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@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@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@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 7:47 AM Aaron Jones <retro64xyz@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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