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I see the raise of popularity of Linux laptops so the hardware compatibility is ready out of the box.
However I wonder how would I build PC right know that has budget - high end specification. For now I'm thinking
- Case: does not matter
- Fans: does not matter
- PSU: does not matter
- RAM: does not matter I guess?
- Disks: does not matter I guess?
- CPU: AMD / Intel - does not matter but I would prefer AMD
- GPU: AMD / Intel / Nvidia - for gaming and Wayland - AMD, for AI, ML, CUDA and other first supported technologies - Nvidia.
And now the most confusing part for me - motherboard... Is there even some coreboot or libreboot motherboard for PC that supports "high end" hardware?
Let's just say also a purpose of this Linux PC. Choose any of these
1. Blender 3D Animation rendering
2. Gaming
3. Local LLM running
If you have some good resources on this also let me know.
I don’t think that’s relevant.
To employ a car metaphor, I own a small Japanese sedan. I’ve installed an aftermarket tow hitch and have used it to haul small trailers. I have a pair of toolboxes in the trunk and I live up a road that after recent events would be considered a technical driving course. I’m able to get home just fine in my small, low clearance car with a four cylinder engine and touring tires.
If a person asked me: “what vehicle should I get for towing, working in trades and off roading on the weekend?”, I’d absolutely never suggest a Honda accord.
While the experience of owning a diesel truck is more complex and requires some fiddling around, for example, remembering to use the green pump, understanding when to use the fuel cutoff switch, using a block heater when it’s cold outside, saving up more money for repairs and generally actually operating the vehicle differently under almost any comparable conditions, it’s the right tool for the job at hand and dealing with those differences is part and parcel not just of handling the tool, but completing the job.
Great read, thanks!
About the Blender: opendata.blender.org/
There is this site so you can compare CPU and GPU and its scores.
Blender Open Data is a platform to collect, display and query the results of hardware and software performance tests - provided by the public.Blender - Open Data
I don’t know of any msi or asus boards with problems. Of course, I rejected coreboot as a requirement so that plays into it.
My personal experience is: don’t overclock and everything will run fine for at least ten years.
Blender works faster with nvidia and it’s been the optimal hardware for maybe two decades now. There’s just so much support and knowledge out there for getting every feature in the tool working with it that I couldn’t in good faith recommend a person use amd cards to have a slightly nicer Wayland experience or a little better deal.
If you’re only doing llm text work then a case could be made for a non cuda (non-nvidia) accelerator. Of course at that point you’d be better served by one of those coral doodads.
Were you only doing text based ml work or was there image recognition/diffusion/whatever in there too?
Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.
If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It's hardly fair to compare AMD's top-end to Nvidia's top-end when Nvidia's is over twice the price in the real world.
If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don't absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can't fit your whole model in VRAM. I'd take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.
You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you'd take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it'd still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that's probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.