Might want to reconsider the mobo/cpu choice, given the current situation with Intel chips failing at a pretty high rate.

Your build looks good (setting the ongoing intel issues that somebody else already mentioned aside), but personally I’d consider a different drive than the Samsung - it’s a great drive, but usually overpriced imo. If you can get it for a good price then absolutely go for it, but most times I find sn850x drives significantly cheaper and insignificantly slower. Otherwise, the only other note I’d make is that grub is abysmally slow at higher resolutions on chips with no igpu, at least when using a nvidia gpu. I’m not certain if this would apply to an AMD gpu, and either way you can just use something better (cough cough refind) to avoid the problem, but for anyone who just wants the default out-of-the-box bootloader on most distros to just work properly it might be worth spending the extra ~$40 for the K series instead of the KF to get the igpu. It’s not something I’d recommend doing personally, but it’s at least worthwhile to know about when you’re making the K/KF choice imo. Anyway, good luck with your build and have fun with setting everything up!

I love seasonic PSU. They are the among the best IMO and all my personal machines use them.

I’m not sure if an Intel 13th or 14th gen CPU is the best choice at the moment. They are defective:

• video: Intel’s CPUs Are Failing, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs - Gamer’s Nexus, early July 2024
• video: Intel’s Biggest Failure in Years: Confirmed Oxidation & Excessive Voltage - Gamer’s Nexus, late July 2024
• article: Intel finally announces a solution for CPU crashing and instability problems — claims elevated voltages are the root cause; patch coming by mid-August [Updated] - Tom’s Hardware, late July 2024

Edit: A little note on the iGPU of your CPU. I used one without integrated graphics for almost 10 years and is one of the things I regret to be honest. You might encounter an issue in the future and want to disable the graphics card in example, to eliminate issues with driver or whatever. Or if the card is failing. Then you would be happy if you could access your system without a dedicated graphics card. Or like in my situation, I would use the old computer for something else without a graphics card, but can’t. Not the worst thing in the world, but reconsider this decision.

Didnt know there were so new mobos with coreboot support! Really great!

I don’t have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

aside from the redundancy, an integrated gpu is really useful when you need video acceleration in VMs, because you can pass them through as a pcie device and get good performance in games running in VMs

also I don’t have experience with this but VM disk performance would be drastically improved if you got a 2nd drive (even those really cheap SSDs like the NV2) to pass through to the VM rather than making it use a emulated drive

I think a 650 W PSU should be enough for a workload of 490 W idle. Please, correct me, if I am wrong.

You mean 490W under load, right? One would hope that your computer uses less than 100W idle, otherwise it’s going to get toasty in your room :) I would say this depends on how much cheaper a 650W PSU is, and how likely it is you’ll upgrade your GPU. It really sucks saving up for a ridiculously expensive new GPU and then realizing you also need to fork out an additional €150 to replace your fully functional PSU. On the other hand, going from 650W to 850W might double the cost of the PSU, and it would be a waste of money if you don’t buy a high end GPU in the future. For PSU, check out https://cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/ .If you’re buying a decent quality unit I wouldn’t worry about efficiency loss from running at a lower % of its rated max W, I doubt it’s going to be enough to be noticeable on your power bill.

I’ve always had Nvidia GPUs and they’ve worked great for me, though I’ve stayed with X11 and never bothered with Wayland. If you’re conscious about power usage, many cards can be power limited + overclocked to compensate. For example I could limit my old RTX3080 to 200W (it draws up to 350W with stock settings) and with some clock speed adjustments I would only lose about 10% fps in games, which isn’t really noticeable if you’re still hitting 120+ fps. My current RTX3090 can’t go below 300W (stock is 370W) without significant performance loss though.

If you have any interest in running AI stuff, especially LLM (text generation / chat), then get as much VRAM as you possibly can. Unfortunately I discovered local LLMs just after buying the 3080, which was great for games, and realized that 12GB VRAM is not that much. CUDA (i.e. Nvidia GPUs) is still dominant in AI, but ROCm (AMD) is getting more support so you might be able to run some things at least.

Another mistake I made when speccing my PC was to buy 2*16GB RAM. It sounded like a lot at the time, but once again when dealing with LLMs there are models which are larger than 32GB that I would like to run with partial offloading (splitting work between GPU and CPU, though usually quite slow). Turns out that DDR5 is quite unstable, and I don’t know if it’s my motherboard or the Ryzen CPU which is to blame, but I can’t just add 2 more RAM. I.e. there are 4 slots, but it would run at 3800MHz instead of the 6200Mhz that the individual sticks are rated for. Don’t know if Intel mobos can run 4x DDR5 sticks at full speed.

And a piece general advice, in case this isn’t common knowledge at this point; Be wary when trying to find buying advice using search engines. Most of the time it’ll only give you low quality “reviews” which are written only to convince readers to click on their affiliate links :( There are still a few sites which actually test the components and not just AI generate articles. Personally I look for tier lists compiled by users (Like this one for mobos), and when it comes to reviews I tend to trust those which get very technical with component analyses, measurements and multiple benchmarks.

Thank you for the write up. It’s very helpful.
I’d pick another CPU (even Intel) but I understand that you’re bound to the motherboard. I’m looking for a SFF build, what’s your PC-case?

I’d strongly recommend against going Intel 13th gen, they’ve had a ton of stability issues and RMAs with 13th and 14th gen chips.

650W is probably gonna be fine, I’d get an 800W if possible, but 650W should be fine.

I’d say to ignore anyone saying “Nvidia is as good as AMD on linux”. Because while that can be true, it comes with a lot of asterisks.

*It can be as good and as stable as AMD if you use the very latest drivers and version of KDE plasma.

Unless you NEED cuda, I’d say avoid Nvidia for linux use…