It has been a little bit since my last post. I generally post when I am bored at work and the past 2 weeks were busy.
Today for a change I am curious about your hardware. Do have a laptop, desktop, both? One, 2, more? Why so many if you got more than 1? What hardware is it in it? Anything you would like to upgrade/change for your use case? Ever ran into any support issues with them? Any Steamdecks or funky hardware around?
My main rig is an AMD Ryzen 7950X with a Radeon 7900 XT. I knew I wanted a 7950X after seeing it fly through Windows 9x on 86box (cycle-accurate 80s/90s PC emulator), and throw some punches playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (also why I got the 7900 XT, it’s only slightly worse than a 4080). This was the rig I recently bought from a vendor and so far I’m in love with it. It does Linux near-perfectly, the liquid cooling and RGB needs a bit of tweaking but Liquidctl + OpenRGB does the trick right now.
Then, I have a gaming laptop with a Core i7 and RTX 2070 Super smushed into it. This was like a grand cheaper than buying a whole new rig, especially since the rig at the time wasn’t really broken or problematic. I was also depressed from COVID lockdowns so probably wasn’t my best decision, lol. This laptop served me well gaming-wise but I can’t use Linux on it, like at all. Fractional scaling issues and Intel’s RST makes it a pain.
Then there’s my Steam Deck, which basically rendered the laptop and my Nintendo Switch obsolete. If I know I’m going to need a portable gaming system, I just bring my Steam Deck out now.
Do you actually pllay Flight Sim or just were just impressed by the performance in it?
Shame that the laptop won’t run linux properly :/ but at least the Steamdeck comes in to the rescue:)
I’ve been wanting to play it for a bit. Was impressed with the game watching reviews during COVID lockdowns, but my PC at the time would not have been able to play it well.
Then by the time I get the new PC… they announce MSFS 2024.
Ahhh alright. I was asking in case you did how your experience was with it on Linux because I own the game but I haven’t touched it in forever because I can not be bothered to boot into Windows because Protondb doesnt look optimistic with it.
Huh I completely missed the 2024 version news, gotta check that out.
main pc: 2015 toshiba satellite held together by duct tape (runs arch BTW) second pc: an old HP laptop that was given to me recently, don’t know when it was made but it has a windows 7 sticker on it (also runs arch BTW
am I good for 2 accounts here now?) and a tower PC I was given and used as makeshift server until the HDD started failing S.M.A.R.T. tests and I haven’t replaced the drive on it yet, ran various things on it, but mostly centos (before it got killed) and then rocky, also has a windows 7 sticker on it.(and like the true weeb I am I named them all after anime girls)
Haha yes, you get a bonus account allowance :D
I hope you don’t have anything important on that HDD that is not backed up anymore. Because if so please learn from my mistakes and get it off as soon as possible.
Hmmm that might be a good question for the future, if people nickname/name their PCs
I built a box in grad school for doing small sims before sending to HPC. It was named Samantha Carter 😄
I had to look up who Samantha Carter is but it seems like a very fitting name :D
I shall start: I have one too many PCs hanging around. My main desktop, my main laptop, my NAS, my old desktop and my old laptop. Desktop for every day use, laptop for travelling, NAS for data hoarding, old laptop because I still havent gotten around setting it up to give it to my mom and my old desktop is there if I need Windows but I can’t be bothered to boot out of Linux and it has some old game save files I still haven’t bothered moving for over for 4 years now…
As for hardware, I will just mention my main desktop and laptop because they are the only ones I really use much and I don’t know the specs of the rest by memory.
Desktop:
i9 9900k
RTX 3090
64GB of RAM
4TB of SSD storage
Runs Manjaro, Arch and in case of horrible emergencies a locked down version of Windows 10 LTSC
Just upgraded it 2 days ago (added 2TB of storage and retired the 1080ti I had before). Yes, it is overkill as hell but for good(?) reasons. When I have originally prewritten this post 2 weeks ago I was complaining I couldn’t find a new GPU for it but I finally found a decent used GPU last week.
Laptop:
i7 6th gen (don’t remember the exact model on the top of my head)
GTX 960M
16GB of RAM
1TB SSD
Runs Arch
I bought this for cheap last year. I don’t know what the previous owner did with the screen (I forgot to ask) but there is something funny going on with it and I got no clue how to fix it :(
0 issues with any of the hardware except the occasional nvidia driver pooping itself on update. Some of the peripherals could do with some dedicated software for it (wheel, webcam, mouse and so on), but it all works out of the box so I am alright with it. All in all as of right now I am incredibly happy with the setup and I have 0 updates planned for it till something decides to break.
Very very controversial opinion: I will be dead before I buy something from AMD again. Nvidia and their drivers are faaaaar from perfect, but at least the worst I have ever had to do was to just reinstall drivers when they fail to update properly (its been a long time since the last time too), AMD drivers are an absolute pain in the ass from my experience.
I finally found a decent used GPU last week
Your idea of a decent gpu is a 3090. My idea of a decent gpu is a 1660ti. We are not the same. JK lol.
May I ask why that powerful PC? Work?
Oh god, I worded that badly. I meant a decent option for purchase between the things I was looking at (something in the 3080-4090 range) because I just been finding either things that were way to far away to go look at them and test them before buying (since I was looking at used stuff), not very great brands or stupid prices. I am highly aware it is an absolutely insane GPU, not just “decent”.
Each component got its completely different reason:
The CPU is because I wanted to buy something that is going to last me a very very long time before I need to upgrade. We are now 4 years in and unless some miracle technological advancement happens it got at least another 4 years in it easy.
GPU is because of streaming. The 1080ti was/is an absolutely beast of a GPU and its fine for just gaming as it still runs everything I throw at it. However when it comes to gaming + encoding at the same time there are some games nowadays it struggles with so hopefully that gets sorted now.
RAM TL;DR: I had 32GB of RAM. RAM fails mem test. Friend just upgraded PC to DDR5 RAM so friend has 64GB of spare RAM. I have the RAM now. It is a stupid amount that I really don’t need.
SSD: I give it 5 minutes before the new SSD is full like the other 2. But also I like to have each OS on its own drive (mainly because I don’t trust Windows anywhere near my Linux install).
Funny you mention work, because at work I got the absolute opposite of my home computer - jankey legitimately half broken old little thinkpad lol.
I (used to) work with HPC a lot, so I avoid using computers much at home. I have only a 2017 Asus ZenBook that runs some out of date (probably) Ubuntu distro. Mostly I use my Samsung tablet or Pixel 6. The house has a raspberry pi attached to my router serving as a Pi-hole. I really want to get a Nextcloud server set up but I gotta figure that out.
Completely understandable to try and avoid it! Always gotta use whatever works best for you :)
Good luck setting up Nextcloud!
i5 6600K overclocked to 4.5 GHz and an RX 6600 for the desktop (at some point I will finally get around to upgrading the CPU lol), laptop is just a T470.
