Upgrading with Linux is Painless!

booman

booman

Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming
Staff member
I have 6 PCs in my office for gaming and LAN Parties. Most of them are close to 10+ years old. So I recently decided its time to do some upgrading. I wanted to do minimal upgrades to save money and still have newer hardware that will last another 10 years.

I priced out the following for two computers:
  • CPU
  • Motherboard
  • Memory
I decided to keep the old hard drive, power supply and video card from the existing PC. Mostly because I've upgraded the video card in the last 5 years and the Enermax power supplies I purchase normally last forever!

Here is what I ended up purchasing:
When all was said-and-done it costs me about $500.00

This is great because when I tried to price out a brand new computer (all components) I found hardware to be extremely expensive... specially video cards. I really wanted a Ryzen CPU but they were too expensive because most of the compatible motherboards and memory were too much. I don't even want to talk about video cards right now! We are so screwed by Digital Mining rising costs... not cool!

Next step was blowing out dust, swapping hardware, thermal paste and then booting up. In my Windows days this would take an entire day of downloading drivers to my flash drive, installing, rebooting several times and then applying updates.... then installing every game one-at-time. You would expect the same from Linux, but what really happened?

NOTHING! Just plug-n-play and my Mint 19.3 recognized all the hardware on the motherboard, the video card and everything! Within a few hours we were back up and gaming again!
  • No Drivers
  • No installation
  • No Troubleshooting
  • No BIOS upgrades
  • No KEYS
  • No activation
  • No reboots
Linux is amazing!
 
Great that you managed to get the upgrades at a decent price. And I agree, most upgrades on Linux is easy. Most required stuff is loaded by the kernel on boot, so you really don't need to worry. As far as I know, you only need to uninstall/install driver if you switch GPU between AMD and Nvidia.

Speaking of GPU's, here in Norway you can't even get GPU's. You can put yourself on a list to be notified when a specific model is available, but the prices are insane. I just hope this will normalize in a year or so, because as it is now a normal person just can't afford to get a new GPU, provided they are even available.

By the way, all your links go to the CPU.
 
I know, its CRAZY!
I can either buy a used video card or buy the same one I already have but for twice the price!
I read that Nvidia may be creating a new GPU for digital mining which could ease the prices off of gaming cards.
We'll see if that ever happens...
 
booman said:
I know, its CRAZY!
I can either buy a used video card or buy the same one I already have but for twice the price!
I read that Nvidia may be creating a new GPU for digital mining which could ease the prices off of gaming cards.
We'll see if that ever happens...
Click to expand...

I have a hard time seeing how that works out. It's the same silicon, coming from the same factories, and the factories are running at capacity already. That silicon for the miners has to come out of the same pool of silicon that is being used to make the video cards.

And yes, I know that nVidia says that the miners will be using a COMPLETELY different chip.

BULL.

They aren't going to spin completely new masks for this; the costs don't make sense. They will take existing chips and mark them some way to identify them as miners, but other than that, they are still GPUs, and still coming off the same production lines.

So, no change in demand for the silicon, video cards are almost certainly still going to be hard to get hold of, and will probably still be priced sky high.

orse, because they ARE marking the chips specifically for miners, we can't even count on being able to pick up used video cards cheap when the current mining craze crashes and miners start liquidating their stock, because they won't work for anything other than mining.

This does nothing good for anyone except nVidia.
 
Gizmo said:
I have a hard time seeing how that works out. It's the same silicon, coming from the same factories, and the factories are running at capacity already. That silicon for the miners has to come out of the same pool of silicon that is being used to make the video cards.

This does nothing good for anyone except nVidia.
Click to expand...
That is exactly what I'm afraid of :(
I guess worst case will be buying used video cards!
Just totally sucks that I can't upgrade my GTX 1060.
Its a good card, but I was wanting something better, but spending more than $200.00 has never been in my budget.
 
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