bazsy

bazsy, 3 months ago

If you are looking to reduce the build’s cost consider a cheaper motherboard or a used GPU. The Asrock B650M-HDV/M.2 is the lowest you should go if it has all the connectors you need. As for buying used video card it’s always a bit of risk, but as the most expensive component you could save the most on that. Since all AM5 CPUs have an integrated GPU you could build without the dedicated GPU first.

bazsy, 3 months ago

if the integrated one is good enough for gaming

No, the iGPU is only meant for testing and basic desktop usage like video playback on the 7000 series. There are 8000G series with better integrated graphics but even those are much weaker than any dedicated GPU.

bazsy, 4 months ago

Are both drives fully encrypted with LUKS? Is trim enabled in both crypttab and fstab?

bazsy, 4 months ago

Stormgate

It’s like 90% StarCraft 2 and 10% Warcraft 3. The competitive RTS part is promising but it didn’t show me anything new. Depending on the lore and campaign it may get more interesting, so far it’s neutral.

Millennia

It starts very similarly to Civ 6 with even more kinds of resources. The current version of the UI seemed confusing and the poor performance (on linux) stopped me from finishing the demo.

bazsy, 4 months ago

Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set.

And enable/automate maintenance services for BTRFS. For example: balace should be run on heavily used system disks or scrub could help detect errors even on single disks.

ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).

Could you explain the preference of ZRAM over ZSWAP? I thought the latter was the more advanced and better performing solution. Is there some magic in Pop’s config?

bazsy, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Thanks for the links! I updated my config from z3fold to zsmalloc and adjusted the vm.page-cluster to test these out.

Reading a bit more, I think when using large max_pool_percent (>30) with Zswap the two solutions are more similar than not. A crucial difference is what use-case is more acceptable since Zswap can cause unresponsiveness (and potential lockup) under high memory pressure. While Zram could result in an OOM crash in a similar worst-case scenario.

bazsy, 4 months ago

Did you check the system logs to see what caused it?

Many things can result in seemingliy random crashes. Any overclock (including XMP and Expo) or undervolt or even a bios version can be problematic.

I would check first if it’s stable on windows.

bazsy, 4 months ago

Most distros use systemd and its logging solution: journald. You can use journalctl to read the logs around the time of the crash for e.g.:

• journalctl -S -5m this shows the last 5 minutes. Use this when a game crashes but the system continues working and did not reboot.
• journalctl -b -1 -S -10m this shows the last 10 minutes from the previous boot. Use this if the crash froze the whole system and rebooted.

Look for red lines (errors) and what wrote them. AMD GPU faults usually have the ‘amdgpu’ mentioned, memory errors could appear as ‘protection fault’.

bazsy, 4 months ago

Happy to help! Tough you are right, this is a rather generic error that doesn’t help much just confirms that the GPU is the issue.

At this point it could be a driver issue since there are similar open bug reports. A hardware problem is still possible since you previously said that it’s unstable on windows too, and power related issues can also lead to this error message.

bazsy, 5 months ago

For the storage you have an additional option: converting a PCIe slot to M.2 Nvme is possible with a passive addin card. This way you could keep the current OS drive and add a 2TB m.2 instead of a SATA one. Since M.2s are quite cheap I went this route last year. Just be warned that secondary x16 slots are slower: it looks like 2.0 x4 for the b450-a pro max.

bazsy, 8 months ago

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

Fallout New Vegas

Diablo 2: LoD