Hello Comrades,

Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more.

I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux.

Should I prioritise RAM or the processor? My budget is limited so I will have to make a choice between RAM and the processor. Would it be better to go for e.g. 32GB RAM and a slower processor, or 8GB RAM and a faster processor? Or is balance better? Say, 16GB RAM and a ‘medium’ processor (that’s ‘medium’ between the ‘slower’ and the ‘faster’ option within my budget, not ‘medium’ for the market).

Intel or AMD?

  • pigginz@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    Some more concrete information about your budget and use case here would be useful. For gaming workloads 16GB is sort of considered a minimum these days, but how much you need could vary a lot depending on what your system will be doing.

    • redtea@lemmygrad.mlOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Mainly typing and reading PDFs and ebooks. Browsing the internet. If it’s useful information, my work laptop has an i3 processor and 8gb RAM and I regularly have to limit the number of documents I have open, which is annoying.

      If it doesn’t make the price skyrocket, I wouldn’t mind playing some games. Nothing AAA, though, I don’t think. If it was legal I would consider using an emulator to play some Pokemon. I might use GIMP occasionally but just for fun, not for work.

      Ideally, as cheap as possible because I’m tight frugal. At the same time, I want it to work.

      • pigginz@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        I think 32GB of RAM might be worth it for you then, that should let you multitask quite comfortably for awhile. Additionally, a SSD would probably be a great investment too if you can swing it since having faster storage makes everything snappier in general, and in case you do still run out of RAM, swapping data between RAM and storage will be dramatically faster.

        • redtea@lemmygrad.mlOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          This is helpful. I think I can opt for an SSD because I don’t need loads of storage, which means I can save by getting a smaller drive. Are there performance losses by filling up an SSD in the same way as with filling up an HDD more than half full?

          • pigginz@lemmygrad.ml
            1·
            1 year ago

            Technically there is a reduction in performance as you fill the drive but, as far as I know, it’s a pretty small difference in modern SSDs and you’ll probably never notice it in real world usage. It might show up in synthetic benchmarks or server/database applications that involve moving huge amounts of data constantly.

            An issue you may encounter in the real world is SLC cache saturation when writing data. Flash memory can basically kind of come in high density, or high speed, but not both. You trade off one for the other. Most SSDs have a mix of both, allowing rapid writes to the “fast” SLC memory, which will then get transferred to the “slow” TLC/QLC/PLC/etc. memory over time. Depending on the SSD model and how the manufacturer configured things, it’s possible that if you’re writing hundreds of gigabytes in one operation you’ll completely fill the fast memory and your write speeds will plummet dramatically until the transfer is finished.