The ‘ol 3rd gen i7 in my personal workstation soldiered on remarkably well for about 6 years – the longest time I ever went between PC builds. But I’ve been doing more video processing lately and encoding runs finally started to become annoyingly slow, so the old Asus/i7 has recently been demoted to Man Cave Theater PC. I decided to go with AMD vice Intel for a new workstation this time around due mostly to recent CPU micro-architecture security vulnerabilities and the way that fell out between the 2 companies. I’ve always been an Intel guy, but their somewhat lukewarm and deceptive response to this issue was enough to sour me on them for now.
And apparently a long 6 years it was! The PC builder/enthusiast scene appears to have evolved into a basically gamers-only market segment, with brightly colored RGB everything all the rage these days. It’s not exactly my cup ‘o tea, but this is what you currently get building a custom top-shelf PC:
Ryzen 2700, 32G RAM, 512G NVMe boot drive, 3Tb Raid1 data volume with a Radeon Vega RX 64. The Black Friday deals were just too tempting. I put this together for a whopping $1,500 – about half what a similarly configured off-the-shelf system would cost. As usual there’s always a fly in the ointment. AMD’s open source Linux driver does not support system suspend and hibernation in the current stable Debian kernel. The currently available AMD proprietary driver is Ubuntu-only, so I’ll need to get another graphics card at some point if a new kernel with better AMD support doesn’t filter down soon.