I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back.
I am finding it easy enough to find build ideas for very capable (and expensive) machines but I am that out of touch with “what’s good” that I no longer have any idea of what would be “good enough” (to play most modern games at “high” settings and at 60fps).
Basically, I would like help in avoiding an attempt at going back to my old ways and building some kind of pie in the sky setup like this:
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
CPU fan NZXT Kraken 360 RGB
MB Asus Prime X670E-Pro WiFi 6E
GPU Gigabyte Aero GeForce RTX 4090 24GB
RAM G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB DDR5-6000
SSD Samsung 990 Pro 2TB
PSU Corsair RM1000x Shift 1000 W
Perhaps the could serve as a starting point - what could you cut from the above build and what would you substitute?
Not OP, but as a person who wants to switch to Linux but is worried about being able to play the games I like (and doesn’t generally use Steam), is Nvidia bad for Linux gaming? I’ve heard good things about AMD’s Linux compatibility but I have an Nvidia.
Linux fanboys like to hate on Nvidia, but their GPU’s usually work fine on day one and have performance parity with other OS.
What isn’t good is that they don’t support some newer features that work on the open-source drivers from AMD and Intel, namely Wayland. But even that’s constantly getting better and won’t be a problem for long.
Also, the proprietary drivers made some problems a few years ago that resulted in a black screen after the update. But as I said, that’s been years ago and was simple to fix.
Now I’ve talked about those Linux fanboys like myself and do recommend AMD GPU’s over Nvidia. It’s great that they work ootb without having to install drivers, but that’s only for gaming. E.g. machine learning apps like stable diffusion make the AMD driver situation way worse than Nvidia.
Don’t let yourself be discouraged by overly dramatic comments! Try it for yourself and it’ll probably be fine.
Agree, most mainstream distros have it all handled for the most part and it normally “just works”.
Now, myself on Gentoo testing on the other hand… Sometimes I shoot myself in the foot and forget to rebuild my kernel modules and wind up needing to chroot to fix things - all because I have an NVidia card.
I have an Nvidia GPU and I use it with Linux, even with Wayland, but it’s still not quite there yet, and because all the fixes have to come from proprietary Nvidia driver changes, nobody really knows when/if everything will be fixed. AMD has been much better with support and switching to AMD for your next.card will save you a lot of headaches.