip that was eventually patched.
