After having a good talk with a few folks, I've decided to buy a gaming PC and build it myself. I have everything I need, including all of the necessary equipment and accessories. I don't want to buy anything from NVIDIA because of some of its controversial decisions, its drivers' poor performance on Linux, and its high price. I'm going full red (AMD). Keep in mind that I will not be using Windows on this PC at all and will be running Pop OS on it as my primary operating system. I am also buying all the parts from Bestbuy. My budget is not to go completely over $2000
Two questions
- Will everything work properly with all of the PC accessories I'm getting, and is there anything I should replace? (not including the CPU or GPU)
- Do you think it will be enough with three fans, or do I need five for extra cooling?
Everything is linked here: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Crafted_104/saved/XcZCrH
The current price for everything is $1716.78
Not necessarily true. If you have an older card (older than the 1650/older than 2020) you're fucked but newer cards should actually be supported. By the end of the year Nvidia should not be an automatic downgrade of an experience compared to AMD. But yeah they're expensive, ruled by the richest capitalists in the world, and their power efficiency is hot garbage.
If you're getting primarily a gaming PC then I would recommend checking out Bazzite because it's all batteries included with support for Steam's gaming mode (basically getting the Steam deck functionality onto your PC) with minimal setup required. POP!_OS is still going through a heavy transition right now into COSMIC so I wouldn't recommend it right now until POP!_OS 24.04 drops. I've used it on my own gaming pc with an nvidia card and it worked flawlessly (minus the green company problems).
Anecdotally, I never had performance problems with Nvidia on Linux. Just other annoyances, like it taking a very long time for them to properly support Wayland (historically poor performance in XWayland, moot for several years now, but the workaround of just sticking with XOrg was workable), needing to compile out-of-tree kernel modules (usually managed by the distribution, but annoying if you need to run bleeding kernels for other reasons), and having it's own proprietary OpenGL / Vulkan implementations instead of running Mesa3D at full performance.
When I switched to AMD, I noticed little things, like the screen doesn't flicker when I activate a second monitor, and having monitors with different refresh rates worked. Gains from Wayland working as intended, mainly.
I feel this. The first time I loaded the 555 driver onto my NixOS system it felt amazing to just have all my games run smoothly using Vulkan.
But my sleep/suspend was broken in the process. Fuck green company.