Due to the premature demise of a fairly new NUC, I needed (well...wanted) a new "main squeeze" for the living room, used for the day to day stuff around here, from entertainment to sysadmin to programming....
I found a long time ago that it's far cheaper to get the good stuff once, than get crap, then have less left over to buy it again when it fails or upgrade it. I wanted to add some better video editing capability along the way, and it seems like I might be able to support this electricity wise, if I'm careful. So I went for some really decent specs. Since Intel has browned me off, and not really made any serious performance improvement of late - my 4th gen stuff is almost as quick as the 7th was before it fried, and AMD has improved not only performance, but mips/watt - this is my first AMD box.
It's a ryzen 7 3700x, 16 gigs ram (for now), 1 terabyte nvme SSD, an RTX 2060 gpu, and a nice new case and power supply. Pretty high-woo stuff - there is room at the top, but double the cost for 15% more performance is not what engineers do.
A lot of the parts choices were influenced by "what can I get at all" at the moment - the new b550 chipset mobo's are scarce and so on - and in this case I was spared the crazy increase in power supply prices as I had one from a build long ago I never got around to...an EVGA 500 watt one does fine. I'll put links to the rest below. I'm not saying these are the best or the best per buck, just what I was willing to compromise on because even here, some of the parts took a month to get shipped.
TL;DR - it all works, it's a screamer, I can get the power from the wall down to ~55w at idle, and I'm only getting going on that, and I'm just now spending the couple of days it takes to get all my favored applications and basic stuff put in.
I'm used to having it all in this one domain, and by golly....it's gonna happen - it IS happening. Every cool tool will be here, and that's a lotta tools. For grins I just rendered a ~ 1 minute video, with a few minor efx, extreme compression (which definitely slows things down) - and it took 4 seconds. It would have taken 90+ on my 7th gen intel NUC. I can live with that.
This is going to be a work in progress for some days. I'm posting from it now. It's just going to take awhile to find and install all the cool stuff I use, a lot of which isn't in the repos for easy automation, but some guy wrote a cool tool and you get it from their website and deal with it....I should and probably will, detail a few of those in some software thread up here. Some of them are really useful to me, best in class, and not that well known out there, so I'll pass it on.
Some are probably just my quirky preferences, but you get whatcha get.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// The parts:
The Case: A corsair "quiet" model. It's not bad. Their fans are quiet, but the noise from the stock "wraith prism" cooler shipped with the cpu is quite noticeable.
The CPU: I got the lower TDP version of the Ryzen 7 here. More on peak clocks later, but those last few percent usually cost you both when using them - and at idle. This seems like the better choice.
The RAM: Crucial 3200 ddr4. "Only" 16 gigs for starters. What I could get just then, the faster stuff wasn't in stock anywhere. While I have had an SSD of this brand go up in smoke (literally, it did the latchup thing and fried), no issues with their ram. It works.
The GPU: An RTX 2060. I didn't really want an overclocked version nor do I have brand-tropism for MSI, but it works and is fine. I'm planning on putting the clocks down again, I don't quite need this performance level(!). I can't believe I said that, but damn, this thing is fast. I got it for the video encoder, I'm not a gamer so a lot is wasted unless I get into CUDA programming.
The all-important MOBO: Gigabyte b550 aorus master. HIgh dollar, again, what was going to ship soonest. I have to say, it's not actually a horrible value, I'm IMPRESSED. The thing weighs more than some of my earlier whole machines! No skimping here! An important feature is that this line has the most efficient and coolest running cpu power setup going.
I did have an issue with Mint Mate 20 not recognizing the ethernet controller, but that was easily fixed as detailed elsewhere here.