Jamon, Yes, the whole Intel Ethernet, wifi and bluetooth combo should not raise any issues in Linux. On 02/26/18 20:03, Jamon Camisso via talk wrote:

On 2018-02-26 07:36 PM, Alex Volkov via talk wrote:

...

Hey everyone,

I'm assembling a computer and I'm looking for some feedback.

The computer I'm building I'll use for development, run some VMs, edit video time-to-time.  I also already have a 1Gb hard drive which I plan to use for VMs.

One of the big requirements is to be small size, lots of memory (eventually upgrade to 32GB) and have a somewhat beefy CPU (Thus Ryzen 2400G).

I've chosen Asrock AB350 mini ITX because it's small and it's got dual HDMI. I have the same motherboard, CPU, and RAM. Zero issues, ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, everything worked out of the box when I tried it with Ubuntu.

I already have an Intel SSD, but the m.2 port is appealing and I'll eventually get something to populate it with.

I'm waiting for RAM to come down in price - my only regret now is that it has just 2 slots, so I can't add another 16GB.

Cheers, Jamon --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 11:32:11AM -0500, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:

Displayport is much much more versatile and futureproof. And supports daisy chaining monitors and higher resolution than HDMI. Also trivially adapts to DVI, HDMI, etc. I would not consider buying anything without at least one displayport. Especially since the HDMI on the AM4 boards is 1.4 not 2.0, and hence limited to 4k @ 30Hz, not 60Hz. At least intel based boards tend to be HDMI 2.0 these days.

Apparently depending on the CPU model and how well the board is made, it MIGHT be HDMI 2.0 compatible. The 2400G is apparently one of the chips that should support HDMI 2.0 if the board is done properly. -- Len Sorensen

I tried to spec-out similar system to what I'm trying to get, and it's way, way more expensive if I'm going to buy all the parts from Lenovo. If I were to go with Intel-based system, I'd probably go with the NUC. On 02/27/18 11:47, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 11:34:59AM -0500, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:

...

Apparently depending on the CPU model and how well the board is made, it MIGHT be HDMI 2.0 compatible. The 2400G is apparently one of the chips that should support HDMI 2.0 if the board is done properly. Oh and I just saw the Lenovo ThinkCentre M710 Tiny. It costs more than what you were planning, but wow that is small and well equipped.

| From: Alex Volkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | If I were to go with Intel-based system, I'd probably go with the NUC. Zotac has announced some ZBox models with AMD Ryzen Processors. If you like NUCs, you might like ZBoxes. They are supposed to be available "some time in the second quarter" of this year at an unannounced price. <https://www.anandtech.com/show/12319/zotac-displays-zbox-ma551-an-amd-raven-ridgebased-sff-pc> <https://topnewreview.com/zotac-magnus-er51060-review/> I've got ZBoxes, but only inexpensive ones. They have Atom-family or Celeron processors. Some models come with two NICs; I use those as internet gateways 24/7. Sometimes these small systems are more expensive than notebooks with similar resources.

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Looking at their drivers, the ones I checked were all intel wifi and | realtek gigabit. My zboxes use Realtek gigabit ethernet. I know that those in the know prefer Intel but I'm not up to speed on why. I'll give you a why not: Intel ethernet seems to collude with Intel Management Engine to provide "lights out management". This works without involving the main processor and thus without involving your system's own firewall. In other words, you have a big gaping security hole that is very hard to plug (or even assess). Many years ago, DEC Tulip ethernet chips were considered a Good Thing. I think that Realtek's ethernet chips are descendants.

Hugh, I think I mostly prefer to stick to Intel drivers for what now is considered legacy reasons, right now I'm working on a computer that's got RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet and it's works just fine. But five to ten years ago I remember Linux and OpenBSD developers going on a rant about how bad and unpredictable Realtek gigabit chips were, whereas Intel were paying people to work on e1000 drivers in the kernel. I still have dual e1000 PCI cards laying around sever that I can pop in a computer at any moment and know that they would work. When it comes to wireless, I still remember the pain of trying to configure rtl 81xx or even worse, set up ndiswrapper for broadcom chip.  After that I started buying laptops that have Intel wireless chips in them and suddenly I stopped needing to think about configuring wifi. I guess when I see a network card that isn't based on intel, I shrug and think to myself -- "oh, it's gonna stop working in the next kernel upgrade". Alex. On 2018-02-28 01:25 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| Looking at their drivers, the ones I checked were all intel wifi and | realtek gigabit.

My zboxes use Realtek gigabit ethernet.

I know that those in the know prefer Intel but I'm not up to speed on why.

I'll give you a why not: Intel ethernet seems to collude with Intel Management Engine to provide "lights out management". This works without involving the main processor and thus without involving your system's own firewall. In other words, you have a big gaping security hole that is very hard to plug (or even assess).

Many years ago, DEC Tulip ethernet chips were considered a Good Thing. I think that Realtek's ethernet chips are descendants. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

On Feb 27, 2018 11:32, "Lennart Sorensen via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: Why a SATA M.2 rather than the much faster NVMe? I got NVMe for about the same price as SATA last year. It's definitely worth the upgrade, though do be sure your board's BIOS is updated to understand it. With Newegg, some of their "sold and shipped by Newegg Canada" items are shipped from the US. I couldn't work out if there was any logic to what was being shipped from where. As it turned out, some items took about a week longer to arrive than others. So if you're setting aside a specific weekend for a build, give yourself at least an extra week's lead time. Cheers Stewart

| From: Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | With Newegg, some of their "sold and shipped by Newegg Canada" items are | shipped from the US. I couldn't work out if there was any logic to what was | being shipped from where. I *think* that one way you can tell is by whether the item is eligible for "Premier" free shipping (Premier is like Amazon Prime) or not. "Yes" strongly suggests inventory in Canada. Sometimes things go out of stock in Canada and then the shipping price goes up a bit and Premier is dropped.

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

Hi Hugh, Thank you for your comments, see my replies below. On 02/27/18 15:34, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

| From: Alex Volkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| On 02/27/18 11:32, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

| > Displayport is much much more versatile and futureproof. And supports | > daisy chaining monitors and higher resolution than HDMI. Also trivially | > adapts to DVI, HDMI, etc. I would not consider buying anything without | > at least one displayport. Especially since the HDMI on the AM4 boards | > is 1.4 not 2.0, and hence limited to 4k @ 30Hz, not 60Hz. At least | > intel based boards tend to be HDMI 2.0 these days.

| 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.

Really? I thought that gamma needed to be adjusted for each screen (if one cared). What is the procedure for calibration? is there a way to do it in Linux? Do I need a special device for that?

I heard 'gamma calibration' being mentioned but I have no idea about how it's done.

| 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?

What do you mean by "Dual"?

I mean a some sort of a splitter driving two monitors. From reading replies and doing a bit of research, It looks like DisplayPort has the feature of carrying several video streams and supports that kind of splitting but not HDMI; Even HDMI 2.0 seems to have the capability of carrying 2 channels per physical port it's bandwidth is limited to 18Gbps whereas DP bandwidth is 32Gbps.

There is a concept in DVI-D of "Dual Link". That is needed for resolutions above 1920x1200@60. It's not too well known, but important to me (my previous monitor was 2560x1600 and only accepted dual-link DVI input). DP -> Dual Link DVI requires an active converter (usually $~100 but I found some cheap on Kijiji).

There is also a concept of Dual Link in HDMI but I don't imagine any devices ever supported it. It requires a different connector and cable.

If you mean DP to two separate video connectors, Lennart addressed that.

Note: DVI is a dead end. The standard is frozen in time.

I just need HDMI to DVI converters for some rather old 1080p monitors that are still working perfectly fine.

A cable with DP on one end and DVI-D or HDMI on the other is under $10 from Prime Cables (plus shipping): <https://www.primecables.ca/p-331688-cab-fl-445-914-primecables-displayport-to-hdmi-adapter-cable-mm-3ft-black>

To go to HDMI 2.0 is more, I think: <https://www.primecables.ca/p-362078-cab-12781-displayport-12a-to-4k-hdmi-active-adapter-black-monoprice> Do check the details.

| 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.

Cheap UltraHD TVs require HDMI 2.0. They are so appealing, and getting more so. Make sure you can support HDMI 2.0. You can buy one NOW for as low as $300. Since the screen has the same number of pixels as four FullHD monitors, that's pretty hard to ignore.

UltraHD TVs are cheaper than UltraHD monitors. TVs don't usually have DP inputs but UltraHD monitors do. TVs tend to have chroma

The board Asrock AB350 mini ITX, or more precisely Ryzen 2400G supports HDMI 2.0, so in this configuration it should be possible to drive two 4K screens at 60Hz. https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/raven-ridge-hdmi-2-0-compatibility... I wonder if it's possible to connect more than two screens with two HDMI ports? (This question is more theoretical than anything else). Lennart mentioned MSI B350I ITX motherboard that has DP and HDMI. I looked at it for a bit, compared to ASRock the following put it at disadvantage: * It's not yet available in stores * Ethernet chip is not Intel * Reviews show that MSI BIOS is consistently worse then any other boards * Really obnoxious naming (They even managed to call something more obnoxious than fatal1ty)

sub-sampling which I can live with but you might not want to. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

Hey Stewart, Thank you, I'd like to borrow your ColorHug and  I'll contact you off the list about it. Not matching color profile of a dual screen setup have been bane of my existence, for any dual screen setup I managed to experience, I've seen not-so-slightly matching color temperature that I could never adjust. I assumed that I've been getting screens from different batches and there's nothing I could do about that; also my knowledge of color profiles is really dated -- I thought it was something really expensive, finicky and doesn't work for Linux. Alex. On 2018-02-27 05:01 PM, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:

On 27 February 2018 at 16:08, Alex Volkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org <mailto:talk@gtalug.org>> wrote:

What is the procedure for calibration? is there a way to do it in Linux? Do I need a special device for that?

Yes, you need a device, but the procedure is simple. I can lend you my ColorHug, a display calibrator that runs *only* under Linux. Takes about 20 minutes to do a full calibration per screen. It spits out an ICC profile that (should) be automatically picked up by your display manager. Picky types recalibrate frequently. I do it annually, at best.

Most displays come set way too cold, so whites are blue-white out the box. Your display will look a bit pink for a while until you're used to it, but you should notice you can see a bunch more brightness levels. If you're running a dual-monitor setup, make sure you calibrate them both - having one eye-searing cold blue and the other warmer looks terrible.

  Stewart

--- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk