Motherboard and graphics card recommendations for building a Linux Box

[Michael Butash]

I find motherboards more a matter of reliability vs. features these days,
but depends on what you want to do.

If you want to tinker with overclocking, I was last using MSI with K-series
Intel procs after being disenfranchised with Asus after many years of
failed motherboards and other issues.  They all vary from generation to
generation...  Read the 1 star reviews on newegg or amazon to see what is
pissing people off for what they're really about before buying.

Last round of desktop builds I got a Dell Precision desktop that is more
server than desktop; dual cpu, 16 memory slots, 4x 16x pcie slots, another
few 8x I use for M.2 disks, etc that has proven server reliable.  This is
good, because it's both my desktop and my server these days for numerous
VM's.  I got a really good deal on a refurb'd box loaded with 20 cores of
cpu on ebay watching and waiting, just added ram/disk/video/other as needed.

If you can afford M.2 ssd disks, get them, otherwise sata-based disks are
fine for os, homedir, etc.  Throw in some spinners if you need big space,
otherwise use an external nas (or both).  I like to replicate really
important stuff between local and nas using Unison.

Video cards, if you really want to stick to oss drivers, AMD wasn't bad
last I used them a few years ago.  I had an old 7950 card I used for many
moons due to it's 6x video output that I used all of, and by the end, it
played steam games quite well using oss drivers, NOT binary.  It had bugs
(I remember early Shadow of Moridor had odd texture issues for an AAA
game), but others like the Saint's Row games played fine.  I used it for a
bit on my 3x 4k displays, and oddly it worked it worked rather well there
too, still play games like Saints Row 2-4 at 4k res at fairly high frame
rates, even with oss drivers!

Now a days I use nvidia, a 1070GTS, binary drivers are mostly the only way
to fly with nvidia.  That works rather well with most linux games, and
lately more even with Steam Proton for windoze-only games.  The nvidia
performance is pretty stellar in most games playing 4k full screen at good
frame rates on most games native or proton-based, worst hit I've seen
lately was playing Subnautica at 4k, but man it was beautiful even running
at 15-20fps @ 4k res.

I've not had driver issues in a long while, or anything special around
certain motherboards or other core components that made me choose one linux
over another.  Save maybe laptops, but they're entirely different beasts.

Hope this helps!

-mb


On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 11:08 PM Adam Mercer <ramercer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I planning on building a new machine fairly soon, I want the box to
> primarily run Linux and I'd like to make sure that I can use as few
> binary drivers as possible. Any recommendations for motherboards
> etc...
>
> I last built a PC probably about 20 years ago and finding a board and
> graphics card that supported Linux well was challenging (in fact I
> needed to patch the kernel to support my graphics card ), hopefully
> things are better these days.
>
> Not sure of the OS I'd be using yet, contenders are currently Ubuntu,
> or Manjaro... depends on how adventurous I want to be.
>
> Cheers
>
> Adam
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