Motherboard and graphics card recommendations for building a Linux Box

[Michael Butash]

> I don't think Intel boxen (nucs) are upgradable very much.

Not much outside of ram or disk.  If you want a real system for expansion,
get a real atx form-factor system.  If you need a very specific use-case,
get a nuc, pi, or other form-factor.

If a general desktop, buy as big as you can afford, and leave some room for
expansion - just start with a standard atx if your first time.

If you want gaming, throw money at the video card, with moderate ram
(8-32gb).  If you want to do more virtual builds as you said with docker
and vagrant, leveraging virtualbox or qemu/kvm, go for more 16-128gb of
ram.  Get as many cores and as fast a cpu as you can afford with them, plus
as much ram as you expect you need.

I do both gaming and using mine as a server.  I tossed the 1070GTX in it,
and 128gb of ram with 20 cores, a few M.2 disks, and I want for little.  I
game a lot, and run whole domains and ecosystems of vendor appliances
internally as vm's on it, and it chugs along in most cases.  I added some
left-over ssd's and spinners I put things like games and non-essential vm's
on, just in case they die, which I anticipate they will do as most are
orphans from a like-mate disks already dearly departed.

Surprisingly, gaming hard on it and running a half to full dozen vm's or
more on it do little generally to shake it.  I'd not expect a typical
windoze box to handle anything like this, power of linux imho.

If anything crashes at all, it's usually the DE compositor freaking out
after a few months of uptime.  /me coughs "Thanks KDE/Cinnamon."

-mb


On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 6:34 PM Ed <plug at 0x1b.com> wrote:

> I prefer an AMD based motherboard, more cores is important with
> containers, and the new Nvidia 1660 is looking good - more research is
> needed beyond that - also https://camelcamelcamel.com  can be helpful.
>
> I don't think Intel boxen (nucs) are upgradable very much.
>
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 4:52 PM Adam Mercer <ramercer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 7:47 AM Aaron Jones <retro64xyz at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Times have changed. Most stuff works out of the box with little
> tinkering. What do you plan to do with the box?
> >
> > Good to hear. It'll be mostly used for development work, so I'll be
> > using Docker and Vagrant quite a bit. I'll probably be doing a bit of
> > gaming on the box, nothing fancy but I'd like a reasonable graphics
> > card.
> >
> > > Space requirements?
> > >
> > > I use multiple Intel NUCS and I love them but if you are looking for a
> behemoth box to support your 50 card collection of ASICS, well I can point
> you that way too.
> >
> > I'd been looking at NUCS but didn't know how upgradable they were.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Adam
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