I’ve been looking around and reading about components the last few days 'cause I’m in the market for an upgrade and came up with the following core components:
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
ASUS GeForce GTX 1660S DUAL EVO OC
16 GB DDR4-3200 (2 x 8GB)
Or:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
ASUS GeForce RTX 2060 TURBO
16 GB DDR4-3200 (2 x 8GB)
The price of both sets is about the same and I’m really curious which of those two would be a better fit for the things I do. I’m leaning towards the first one (Ryzen 7 + GTX). Seems the more balanced one, but that is based on a feeling.
How do I torture my current machine? In the order of importance (top = more used/important)
photo editing (darktable, GIMP, ImageMagick)
compiling/building software
video (handbrake, ffmpeg, mencoder/mplayer) no heavy editing though: recode and/or resize mostly!
heavy internet/browser related activities
One other thing that might be of influence: I’m exclusively on Linux (Debian).
I do not play computer games. At all. Ever.
Also: Does anybody have any experience with this mainboard, which I came across and seems to be a nice fit for either of the above set-ups and my HD requirements:
MSI MPG X570 GAMING PLUS
Oh, I all but decided that 16 GB memory should be enough (based on some memory/swapping tests with my current setup). I do mention this though because maybe someone here has a (very!) good reason for 32 instead of 16 GB
hah, this looks very similar to what i would put together for myself. i would probably get the second config. i like that the 3600 uses less power. one of my use cases would be the RTX cores though (not to play games either), so i think one incentive to put together a new machine at all for me would be the ray tracing cores. also the 2060 vanilla seems to be faster than the 1660 super in terms of regular compute.
your mainboard choice sounds expensive. there are some at about half price which would still handle 3200 memory. may i ask why you would go with the expensive one?
would also not bother with 32G, running every day stuff well below that, and it’s easy enough to upgrade in case.
As a matter of interest: also check Ryzen 9 3900X, and a suitable X570 motherboard. Also check the difference between 4 * 8 gig and 2 * 16gig RAM (or 4 * 4 gig versus 2 *8 gig). Some say RAM speed is the most important, others say that CL is the important factor.
PS: Also - is your distro able to handle an RTX gfx?
Both versions are 65W according to the specs, it was one of the first things I looked at.
The wattage is one of the reason I opted out of the ryzen 9. There’s also the price: I don’t think the extra cores and speed are worth it, not in my case anyway.
The choice is mainly based on the HD’s I have/want. Had a little mishap mid last year and bought 3 WD’s RED (2TB each. 2 in a RAID 0 setup). I like to reuse those together with a fast, small os/system SATA600 ssd disk and possibly (money…) a 1TB NVMe “work” area. The board I mentioned has enough sata/m.2 slots to handle that and possible future add-ons.
It is one of the parts that I need to think about real hard! Might opt to put the 3 WD’s in an encasing of their own and make them external.
Too expensive and it runs on 105W. I don’t think that the 12 cores and 300MHz speed increase is worth the investment. I did have a good look at them though!
That is one of the things I’m still looking into. I haven’t been able to find DDR4-3200 8Gb memory by brands that I know/trust. Have to read some more reviews and tests before I make a decision about that. That is assuming 4x4 is faster then 2x8 on dual channel board…
I was hoping that someone here would have experience already with the RTX2060 on a Linux box.
Never had a Dell before so I’m curious how this experience will be.
Read a lot of good things about Ultrasharps by end users (you, among others, in a few threads on this board).
Specs of this particular one looked nice, 27" is right at the outer edge what I think is still comfortable for a 2560x1440 (W)QHD monitor and the price is reasonable.
Heard of Dell panel lottery?
If not better look up, I have personal experience with my (then) expensive 30" Dell. Few years later I cherry-picked wife’s U2711 from several, thanks to the accommodating shop. Not perfect but much better than my 30" model which was exchanged two times for infamous purple-green tinted panel problem.
Smaller, like paperdigits 24" panel are usually better.
Spread the word and demand normal monitors. None of my CRT’s had such problems and this is called progress!?
You seemed to be worried about peak power usage, but the higher-core-count processors run at lower all-core clock speeds and run more efficiently (consume less energy) for accomplishing the same task. Plus they’re faster on multithreaded workloads like image processing.
I have a 2700X right now and kind of want to upgrade, even though it’s really not worth it.
It isn’t something I’m worried about but power usage did play a roll as one of the deciding factors.
That’s good info to know and that’s the reason why the rtx2060 Super runs more efficient then its predecessor. This not being limited to CPU’s.
Not worth it; Exactly! I’ve thought about spending the extra roughly 120,- to go for the Ryzen 7 3700X instead of the 5 3600. In the end I didn’t really see the point and spend some of that to upgrade to the RTX2060 Super.
16GB RAM seems kind of sub-minimal for an “upgrade”. More is always better in the RAM department. In my experience RAM (the amount) is crucial. My “personal “minimal” systems have 64GB on Mac and 32GB on Windows. Systems I make for clients have 128-256GB RAM and a 10,000 Base-T card to borrow a neighbor’s memory in case of RAM shortages…
Yes you only need 4GB to launch the software, but you want it to run so give it a long track.
Taking prices into consideration, I would also opt for 32GB RAM. For my setup I chose relatively inexpensive non-overclocking-RAM (Crucial 16GB DDR4-2666 UDIMM | CT16G4DFD8266 | Crucial DE).
For my 2nd Generation Ryzen 2700X RAM specification was given at 2933MHz so 2666MHz was fast enough for my taste. 3rd Gen Ryzen 3700X supports 3200MHz, so faster RAM will probably be more expensive.
I go for RAM that natively supports the frequency speed as my personal experience with overclocking RAM has been less successful.
Depending on the setup, have an eye on the BIOS settings. In my case, after a BIOS update, my settings were reset without me realizing it. The Auto setting tried to overclock my RAM by increasing its voltage to 1,35V instead of the correct 1,2V, having me sitting there and wondering why all of the sudden my system became unstable.
I did some testing with my current 12 GB RAM (+12 GB swap) setup and I only reach the point when swap is actually being used when I start doing things I do not normally do. I do, very often run multiple instances of for example darktable, GIMP and/or krita at the same time next to all the normal stuff that is running and this is handled nicely with the current 12 GB RAM.
As a result of those test I decided to go with 16GB DDR4-3200 (2x8 on a dual channel board). The board does have 4 slots so I am able to add another 16 if needed.
I’ve never dipped into the overclocking pool, be it CPU’s or RAM. I might be wrong but I get the impression that the extra heat it generates, does, in the end, shorten the lifespan of those components.
I feel you, however I have weird experiences myself. I’ll be looking soon for something more recent than Dell T3500 that I own for couple years that is way more powerfull. I need to state this though: I thought 12GB was ok for me, till the company required dumb electron-based communication software.
Today my T3500 has 24GB of ram with 12GB swap and it CAN swap. Intel xeon with 4 cores and 8 threads doesn’t seem to be that much of a help these days and since the board can’t do atomics I can’t use ROCm if I were to upgrade cards…
I’ll try to get something similar to your config in the future.
Well, seven years ago, configuring the 8-core FX 8350 machine I still use, when RAM wasn’t as cheap as today, I bought 32 GB of slower RAM instead of 16 GB faster RAM
Downsides of the decision: When using all cores, my machine is more limited by RAM bandwidth
Upsides of the decision: Because of the bandwidth limitation I could make more improvements to RawTherapee to avoid these
Requirements and, for most people, money dictate what it is you are going to buy, be it an off-the-shelf box or one that you build from components you choose yourself. I’ll keep you informed on how this setup will hold based on running the stuff I mentioned in my original post.
Right now I’m using an almost 10 year old system: Intel I7 950 3GHz 4 cores (8HT), NVIDIA GTX 460 and 12GB on an ASUS P6T V2 board (the nicest board I’ve had thus far). At the time it was state-of-the-art and I’m amazed how long I’ve been happy with it and how reliable it has been (never a hitch). Still good in some ways even though it has to work harder and harder to keep up… It’s going to be a nice 2nd computer.
so give it a long track.