Hello LQ

I do hope this is the right forum for this, if not please let me know and I will remove it and post it at the right place.

I am looking into geting my self a new home computer and I am looking at an AMD system as I will be running Linux as the main OS. The CPU will be the Ryzen 5 5600X or Ryzen 7 5800X, for memory I I will go with G.Skill (2x8GB) DDR4 3600MHz CL16 Ripjaws V. For the GPU I am waiting for AMD's new Radeon 6000 series and see how they perform. However I cannot decide on a motherboard and i am looking at the B550 chipset. I tried google about a boards that have Linux support 'out of the box' and it seems like most of the bords does just that, though I did read something about temperature sensors on the Gigabyte boards that does not have Linux support (cannot find the link at this time) so I thought I would ask you guys which have more knowledge then me on the subject. I do think that the CPU temperature is important and a surprises such as this I would like to avoid. So, what do you guys recommend?

This is just a pointer for what I am looking at and of course all suggestions are welcome.
B550
PCI-E 4, 16X (One port minimum)
PCI-E 4, 1x (One port minimum)
6 SATA-3 ports (Minimum)
1 M.2 disk support (Minimum)
USB 3.1 gen 2 (Few ports minimum)
RGB (Preferably not)
Wireless and Bluetooth (not required)

I am not in a hurry to acquire components right now as the Radeon 6000 series have not been released yet and the Ryzen processors are all sold out, given this I am waiting until sometime in January February next year.

Kind regards
Hajnyckel
TOSLINK

It's rare to find a board with most of the characteristics you describe not adequately supported, as long as it's old enough, or you are willing to wait through the foibles of absent support eventually disappearing.

hajnyckel,

Welcome to LQ forums.

This link may be helpful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardwa...0_motherboard/

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you both for your reply

@mrmazda, I suspected as much. The characteristics i gave are just to give a hint at what I am looking at and I would like as much support as possible from the board and I wont go with and older board then the B550, mabye the X570 but no older then that.

@beachboy2. Thank you. Then link you gave is really interesting and have lots of information, could not read the whole thread so I have to register on reddit to continue reading and make a post in it.

If I'm not mistaken, you won't get 'secondary' PCIe 4.0 on B550, only on X570 (X570 is actually the 'higher end' of the two). That said there isn't much need for 'secondary' PCIe 4.0 unless you are going for Gen4 NVMe devices. I would hold off on a 'brand new' Radeon under linux unless you want to deal with early adopter stuff.

1 members found this post helpful.

@obobskivich, thank you for your reply. I am not even sure I will ger more then one NVMe drive and I had no idea that there was a Gen4 on they way, this gives me more to read up on, thank you for that information. I have been waiting for the reviews on the new Radeon cards and my plan is to wait a few months more to see how the cards perform and to avoid the early adopter stuffs you mentioned. At this point there seems to be long queues for the cards as well and given that I can wait the availability does not mind me.

'Gen4' or PCIe 4.0 NVMe has been out for a little while - Sabrent and Silicon Power seem to be the early 'winners' here (the Samsung offerings came late and thus far have not been as impressive in reviews that I've read), but whether or not you 'need' such a thing is more debateable, as there very much is a diminishing returns curve for disk performance in most normal usage (just anecdotally, I don't really note any improvements in measured or 'felt' performance with real applications between my fancy RAID0 10k array, flashy SATA SSDs, or NVMe SSDs, despite the NVMe SSDs putting up much higher raw read/write values). But Ryzen 3+ will support Gen4 NVMe, and they aren't massively more expensive than Gen3, so on the other hand 'why not?' comes to mind.

On the 'new Radeon cards' - from what I've seen thus far of the RX 6800, they're on-par with the other unobtanium cards like RTX 3070 and 3080, and will probably be >$1000 US street. On one hand that's 'awful' but on the other hand, unless your use-case is fairly specialized, I just don't see any strong selling point for any of these cards - I've yet to run into anything (games, video, etc) that my existing graphics cards cannot handle (and the most 'exceptional' of that group is a GeForce GTX 1080 8GB from early 2017). I'd honestly probably just go with something less new (like an RX 580 or 5700XT, or used GeForce 1070/1080, etc), save your money, and bypass the entire early adopter festival entirely (especially because actual adoption rates for any of these newer cards are so low you probably won't see quick uptake/support).

I have come across other people that debates the need for an NVMe drive in the same manner you are doing now and I find that very interesting because when I started to search for new hardware a few months ago and came across the NMVe drives they seamed to me a piece of hardware you absolutely could not do without. At this point I am debating it and my idea is/was at this point a 2 TB SSD and a 1 TB NVMe and for me it does not really matter if load time of OS/Games is 5 or 10 seconds (even 15 for that matter) and as you say 'why not.'

When my old GPU died which was the most modern part of my old computer of something like 6-7 years old I decided to look of new hardware and swap OS completely. And quite fast I discovered the new Radeon that I thought I would wait for. I am not that impressed and especially the price is at the upper end of what I am willing to pay for a graphic card. Again you hit the spot, I do not think I in 2-3 years time will have full use of a Radeon RX 6800 as an everyday user I will mostly do some gaming, not the most recent games, some streaming and writing. Video/image editing is of no interest to me, though I am going to run 2 monitors or a large singel monitor (like Samsung G9) and I want the graphic card to be able to handel games and streaming at the same time. It is not 4k gaming it would be more like 1080/1440P.
By saying "bypass the entire early adopter festival entirely," are you suggesting to to got an RX5700 and in a year or so go for the Rx 6800? (This might be stupid of me to ask but does not the AMD cards have better support the Nvidia cards on Linux? If not, I would have to read up on performance/Euro on a new set of cards).

You have given me some more to thing about and that I appreciate, thank you.
I might get lucky as Christmas and all that is around the corner and I might be able to pick up some nice hardware and save some more money.

As for CPU, Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series?

Kind regards
Hajnyckel

Just one answer to "why not" would be cost. 1TB PCI-e 3.0 NVMe SSD = $100-$160 for all but a few outliers.
1 TB PCI-e 4.0 NVMe SSD = $180-$250. Maybe not enough to discourage some (as you said, not MASSIVELY more expensive), but it would be enough to discourage me (if I had the option, I have B450 so no PCI-e 4.0). For no "feel" of faster a 60%-80% cost difference is far too large for my tastes.

Getting ready to build my new system also. I went with this board, IMO its the best in its price range and should fit all your requirements. It's relatively new, Asus just released it a few weeks back. Plus they are offering $50 steam cash rebate on this board right now. It's not a B550 board like you are wanting, but a x570.

https://www.newegg.com/asus-tuf-gami...-353-_-Product

One thing I found recently was that I bought a 250G sandisk sata SSD and the system sees it as nvme. Without taking it apart I can only assume that it is an nvme drive packaged with a sata3 interface.

Looking at my newest motherboard (B550) I see 2 M.2 slots for nvme drives, one is dedicated and supports up to PCIe 4 nvme. The other is PCIe 3 nvme and shares a sata bus so it allows either 2 sata3 drives or the M.2 nvme but not both. Cost wise now the lower speed drive is much more attractive.

With those prices I agree. Unless I am doing something where the PCIe 4.0 speed difference vs PCIe 3 speeds can be measured and becomes subjectively noticeable it is hard to justify to myself the extra cost. I personally can't tell the difference in 1/4 second and 1/2 second response times.

A quick search for differences in performance shows some things are improved and some things aren't noticeably so, thus mostly it becomes personal preference.

SSDs are probably the single most-hyped, over-blown, thing to come out of computers in the last 20 years (yes I'm aware of 'blockchain' and 'the cloud'). I've seen every possible superlative thrown at 'why you need an SSD' upto, and including, hardware forums telling people to sacrifice PSU quality, CPU performance, memory capacity, or GPU performance just to ensure they shoehorn an SSD into the build. So I'm sure you can absolutely find a lot of articles written about its the 'single biggest performance improvement you can ever have ever no matter what' and other such superlatives, and honestly I will tell you it isn't that impressive, and isn't worth sacrificing computational performance, build quality, etc over (let alone losing sleep). That all said, prices on SSDs have gotten to a point where unless you really need 'raw capacity' there isn't a good counter-argument (years ago a SATA SSD would typically be 32-128GB and cost as much as a multi-hundred (or 1TB) GB hard drive), where a 256-512GB SSD can be had for around the same price as a 1-2TB hard drive. Now, on its face the hard drive looks like a better buy in terms of capacity, but at least in 'typical' desktop use-cases I don't really see 1-2TB as being used to its entirety that often (note that I am making a few assumptions here: 1) you already have some sort of external storage like a NAS, server, external hard drive, etc and 2) you don't intend to install every application, game, library, VM, etc known to humankind all at once), so 'living with' 512GB-ish is really not that rough imho.

The other gorilla in the room is the question of 'disk bound' vs 'computational bound' performance - and let me say this very directly: an SSD will (can) not improve compuational performance. So what this means in practice is it will not get you more FPS, more 3DMarks, whatever. Where it will (maybe) help is with things like application load times or similar, but that's a bit more nebulous to measure (or the oft-quoted 'how fast does your computer startup to the desktop' metric) because its a mixture of factors that ultimately determine the results (and its really hard to test in an objective/repeatable way too). So you usually end up with a bunch of polemics about 'well the computer FEELS faster' - sadly that doesn't tell us anything useful beyond the specific computer being talked about (that is, I don't think those people are full of it, but its hard to translate their setup/results to mine/yours unless we build the exact same machine + software + etc).

Note: This may all 'work differently' in some more or less material way on Windows (where a lot of the above-referenced guides/articles are probably assuming users live) because of differences in how RAM is used for caching on Windows and linux (https://www.linuxatemyram.com/), so linux may be better hiding disk latency/performance behind RAM (assuming you have a relatively lot of RAM to spare). To this the only evidence I can offer is watching htop with games or compiles or encodes running and seeing the cache fill up over time.

Honestly the need for 'latest and best' with GPUs has kind of pleateau'd in the last few years - take a look at expected system requirements for even recent games and you can get a feel for this in practice. This isn't to say RX 6800 or RTX 3080 aren't awesomely fast, but the question is more 'what uses it?' This is different of course if you're doing something with GPGPU, but usually that isn't using Radeon/GeForce these days. Also keep in mind a lot of newer game/graphics reviews seem to assume 4K-as-standard, depsite most people more likely using 1080p or something adjacent to that (source: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey - 65%+ list 1080p as display resolution, and you can expand that out to see some other resolutions vs prevalence, 4K is around 2%).

When I said that, yes that is what I meant, but after reading the Phoronix review of the RX 6800 (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...00-linux&num=1) it appears that AMD and the amdgpu devs have been more 'prepared' for Navi 2, so the expected 6-9 months of 'growing pains' may not be so bad (vs what you can go back and find people hand-wringing about with RX 5700 on various forums). I would still 'pass' on these cards because A) the prices are outrageous and B) the performance fits into 'what needs it?' territory in my view - use Phoronix's game tests for example). So something like RX 5700 (or GTX 980/1080 or RX 580 or 5600XT or Vega etc) makes more sense to me, but this is mostly price/performance talking (if RX 6800 was $400 like RX 5700, I'd probably say RX 6800).


As far as nvidia vs AMD, the nVidia Proprietary Driver is good in terms of support, and I have had no real complaints there vs the AMD FOSS drivers 'radeon' either, but I don't have a newer Radeon that uses 'amdgpu' - it looks just a good from what I have read though (and will better support the newer features on those cards like HEVC, Vulkan, etc). I'd probably say 'either/or' with the caveat that installing the nVidia Proprietary Drivers can be a chore on some distros, so if you want to distro hop a lot you may want to either A) look into what nVidia install is like on your chosen distro(s) or B) look at getting an AMD.


I haven't seen any good reason to avoid the 5000 series if they're actually available - they're faster in a similar TDP envelope to the 3000 series. If the prices are outrageous/gouged, then I'd probably 'pass' because the 'faster-ness' is not going to justify a 200% price premium, but otherwise 'newer is better' from what I can see in reviews. Of course, try to be realistic about your actual CPU needs: do you actually have workloads that want a 12 or 16 core chip? Or will one of the (equally high clocked) 6-8 cores be good enough? 'More cores' has become the new 'more GHz' while 'real world' a lot of stuff will still run just dandy on a few years old Core i5/i7 or AMD FX or Ryzen 1. Basically, just keep reality in mind when looking at new shiny toys.

Very good point on pricing - that is about 'double' in those cases and I'd fully agree with your reasoning there and pick the Gen3 in this example. But see above re: my thoughts on 1TB (or thereabouts) of storage - I'm usually looking at 256-512GB disks, where a 512GB Gen4 disk will run around the same price as your 1TB Gen3 example, and in terms of 'why nots' I'd probably go for the unneeded speed over the unneeded capacity in some vain hope that it'd square the circle and 'actually improve things' this time...


Yeah this is something I really don't adore about modern SSDs - 'NVMe' is so nebulous in terms of how its defined, where you can have SATA or PCIe interface over one connector, or you can 'shell' such a device the other way. It would be nice if retailers/manufacturers were more up-front about what they were offering...

To be honest I did not expect it to be that much of a difference (did not check prices until now) and that differences makes me re-think if it is worth it really. I thank you for your input.


@Daedra. Thank you for your comment and board suggestion. An X570 would work as well and I do wonder if you have hade an chance to try out the board and how well it performs?

Thank you for your reply. After have seen the price difference and I do not mind much if my OS/Games load in 5 or 10 sec I would agree that a Gen4 NVMe would not justify the cost.

@obobskivich: Your arguments I believe to be sound and about the computational performance of SSD and HDD as it only handels read/write it should not improve and FPS as you say. I do not have a NAS but I do have a total of 4,5 TB of 3,5" HDDs, old SATA2 drives that I will use until they give in and they work great for storage and of course I will not be installing all applications, games and other stuffs I can get my hands on. Though I do believe it is worth the cost of 1-1,5 Euro per 10 GB for a 1TB SSD

This was really interesting, had no idea about this. How and what I will/can do with this I do not know at this time but I will save the link and read up in this. Much appreciated.

RX 6800: The partner-cards (proper term for this?) where announced today and and starting at, were i live, 800 Euro for the RX 6800 and yea that is outrages and on top of that there are no cards available eater, probably as earliest in first quarter 2021 it would be possible to actually get one of this cards. Going back a tier with the graphic cards do scare me somewhat, probably due to lack of knowledge, as I want to be able to both game in 1080P and stream at the same time with a 2 monitor setup of one large monitor. As of today there 'should not' be any problems with the drivers for the RX 5700?
Hopefully the price of RX5700 /RX5600 will drop a bit and with the RX 6700 on the way it might ever dropp some more.

I am looking at the 5600X CPU with 6 cores as to what I have found out I should not need more then the 6 cores. Though I difficult to compare price/performance for the 3000 and 5000 series as there are more to take into account then frequency it have.

In reality I do guess I would do fine with the Ryzen 3000 series and a Radeon RX5700 for years as I usually do not play the latest games. To be honest, i did not realise this until now. All this input is great and much appreciated!

Just to reiterate, X570 is the 'higher end' option - B550 is the 'value' choice. Both are equally competent for what you want. I'm not trying to 'answer for' anyone here, so if @Daedra has more to add/more first-hand experience I'd listen to that too.


And that was kind of my point with 'which why not would I choose' - there isn't really a 'best' answer there unless you know that you explicitly need the 1TB over the 500GB, or the extra speed over the other, but I can't think of a situation (at least on my end) where 'explicitly need' is true. Either way I don't think you'll go wrong - and I would not even expect the difference in 'game load times' to be as big as you've mentioned (5 vs 10 seconds) - especially between Gen3 and Gen4 you're probably well into the diminishing returns curve.

So the 'reality check' here is basically a few-fold:
1) Until the paper launch of 3080/6800, nothing released has really 'moved performance up' since 2016-ish's GTX 1080 Ti - all of the 'later' cards (at least with anything resembling sane pricing) largely just mirrored 1080 or 1080 Ti-level performance (e.g. RX 5700, Radeon VII, RTX 2080, are all basically 1080 Ti equivalents; Vega64, Radeon 5600, RTX 2070, etc are all basically 1080 equivalents). Almost nothing uses RTX (and I don't know if anything in linux does), and the entire thing has sat stagnant for roughly 5 years (because when the 1080s came out they were so far ahead of everything else) - the entire sales pitch for RTX 2080 (and now 3080 and RX 6800) is basically "just buy it, you don't want to experience FOMO after all!" If the prices were sane, as in lets say the 3080 was actually selling at the same price as the 1080 was in 2016, it'd be a different discussion , but at >$1300 USD for any of these cards they're basically just re-creating the 2080 Ti, Titan V, Titan Xp, Titan RTX, etc 'unobtanium expensive cards' that nobody buys and that no (sane) developer targets with performance requirements as a result.

2) I absolutely reject the '1080p card' or '1440p card' kind of discussions - I know they're the hot new thing to do on most gaming/computer hardware forums (slash buzzfeed-style content mills), but they're completely wrong-headed in their approach. Specifically because they assume there's some latent 'performance requirement' of 'anything in 1080p' - but in reality its more game/application dependant than that. For example, the GeForce 2 Ultra (from 2000) can run some games (from 2000) at 1080p - so is it a '1080p card'? Most graphics cards since the mid-2000s were marketed for their ability to support 1080p, so are they all '1080p cards' too? To wit, every single release since R9 290X (in 2013-ish) has been hailed as the 'arrival of 4K gaming' or '4K gaming is now possible' or whatever (and now with 3080 we're starting in on '8K gaming is now possible' - despite EA having Battlefield: Hardline running at 8K a few years ago at E3). In general it really depends on what specific games you're playing, but by and large anything 'relatively recent' (which can mean up to 10 years old at this point) is probably going to be at least half comptent. I'm not saying run out and buy a GTX 480 as your next GPU, but on the other hand you absolutely do not need the 'latest and greatest' just to play Counter-Strike or DOTA or what-have-you.

3) Your specific performance requirements are probably 'pretty basic' - even with the streaming - so you shouldn't need flagship-tier parts anywhere. I don't know a whole lot about gameplay streaming on linux, but I'm sure you could find a guide that will walk you through what software folks are using these days.

Not to put too fine of a point on the above, but folks are regularly doing what you want with Ryzen 2600X - the 3600 and 3700 (and 5600 and 5700) *are* faster, and if the prices work out similar enough, there's no reason not to grab one, but keep in mind the 'faster' is only a few % not 'double.' Without digging into prices I would probably take an 8 core 3000 series over a 6 core 5000 series if offered at the same price, but if 3600 and 5600 were within a few USD/EUR I'd probably take the 5600.

I would say go back and look at system requirements for games you actually are playing, ignore 'future proofing' as an impossible goal (but acknowledge that over the last 5-10 years things have been pretty stagnant in terms of 'insane system requirements growth' (like what we saw in the 2000s) - and this is a GOOD thing), and pick out parts based on availability + that fit your budget + that meet/exceed your actual known system requirements. The two 'open questions' I would have are:

1) Ensuring that whatever you pick will be compatible with whatever software you need for streaming (for example there may be an affinity for nVidia or AMD drivers, or somesuch - I'm just spitballing here).
2) Ensuring that whatever GPU you pick will have correct connector(s) for the monitor(s) you select - a lot of newer cards are going DP-only and thus may need adapters for some monitors, for example.

I apologise for delaying with a reply, have done some more researching and have got a few questions answered and a few more added.

To what I understand now is that most boards, X570 and B550, should work just fine.


You *like* to hit me with the "SledgeHammer Of Reality" and it is appreciated. My decision about storage will be a 1 TB SSD and if I ever for some reason need a faster drive I will have the option to add an NVMe drive. There should come up some more sales soon and then I might save some more on the drive.



You are absolutely right.


This is interesting because on several forums where the discussion was AMD Ryzen 3000 vs Intel equivalent the Intel CPU seems to be the 'go to choise.' So I got my eye on the Ryzen 5600X at this time as the performance and power consumption is better then most of what the 3000 series have to offer and the price is about 60 Euros up and that is not much. Yes, the availability today is zero but I can wait a bit more.



My old CPU/Motherboard have been running near 13 years now and still works and it was bought with the idea of 'future proofing.' Though I agree that it is an impossible goal (depending on what one want to use if for) but i do think it have worked out very well and for about 2-3 years ago were the first time I had my CPU running at a 100% load at lowest settings making those games unplayable. It might be that the CPUs lasts longer then the GPUs (changed the GPU for more then 5 years ago) does, I really do not know. Still I think it is worth spending a bit more for hardware that will last longer.


After researching I have found out that the 6000 series have a 'fair' support though as we discussed earlier the 6000 series are more powerful then I need. It is also here it all becomes a bit confusing to me as I have only been running Ubuntu 20.04 for 6 months and Linux mint for 3 months now and to run the 6000 series I would need a distro with a Kernel of 5.9 and ubuntu and mint uses 5.4 at this time. And the it goes on with a lot of technical babble that I am at this point to far behind to grasp. Thus ending up with the conclusion that stability and comparability is of greater importance then peak performance, giving that the Radeon 5700 is well supported across the board. And I do think that a Radeon 5700 will work very well for me for several years. I usually plays the Command&Conquer series, Total Annihilation, Half-Life, CS 1.6, Carmageddon, Doom, Quake, Need for speed, Age of Empires, yea many games from 1995 until 2005 and even some newer games like Wow classic, newer NFS games, One mans sky. Every now and then a more modern game shows up and I want the performance for that also (no need to run at 'ultra' settings) and it seems like the Radeon 5700 have just that and it also have the ports I need making it a very attractive choise. The only thing now that really debates against the R5700 is how well it can handle a screen like Samsung Odyssey G9 or maybe I should go for the previous model, it sill needs some thought.