I have been using a parts-built AMD 4 core 3.5gz i7 maxi-tower for about 8 years, but finally it (the mobo) is dying. Been a good machine - solid, fast and Debian loved the Gigabyte MB but, it has old graphics, only USB2 and so forth. Time to kick the tires on another.

However, as far as the search engines go, most MB discussions seem to be about gaming. Even the motherboards are labeled “Gaming” in the advertisements. I haven’t paid much attention to the nuts and bolts of system building for several years, so am not yet sure just what would be the difference between a “Gaming” mobo and one used for mundane stuff like compiling, surfing and ordinary activities. It is obvious that there must be, since I see comments along the lines of “Stay away from this one if you want to play Fortnite…” “…Minecraft really sucks on this MoBo because of the lousy…”

Firstly, the task is to decide on a MoBo. Thus far, I am not even sure that I can use my 8 year old tower case. Is the ATX form still the same as before? Power supply connectors - Different?

Reading between the gaming lines, it appears that ASUS has a good rep for Linux. And maybe, still Gigabyte. I have always preferred AMD over Intel and would probably go with a Ryzen 8 core and don’t need any vast amount of horsepower, since I mostly program and surf.

Anybody have any thoughts or experience in building with late model desktop hardware? Or advice? Or even warnings? ( i.e. Don’t buy the **** piece of junk!!).

Thanks all.

Romanof,

I am no gamer, but I can certainly recommend the MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX motherboard.

This link may be of use to you:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...og.php?b=38257

Form factors won't change unless there is a good reason so that is nothing to be concerned with.

8 years isn't a long time for a piece of hardware though. Is there a reason you say it's dying? Would it not be easier just to get a graphics card? That is what I did for my World of Warcraft computer. Running an older 3rd generation i5 with 8gb of ddr3 ram. Got the motherboard off Ebay. I'm using an RX570 gpu and it runs great. When booting Ubuntu it seems to have no issue there either. You can get a PCIx USB 3.0 card and away you go.

Generally in my experience the motherboard has little impact on anything unless you specifically need certain features or major overclocking. It doesn't take anything special to run games all out usually. I think most of it is marketing.

I have just "upgraded" my desktop, the old power supply, HDD, almost everything were ok. I replaced the mobo, cpu and ram, nothing more. The only problem was the Windows 10 which refused to work, I had to reinstall (and even buy a new license). Debian/ubuntu/whatever could safely survive the replacement.
AMD Ryzen is ok, ASUS and/or Gigabyte is ok.
You need to decide if you want to upgrade it later (more ram, better cpu, gpu whatever)....

Intel and AMD both offer two kinds of socket. There is a socket for mainstream desktops (LGA 1151 and AM4) and a socket for high-end desktops/workstations (LGA 2066 and sTRX4). The latter supports more CPU cores and memory channels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_socket

Gamers generally want the first socket. Developers and content creators generally want the second.
Ed

I don't have a particular recommendation, but to me it's all about clock rate, RAM, and peripherals.

I do not create Frankenstein systems anymore, instead I'll buy something complete and use it as I wish.

But I look for a high level of RAM and I get it right away, not at some future point. The clock rate? Well, the presumption is you're replacing something old, so the newer one stands to be faster, I'm not sure I get into arguing about which one of the top ones performs better. I suppose I would tend to avoid anything just announced and released, instead preferring to have the introduction process vet out any initial field problems.

For peripherals, Bluetooth and WiFi included. Sure you can buy add-on cards, but those take up more space. USB 3.0 and quite a few of them. Likely one always will potentially need a hub, but at least you stand to have enough ports from the get-go.

I selected an MSI m'board (Z87-G41 PC Mate(MS-7850) -- jeez, it's 7+ years old now) as they were not using electrolytic capacitors---the failure of which has caused a few system failures over the years (going back to my '486 days). It's described as a gaming m'board but I've been using it primarily as a generic desktop system (with only the occasional Xonotic session) w/o any problems. It is Intel-based, though. Bottom line: don't let the "gaming" moniker scare you off.

If I were looking for a more traditional "server" motherboard, I'd likely look at another Supermicro. Not sure what their attitude toward AMD chips is.

MSI has been good to me but I am an Intel guy because I have always been. The MSI z240A Pro I currently have ran everything I could throw at it. It is only 3 years old so I don't know about long term.

I have heard of people having issues with ASRock but in what context I cannot remember.

Just remember one thing in your searching. The addition of that "Gaming" moniker to most items basically gives the manufacturer carte blanche to slap another 50% on whatever the item's RRP might be.....because, hey! gaming gear is "special", yeah? Nobody minds paying through the nose if we call it "gaming".....

(*...rubbing hands avariciously...*)


Mike.

Yep. I was about to figure that out. And the fact that many of the ads for Mboards give emphasis to their color control ports and software. Now, I agree that I am an old-style programmer about to enter late youth (my first compile was in Fortran, with punched cards, on the IBM 1401 of my college), but I am willing to make some changes. If having a fan that is LED illuminated and changes colors at random will give me a faster compile of C++ or Perl, then I will gladly embrace the new technology.

And on a serious note, I don't need a monster-core speedster for my desktop - just something that has newer technology, especially in the display category, and is solid, to match Debian stable. After a couple of days of research, I realized that I was over... well, researching the problem. I have pretty well settled on AMD with a AM4 socket. The money is in the 64gb of memory, the processor, graphics card, and the zillion byte SSD. MBs aren't that high, unless you are a gamer, of course. If I get one that is unsatisfactory, then it gets donated to a young kid and I try another. The plugin stuff just moves over to the new board.

But, thanks for all the advice, everyone.

My 15-year-old desktop died last Christmas — HD failure, but the old 32-bit AMD chip was getting to be a liability, with not SSE2 — so I decided to buy rather than build. Looking at websites for choosing an office computer, I found the suggestion that Celeron or Pentium would suffice for most things, although an i-3 would be needed for heavy work. Yet high-street shops were pushing i-5 and i-7 — definitely aiming at games players, not to mention larger profits!

As I wanted AMD, I ignored the latest Ryzen chips and got an A6-9500 with Radeon R5 graphics built in. The builder gave me a Gigabyte MB, 4 GB of RAM, and a 120 GB SSD. Cheap and very functional.

It is strange but people mostly suggest rather 8 GB of RAM or more for any big today's Linux distribution. 4 GB or lower is usually considered to work with lighter distributions. This comes from what I read in Linuxquestions topics. And of course 4 GB can be 3.5 if some RAM is reserved for video graphics.
How do you use this computer? From my on experience, web browsing can be what requires big RAM and powerful processors, more than any usual software (except compilation).

Mine has 16gb, but that is just because I always have over stuffed any new machine with ram just to get it over with, and eight years ago that was a lot of memory. But, I have never used anywhere close to that much. With XFCE running just to give me VLC for background music and Firefox for research, then EMACS in a terminal and a compile every few minutes, I seldom break 4gb. From reading over the years, it would appear that heavy video work is usually what requires massive amounts of ram - which I don't do. Of course, anyone can crank up the memory usage by loading one program after another. I have done it myself, long ago, just to see how a machine would handle it.

Compilers love horsepower, but unless you are inside of some fat IDE (Visual Studio, maybe) they don't take much ram.

I find 4 GB ample — less than half is ever used. I suspect the "most people" who recommend 8 GB are Windows users!

1 members found this post helpful.

Personally, I have GGB in a twin core, and never use swap except for the occasional hibernate.

One other factor to bear in mind is virtualisation. I can only assign 50% of resources to each VM. That gives me one core and 3G of ram for Windoze 10, which sucks. Mind you, Windoze sucks - period.