On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 12:25:19PM -0500, Alex Volkov wrote:
All the cheap screens I have either have HDMI or DVI, so I thought to have a simple common display output that would give me the same gamma settings across all of the screens. Displayport is more versatile, and there seem to exist adapters out there that go from DisplayPort to Dual HDMI or Dual DVI, the question is would this kind of set up work with X11, KDE on open source drivers with Radeon Vega chip? I'm more concerned with what kind of hardware I can reliably use today that trying to future proof it and then spending weeks messing with the settings.
Displayport to DVI and HDMI adapters are passive and the software doesn't even know they are in use. The daisychain option (only for native displayport screens that support that) does probably require software that supports it. The multi DVI or HDMI adapters that rely on the DP1.2 multistream (MST) support probably need the same software support.
From what I can find, it works with intel, but AMD looks like it was only just merged in 4.15 kernel, so it would only work with very up to date systems.
There are bunch of much cheaper mini-ATX cards with more feature, I'm trying to figure out if I can relax the requirement of having mITX card. There's also one mITX motherboard from gigabyte -- GA-AB350N, but having been burned by one of their boards before GA-970A-UD3P r2 (Bugs in linux kernel for Via USB 3, confusing memory management settings in UEFI, hardware issues) I would rather not go through that again. I think I'll wait for MSI board.
Certainly miniATX has a lot more options than miniITX. You pay a lot for that last bit of shrinking. Is being that small that important?
The thing I like about ASRock board is that it's only has compact digital output video ports of the same type (and no HDMI+DVI+VGA nonsense), Intel Gigabit Ethernet and Intel wireless chip and lots and lots of USB3 ports; but things like brand and quality control do worth something.
Intel networking is always a nice thing to have.
MiniATX is so much cheaper, but at the same time so much larger. If only there were a Ryzen-based NUC-like platform for a decent price. This build, even with miniITX form factor that makes everything more expensive, is still cheaper than a NUC with the similar specifications.
To me the NUC never made any sense as a product.
I haven't heard of NVMe yet, I guess it's a relatively new standard, so should I use something like this instead? -- WD Black 256GB Performance SSD - M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive - WDS256G1X0C
It's been around 7 years. Essentially it uses PCIe rather than SATA, so instead of going PCIe to SATA to disk, you go direct PCIe to the disk, usually with a PCIe x4 connection, rather than a SATA 3 connection (6Gbps), skipping the translation to SATA. Nice features of NVMe over SATA: 65535 queues of 65536 commands vs 1 queue of 32 commands 2048 MSI-X interrupts vs 1 interrupt No locking needed vs sychronization locking when doing commands 32Gbps vs 6Gbps bandwidth (assuming PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA 3) Linux has no problem with NVMe these days. Has worked fine for a few years now. Just have to get used to /dev/nvme* rather than /dev/sd* for your disk.
PCPartpicker says that the system would consume 119W at its peak, so I can probably get away with 150W power supply.
I've been trying to find mITX cases that don't have slim 5.25" bay and no 3.5 bays which proved to be challenging. I started looking for cases on aliexpress, where there are a few -- but if I go with that route I would need to find a rather sizeable 12V brick power supply and a beefy DC-DC buck converters, it is particularly hard to find buck converters that go above 60W;
That sounds annoyingly complicated. -- Len Sorensen