https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YBpXN6
I’ll be using it mostly for gaming, possibly self-hosting various things as I think about them. I’d like it to be mildly future-proof, but I’d also like to cut the price down a bit. Right now it’s going to cost basically my whole tax refund, and if possible, I’d like to save some of it to further my education.
I’ll be using Linux (don’t know what distro yet, but that’s another post for another /c/), hence the all-AMD build.
Thanks in advance!
If you’re OK with a dead-end platform, you can get insane cost-performance if you get a Zen 3 X3D CPU. Even now the Zen 3 X3D CPU’s are competitive with current gen CPU’s, and you can shave off some money because the motherboard and RAM are older too. The motherboard that you selected seems really expensive for a motherboard - is there a particular reason you selected that one?
I’m also firmly in the camp that stock coolers are sufficient, so if you can get a CPU with a stock cooler, that’ll shave off some cost as well.
I’m not entirely sure why you went with 2 1TB NVMe drives. If you need tons of storage space, the most cost-effective option is still to pair an SSD and a hard drive. For instance, you could replace 1 of the SSD’s for a 2 TB hard drive at the same cost. Me, personally, I would go for 500 GB SSD + 1-2 TB hard drive. But that’ll depend on how you prefer to balance speed and storage space
I have two NVMe drives plus a slow HDD in my gaming PC so I can keep my games on fast storage without having to reinstall them whenever I install a new distro. I know I could have accomplished this with separate partitions, but every installer is a little different and I just cannot be arsed to re-learn how to do it every time. I sprung for the extra 1 TB stick ($50 or so), and now I don’t have to spend hours googling and watching youtube tutorials whenever I want to install a new distro—I just let the installers blow away the entire OS drive and do their thing.
Yeah, I can see your use case, I’m pretty familiar with with partitioning though, plus I’m not a big distro-hopper. I can always upgrade later!
Just for future-proofing, I’m gonna stick with the AM5 platform. The advice about getting one with a stock cooler is a fantastic idea, unfortunately I couldn’t find an AMD any cheaper on pcpartpicker, plus the cooler isn’t too expensive. As far as the storage goes, I just kinda guessed that HDDs were on the way out, and I wanted 2TB in case I got any large games and/or flatpaks with redundant libraries, but I can step that down (so far the only flatpak I have is Space Cadet Pinball lol). So, awesome, good advice!