I agree teetotally. I have IGP on this box I'm writing this reply on, but will upgrade to a GPU. The question about Freecad & blender related to the RX 6600 XT GPU. It appears all AMD gpus suck at 3d to a greater or lesser extent because the Nvidia design is simply superior, and AMD can't match their numbers.

The RazPi 4 is a joke, but it still handles surfing/youtube. My point was that everyday stuff is light usage, but I should have made that clearer. It was one of the slackware arm devs who did the 4K test, and I imagine both screens were identical. I use one hdmi-1.0 screen and it still performs poorly. The And the best a Razpi can do for I/O is SSD via usb-3.0.The "GPU" is some low powered VideoCore thing which survives by preprogrammed software codecs, AFAICT. The I/O is generally very poor.

The devs quote some compile times on LQ forums (slackware arm, & slarm64) for compiles on the Pi 4 and they are astonishingly bad.

I finally ordered today. 6 core ryzen, 16GB ddr4/480GB SSD, decent(ish) motherboard, etc off one of the cheaper 'custom pc' irish websites. Price under €1485 inc delivery. The US prices look attractive by comparison until you realize you factor in a very long delivery which may not arrive (!) or trackable delivery + duty + VAT on point of entry.

They're still looking for €500 - €600 for that RX 6600XT here, and over €1100 for the RX 6700XT. I paid €370 (over their cheapest video card). But all those attractive amazon.co.uk prices get 20% on top from Amazon, and that's before I check duty. Last I heard, duty applied but was inefficiently collected - you might have to pay it, you might not. But a high declared value ups the probability of paying.

Which 6 core Ryzen? 3600, 5600, 5600X, 5600G? Just curious .

FYI, I am running a 5600X on a Gigabyte x470 motherboard with 16GB of RAM currently and it works great. OS drive is a 500GB MX500 Crucial SSD. OS is KUbuntu 20.04. I have an Nvidia 550 card in that system with a 2K 32" monitor and no complaints. Don't play games on it. VLC for video, VM for Windows 7. Haven't found yet a program that 'bogs' down on the processor including freeCad, Kicad and such. I had a 3600 before which also met my needs ... I just wanted to upgrade.... No excuse there.

You shouldn't be disappointed with performance. BTW on a RPI-4, if you boot off an external 3.0 SSD (like a Samsung T7), compiles and such are 'much' faster than compiling off the SD card. Most all of my RPI-4s (and a RPI 400) boot from external SSDs now except for special cases (like projects that are space constrained and/or power constrained). Of course compiles on the x86-64 platforms blows by RPI performance by a wide margin. Gotta know the 'limitations'!

This looks that you generally have a problem with buying computer hardware in the Republic of Ireland. 1485,- € is very expensive for these components in comparison to hardware prices in Germany. Consider that Republic of Ireland and Germany are EU members. I've checked last week prices for a customized computer that can be used for number crunching (FEM, numeric simulation, grid simulation). Adding all components results in a price of about 1200,– € for a machine with Ryzen 7 5800X + top-down-cooler, 64 GiB RAM = 2× 32 GiB DDR4 PC-3200, ATX-Mainboard with B550 chipset, AMD Radeon RX 550, NVMe SSD 1 TB PCIe 4.0 + cooler, 600 W PSU, Miditower-Case. Graphics performance itself isn't critical for number crunching, but full bandwidth between CPU and RAM is recommended. Actually this excludes use of an IGP. "Misuse" of a modern APU for number crunching may be possible in some cases, but this seems to be a little bit complex.

Yes. It's a small country & market, so margins have to be higher or businesses don't survive. My figures also include VAT (23.5%?) which companies can ignore as a cost once they are profitable.

At that end of the food chain also, turnover is low. So high priced graphics cards are still around, because the supplier bought when prices were high. That rx6600xt went up over €600 from one supplier! Another didn't stock the xt but had the rx6600 for ≅€550. Some of these sites cheat - here at least.
They charge you for the POS basics - m/b, cpu, graphics; But the extra cost they add is the full retail price, instead of the retail minus the price of the POS part.

@rclark: I got the ryzen 5 5600 iirc. I eventually figured that the ryzen 3,5,7, & 9 indicate levels of grunt, probably reflected in the internal design. And the difference between Zen 2 & Zen 3 includes a superior internal architecture once you go over 4 cores. This has been a drawn out & tortuous process but I'm noticing nobody's raising hands in horror or tearing hair out, so I probably did ok.

And, the day after I've ordered amd graphics

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/...-kernel-driver

I posted about that to another forums yesterday. I have to say, that was about the LAST thing I was expecting to see happen. But fantastic news for linux users, as we'll no longer be locked into using AMD for 3d as our only (REAL, FOSS friendly) choice.

If any of you have an interest, you can try configuring yourself a box from one of 'configure-your-own-box' sites here:
http://custompcparts.ie # This site is terrible and I gave up.
http://paradigit.ie
http://pczone.ie # I found this the cheapest & bought here.
http://pcspecialist.ie # These boxes are built in Britain, then shipped over. So that opens me up for a typically #20% rip-off charge "In case we have to pay duty" which in practise I never get back. Even Amazon.co.uk does it.

@Arnulf: I'll safely bet the box you specify will even shock you with the price tag! But it's OK. I've got all I need for the foreseeable future. I'm not in the fast lane.

And the nice thing with a box is that if I get fed up with poor performance, I can upgrade components individually, whereas in a laptop, you can't really.

The Ryzen 7 5800X box is planned for an institute. Therefore it's calculated price of about 1200,– € includes 19% VAT.

This is one reason why I avoid laptops whenever it's possible. I used at home an AM3+ box with a FX-8350 over nine years with some component upgrades before I switched to AM4 with Ryzen 7 5800X late last year.

That's why I listed the building sites. Try building it for here. Also, institutes have volume on their side, and anyone outside the IT dept gets crap. I was buying a bespoke one off.

This small institute has limited volume, and I'm the "IT dept" besides my normal job in this institute. "VAT & institutes" is a complex thing in Germany. Therefore I've to plan with VAT included first.

As a matter of interest, try configuring your own on one of the Irih sites I listed or even pcspecialist and see what it costs.

Just for interest, I priced your spec over here. It came out ≅€1,680, but I was just clicking cheapo options where the options were different, so what you got yourself could be more.

Transport from Germany is also messy. Britain is in the way. So it's either by air, or road to Le Harve or Dunkirk, & ferry to Ireland.

With some items here it's definitely worth going outside the box. For instance, I got no wifi (IIRC) but spent €10 for a pair of refurbished powerline ethernet adapters that are good for 600Mbps. I have a 100Mbps internet tap-off from glass fibre, of which about 60Mbps reaches the house.

Lastly, are there any pc building sites you would recommend where one can do business in English?