Motherboard and graphics card recommendations for building a Linux Box

[Stephen Partington]

In line with this. Do not cheap out on your motherboard. It is the biggest
PITA to change later. Ram. CPU. Not so bad.

I would also look up lvmcache or a similar technology. This will allow you
to perk up your spinning drives nicely. This will be especially handy for
containers and vm's.

I will +1 AMD right now with the fact they have more available pcie lanes
especially in the x470 chipsets. And cores make containers and vm's happy.

On Mon, Mar 4, 2019, 7:21 PM Michael Butash <michael at butash.net> wrote:

> > 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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