If you were building a PC today to run CachyOS and you had a budget of $1200 what CPU/GPU combo would you purchase and why?
GPU is kind of tough. The RX 9070 is good and AMD generally provides a better Linux experience, but the RTX 5070 is competitive, you can probably get one for $50 cheaper, and DLSS is great. FSR 4 is great too but is literally on less than one tenth as many games at the moment.
“Super resolution” shouldn’t be that important, but it kind of is; anti-aliasing tech stagnated a long time ago, until DLSS. It is, quite simply, the best AA. The upscaling is just a bonus. FSR 4 is in the same tier but the game selection is limited and growth is slow due to how long it took them to figure out how they were going to implement. Then again, games come with AA solutions, they’re just a step below. If it’s not that big a deal to you then AMD is the obvious choice.
CPU is easy: The 9600X is on sale for $160 right now.
By the time you build something with that CPU and one of those two GPUs, it’ll come out to $1200.
Is it worth it to go Nvidia if the driver support isn’t great? Would you sacrifice the Nvidia niceties for AMD stability?
If DLSS, raytracing and the like are important to you, that should probably be a big factor. Looking around the two GPUs seem to trade blows (at least in Windows) so it is going to come down to do the extra things Nvidia offer make it worth the less VRAM (not by much, admittedly) and them naturally running hotter?
I personally don’t care for DLSS/FSR/RT and rather a more efficient GPU as even my old 6800xt is doing just fine years later. I’d lean more towards AMD given that and the better Linux support, but that’s just my own opinion.
It’s 1500$ but i’d get smth like this:
https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc
a ryzen ai max 395, has a radeon 8060s igpu which is really good.
This way you get a very high end cpu with a decent gpu. And it comes in a small package.
Otherwise, I’d get the cheapest 16GB VRAM desktop GPU I can find in the current generation (probably AMD) and then the best ryzen I can afford to go with it.
is it a build for all 1200$ or an upgrade for 1200$ ?
The driver situation for Nvidia has improved dramatically in the last 12 months, especially if you’re using CachyOS. It’s better with AMD, but Nvidia is good enough now that it’s something you don’t really need to worry about. If it’s your tiebreaker though, then it should go to AMD.
I would love to get an AI Max. Those things are incredible.
It would be a full build.
Is there any hope on the horizon for Arc Battlemage GPU’s?
Those are hideously ugly, overpriced and unupgradeable (as in what’s the point of putting it in such a huge case? that’s just lazy); everyone’s been laughing at this, framework made their name making sorta upgradeable laptops, then they make an un-upgradeable desktop lol.
In short, no.
Battlemage has the same problem as AI Max: it’s far more impressive as a technology than it is as a product.
For AI Max, that means the performance is too low for the price, or the price is too high for the performance, however you choose to frame that. If neither the performance or the price is your #1 concern, i.e. you only care about performance per liter/kg, it might work for you. I can’t even say “performance per watt” because Intel just straight up owns that.
For Battlemage it means what they’ve been able to accomplish has been excellent – given the timespan and the competition. But it would take much more time and at least two more iterations for Intel to become a competitor that can pose a threat in a desktop GPU segment. I do think they can do it. They’re doing terrific work.
Does intel work well in linux in general? Isn’t OpenCL and different things more challenging to get working right on Intel?
Not really, you just need to install intel-compute-runtime. I wouldn’t advise buying Intel right now though.
Is that the command? Intel-compute-runtime? It seems so simple. I have an Intel CPU that worked great when I was on Windows. However, switching over to Linux, it seems not quite so great. I was considering just selling it an buying AMD. Would that be worth it or just make it work with Intel?
If you have a fairly current Nvidia card there are no more issues than there are with AMD. They started doing open source drivers on the high end cards back in May of 2022 and then last year in July 2024 they made all the current drivers open source.
However, even prior to them making the drivers open source I’ve used nothing but Nvidia cards for over 15 years in my primary systems and haven’t had any problems at all since I started using Linux as my daily system. While I haven’t had the latest and greatest cards (currently have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12gb card) I have always had cards that were fully supported by the latest shipping drive so drivers were never an issue once you got them installed. Sure you may occasionally get a hiccup with an issue here and there but that can be said for both manufacturers.
As for stability in my personal experience my NVIDIA cards have always been far more stable than my AMD cards even before NVIDIA switched to supporting open source drivers.
I’m sure if you google AMD vs NVIDIA you’ll find nothing short of 100’s of millions of posts on the subject with very strong opinions one way or another. At this point I wouldn’t personally consider anything for myself but an NVIDIA card but your use case or experiences may be different than mine.
When you get it narrowed down to the couple of cards you want just look up real world stats on how you’ll be using the card so if you are using it for playing certain types or particular games then see how the cards you are considering perform on the games or types of games at the resolutions you plan on playing at. Then compare that performance to price and make a decision that works for you, for me NVIDIA usually leads that price/performance metric by a decent amount for higher/mid gaming at 1440p.
I found a good deal on a 2080ti and bought it. It should be here in a few days and I’ll give it a try. It will be paired with Core Ultra 5 235. I hope it runs well. I’m certain any of the problems I run into are user error.