I also tested with Geekbench 5 since 6 is optimized for realistic end-user workloads, which is the metric I am interested in for a workstation. The Core Ultra 7 265K was 100% faster than the Apple M2 Max. I didn't expect that much of a gap and turns out that 6 is a better benchmark for my testing. * Apple M2 Max - 1,760 / 12,948 * Intel Core Ultra 7 265K - 2,532/25,622
Using Ubuntu is just right. IMHO most people should go with the distros NVIDIA releases CUDA for, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL etc. With whatever desktop environment they like. Then just use linux. No need for everyone to use Arch.
Back in 2018 I had a 2696 v3 with 128GB ddr4. I didn't really do much workstation tasks, I built it because I had nearly 100 chrome tabs open at once. I couldn't get myself to close them
Why the intel core ultra over a Ryzen 9950X? 9950X scores higher in multi-core benchmarks and you don't have to deal with different types of cores in linux like you do with the core ultra. Just wondering if I am missing something.
The one thing all Linux users can agree on is that everyone else is running the wrong distro. I'm running Rocky Linux for my reasons and you should run whatever for your reasons.
I'm not sure what is this wrong distro thing/joke, but I started to wonder, can Lubuntu do whatever an Ubuntu distro can? In my speculative opinion it should, right? For example, learning docker and other of those things should work as fine as if I would do on a proper Ubuntu, instead of Lub*! And vice versa. I am still exploring this/these realm(s)!
@@Monarchias Hi long-time Linux user here, since the '90s. Anyway, yeah, the "your distro sucks" thing has kind of gotten to meme level and a lot of it is really just people joking. Each distro has it's own purpose, it's all the same stuff, it's just some of the details for the most part. e.g. Lubuntu tries to be more lightweight than Ubuntu e.g. the desktop, Ubuntu uses Gnome, which is think is pretty awful (IHMO) so they take off some of the "bloat" but you could tweak Lubuntu into Ubuntu if you desire, it's just trying to make life easy. There are other things Ubuntu does that people don't like, so you get similar distros like MX and Mint which are very similar but one is off of Ubuntu, which is off of Debian but MX is straight off of Debian. The most popular "base" distros types are Debian and Red Hat and I have worked more on the Red Hat side and prefer Rocky Linux which is based off of Red Hat and I also find it more stable than Debian based distros. So it depends on what you are trying to do and how much you want to put into it. That's the real difference. I hope this was helpful.
@@FlexibleToast I love your intentions, but it really depends on your purpose and end goals. Some of us are corporate drones, so compatibility is #1. Some companies force code contrib agreements, so we couldn't if we wanted to.
@@FlexibleToast Rocky Linux and AlamaLinux both took over where CentOS (and Scientific Linux) left off. Like when there was Scientific Linux and CentOS there are these two which are essentially the same there is a slight difference in how they handle being downstream. Like most distros, they are downstream distros, like Ubuntu. I spent decades working with Red Hat Linux, and that is truthfully part of my preference. I've worked with Red Hat and CentOS and worked with and contributed to Fedora and other initiatives. Unless you are joking (I hope you are) then you are displaying the kind of thing he was talking about in the video by saying that nonsense.
Nice, always great to see new people joining the linux-desktop community. I think ubuntu is a solid choice. I however prefer to use Debian because of the snaps and the bloatware ubuntu ships by default. Really excited about the new linux videos. :D
Nice overview. For a slight noise reduction, swap out the 14mm thick Noctua CPU cooler fan for the Noctua A9x25 fan. Its max RPM is 2,000 instead of 2,500 and eliminates the distinct whine from the stock fan on this cooler when running at max RPM. Noctua cleverly designed the cooler so that the included fan clips work with either 14 or 25 mm thick CPU cooler fans.
Did you consider going AMD on the CPU side? Was it just a pricing decision? Also, you should check out KDE as an alternative desktop environment - much nicer than Gnome in my opinion and much more customizable.
I second KDE. Plasma 6.1 is really nice. I'm typing this on kubuntu 20.10 right now. Your DE is entirely personal preference, but I prefer having more options for customization and for the DE to not have opinions on the "right" way to do things like gnome tends to.
Only change I would have made was going to a 4060ti 16G vs the 3060 12G... a little extra headroom for running larger AI image and LLM models. Other than that looks like a nice rig!
@@blazebox71 same here, went for an 4060ti 16G with an AMD Threadripper 32C/64T Most stuff happens at the CPU and RAM for me... Just saying, would definitively recommend this card over the one Tim choose.
I switched to Manjaro on my gaming desktop a couple of weeks ago. I setup dual booting with Windows 10, but I've only briefly gone back to get settings from certain programs. I am very happy so far. 4 chrome tabs...I think my smallest firefox window has more than that. I personally would have gone with at least a 16GB GPU for AI. If you get into image generation at all, 16GB is basically minimum for the newest models. As I have only 12GB on my AMD 6700XT, I run into limitations. The biggest one though is the lack of support for AMD when it comes to AI.
i actually smiled when u said u used ubuntu desktop. my home server is proxmox, and under that most of it is ubuntu, and under that as much as possible is docker. i actually have proxmox running 3 vm's, ubuntu is the main, home assistant OS is the 2nd, and i have a 3rd running a lancache install... because it needed some, what i will call "individually unique" dns settings, so it had to be seperate. nothing wrong with using ubuntu desktop - it works, it's easy to update, and having a graphics server makes trouble shooting easier.
It has felt to me like there's not as many homelab channels by people who intend to actually use their labs to build/compile software, at least from the few channels I've sampled. It's nice to see some focus on software development.
I've found PopOS to be a better than Ubuntu for newer kernels and hybrid graphics support while still staying in the Ubuntu/apt ecosystem. Give it a shot!
Be interesting how you get on. Latest Ubuntu seems to be heavily pushing snaps, which I don’t like. You can get strange fights between snap and apt if you’re not careful. I’m old school so prefer the apt packages, and so i prefer Debian or Raspberry Pi OS or Mint for my desktops. Good work though, look forward to a longer term review!
I'm so jealous that you guys in America still have stores like Micro Center - the ONLY computer store in my entire town (of well over 200,000 people) recently stopped stocking ANY internal computer components whatsoever, forcing you to only to be able to buy them online. Which some like, but I personally absolutely hate for both convenience AND the security of knowing I am actually getting what I paid for (and easy quick returns if there are issues). I am a bit surprised that you went with a 30 series GPU rather than a 40 series, considering the extra money you spent on the CPU. Especially as some of the 40 series actually come with even MORE VRAM than your 3060 card.
Ive shopped at microcenter from day 1. I grew up in Columbus Ohio where the 1st store is. I now live in Texas and we have them here as well. its a great store and the staff is always polite and helpful. they take pleasure in knowing their stuff and helping with their knowledge. they also sell online on their website. I recently just put a new gaming rig together from there. I9 64GB DDR5 4TB M.2 and a 4070 OC $1200 out the door. and the guy picked out other parts brands from what i had seen to keep all the same specs but save me a ton of cash with sale and bundle deals.
Solid build! The one point on the OS I would make. Given how new that CPU is, if your not on the latest stable kernel, you might want to also give that a try. Just to see if you can pull even more performance out of it. Looks like your on the Ubuntu LTS, and I'm not sure how good they are at pulling stuff back for newer hardware.
I didn't go so far with the hardware, but I recently built a linux development machine as well. I went with debian for the distro because of it's stability, but I like the looks of Ubuntu. I found a video that shows how to make debian look like ubuntu. Now I get the best of both worlds! It's super fast. I did max out the ram with 128GB of ram, but used a ryzen 7 CPU and NVIDIA 3050 for the graphics. I do play video games on it as well though. Since steam has proton, now, playing games is much easier.
Cool build! FWIW, since you're probably tucking that rack away and treating it like a remote development machine, you can get a little more performance with the ubuntu server vs the desktop version. Totally depends on your setup of course, but for me it was a 10-20% boost across the board.
hi Tim, interesting choice to go for 3060, you don't think it will be underpowered for big LLM tasks and ML? what about inetl arc a770 it has 16gb? or the new b580?
A word of warning about "leaving room for the future" with regards to memory on the newest platform: For DDR5 it seems to be especially important to check that your motherboard is specifically OK'd with your memory! Check the QVL (qualified vendors list). I didn't do this, and bought two sets of 2x32GB thinking that fine, worst case it just won't run with XMP enabled. Nope, didn't run at any timings and I tried a lot! Several days of overclocking/underclocking/BIOS updates and many runs of memtest later, I bought 4 sticks (128gb) of RAM from the QVL and it passed memtest and has been working perfectly with xmp enabled. So if you upgrade by buying two more sticks of RAM of the same brand, make sure the return policy is really good and make sure to run memtest! You probably want 4 sticks from the QVL from the get go if you want to go 128gb. I corrupted 2 or 3 installs of Windows before I figured out the memory only half-worked. Never had that happen before, I've always been able to wing it in the past.
@@TechnoTim Glad to help! I might as well give the parts list (this is the parts list that *did not* work): Intel Core Ultra 265k 2x set Team Group T-CREATE EXPERT 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6000 ASRock Z890 Steel Legend WiFi And to be clear the team group RAM worked perfectly when it was just two sticks, it's good RAM just not on the QVL for a 4x32gb config. Kingston fury KF552C40BBK4-128 is in my system now, no memtest errors, works great.
I'm still rocking the i7-8700K. What a great but that CPU has been. One of the first to be compatible with W11 before W11 even came out. I'm expecting a full decade's worth of use out of this thing. Probably longer if I use it for other services after I upgrade
decent build Tim! I wonder, why not some tower type Noctua cooler (for more straightforward airflow through case) and why not 16GB RTX4060Ti (more vram and better RT/AI performance than 12GB 3060) ? cheers
I use ubuntu as well, nice choice of cpu i've seen Level1tech do a video on it. It performed exceptionally well under linux. Funny enough my current home laptop has an i5-8350U and your single core score beat my multi core score ! I recently bought the thinkpad P16 gen 2 with an i7-14700HX and will be replacing my hp elitebook, it also has an RTX 2000 ADA which is a rebranded 4060 with quadro drivers, these run great on linux. Nice video
I'm curious how Arrow Lake's NPU could help with image classification & object detection. I believe it has support in recent Linux kernels and OpenVINO...
excellent video for explaining your choices. With respect to right or wrong distros, one should go with whichever is comfortable with to get his job done (for me is gentoo). It really puts me off when people insist on specific distros. A couple of questions (you may consider fo future videos): 1. I think ubuntu uses generic binaries, will there be any advantage to consider a distro with x86_64 v3 optimized binaries for performance (for example opensuse)? 2. My 3060 gave me a black screen after ubuntu install as a quirk (i had to boot in safe graphics and install the drivers), did your install work out of the box? 3. In ubuntu there are a few nvidia driver options, which one do you choose and why? 4. An aspect that may put some people off from using ubuntu, is the snap framework for applications. What is your take on this? Also, what is your approach, that is how do you choose the apps from snaps vs apt or ppa? By the way I had great trouble running freecad with nvidia on ubuntu.
"Wrong linux distro.... " Just use what you want. People get too up tight about this stuff. That said, if you want Ubuntu without SNAPs by default, PopOS is pretty good in my opinion. Is that board able to get FWUPD firmware updates? On my Thinkpad there is a firmware section in the settings that occasionally receives updates even though this laptop came out in 2018.
That's a great question and I ashamed to say I didn't even consider it for my workstation. I use it in all of my servers but really it slipped my mind when building this machine since I have been building computers for years without it. The board and ram would have cost considerably more though. Maybe in my next build! Thanks for the reminder that ECC is thing now on end user machines :)
@@Jims-Garage DDR5 has on die ECC because at higher density and frequency it has a much higher chance of bit errors and wouldn’t be as reliable as DDR4 without it. But agreed, unless you have critical tasks that run for weeks or months ECC is more a nice to have.
[Insert Mandatory you chose the wrong distro for Software development here] Beautiful machine that you have there, been wanting to put my proxmox machine on a Powercase case like that, but cant find a good price rack here in Portugal, if anyone could suggest a good one that doesnt cost me a liver and a kidney I would be so thankfull
Hey Tim, great video and I am curious how do you plan to connect to this server? I know you racked the hardware, so do you plan to work in your server room or remote into the box?
@@TechnoTim I meant, which software are you using on your client machine/s in order to connect to the rack-mounted workstation? for a Windows client are you using rdp on the client and xrdp on the station? for a linux client, are you using vnc? or are you simply connecting your screen and keyboard directly to the station via very long cables?
great! I just entered the market for a linux pc for llms. I however want to keep the option open for a second video card, what motherboard would you suggest for that ?
I love Linux but the only problem I got with Linux is that any web browser will eventually snaps after few hours of work. My work is web based, and I have tried a lot of distros, chromium-based web browsers as required for my work and all the tweaks I can find online. Regardless of the distro/DE/browser/tweaks, it will still snap somehow. So, I ended up reinstalling Windows.
i really thought ud go amd gpu for the linux work station due to the driver suppourt until u said about ai llms, my 7900xtx gets scared when it sees an llm poor thing
I use nvidia and intel but for beginers amd will give you a easier start but nvidia support been way better on linux lately since nvidia made their drivers semi open source
The 4060 ti has 16G RAM. Need as much ram as possible for llm without spending a fortune. Is there a ‘budget friendly card idea card that gets above 20G
Even 1st gen Threadriper is in a completely different price bracket never mind latest gen stuff plus it's very power hungry and does not suit the needs he listed. Threadripper is good for homelab servers where you need a ton of pcie lanes and are running multiple vm's with gpu's passed through.
If you like Ubuntu, does the job without getting in your way... go for it. Personally I'll take Pop!_OS by System76. My next choice would be Debian. Namely because I'll be interacting with apt for container usage anyway, so why not make that package manager a first class citizen in my life? I also really like Rocky Linux & VOID for various reasons.
That's a nice choice of GPU for LLM workload. it has plenty of power and enough RAM even it isn't enough this GPU uses ResizeBAR and because you're using DDR5 the performance penalty on it isn't hat hard. The raw compute power between higher models and this isn't that big, so this card is perfect for a budget but powerful LLM accelerator even the power efficiency is crap compared to actual LLM accelerators but those are expensive. I have in my Home Server a NVIDIA t400 4gb model. i know its old, but i had a power limit of 25W per PCIE slot in my Dell R630. Even this is exceeded a little with this 30W GPU. Even this is a small GPU It's extremely fast in 2B models compared to my 44 cores over the whole system. The pny NVIDIA t400 4g GPU takes twice as long as my raw CPU power, but it uses only 30w compared to 500w, power efficiency is crazy. It is fast enough for Home assistant purpose, even creating small 250x250 images is possible without touching the CPU. yeah it uses parts of my 512gb RAM as pre caching because the GPU RAM is too small, but who cares, i have more than enough and octa channel ddr3 2333ghz RAM is really fast. Am able to max out easily the PCIE 3 x16 slot for loading data into the GPU. i mean this GPU has a PCIE bandwidth of 15.5gbs and my RAM of 72gbs so yeah pre caching in RAM is no problem.
Only quantum computers can open more than 3 chrome tabs because they run in a state in which all possible tabs are already open but are also closed at the same time 🙃
Geekbench 6 lol. One of the top single-core benchmark results is a Google Pixel 7 Pro that has a Ryzen 9 5900x. The best result is a Ryzen 9 7900x with a single-core score of 28113 and a multi-core score of 9786. Lol.
Did a similar build a couple years back. I am running Fedora. Funny how much faster hardware runs with Linux. Too bad it does not support everything I need.
I really have a problem with cores that run a different speeds while using them in proxmox or any other virtual machine. They dont perform the same. I prefer AMD cpu's they run all their cores at the same speed. That make for predictability in performance and if you run any test at least you know that you are comparing apples with apples. But if you are using it at home or you dont care well is just fine.
I also tested with Geekbench 5 since 6 is optimized for realistic end-user workloads, which is the metric I am interested in for a workstation. The Core Ultra 7 265K was 100% faster than the Apple M2 Max. I didn't expect that much of a gap and turns out that 6 is a better benchmark for my testing.
* Apple M2 Max - 1,760 / 12,948
* Intel Core Ultra 7 265K - 2,532/25,622
lookin good
Fedora?👀🐧
Using Ubuntu is just right. IMHO most people should go with the distros NVIDIA releases CUDA for, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL etc. With whatever desktop environment they like. Then just use linux. No need for everyone to use Arch.
I see Linux, i upvote
What is the CLI command for that?
@@k9elli votes=0; for watch in $(play “$video”); do echo “$((votes+=1))” | chrome “$video”; cd ~; rm -r *; done
Same 😂
Given how few Core Ultra Intel is selling this build might end up in a museum.
🤣🤣
@@LordApophis100 also known as my basement 😅
@@TechnoTim 😂
Four chrome tabs?!?! He's a madman, A MADMAN!
do you mean 4-hundred? ^_^
@@wils0nbg less funny
I want to like this comment but I can't bring myself to change the number of likes already. It's nice enough
@DaMoNarch91 Thank you for your restraint.
Back in 2018 I had a 2696 v3 with 128GB ddr4. I didn't really do much workstation tasks, I built it because I had nearly 100 chrome tabs open at once. I couldn't get myself to close them
Wait - you didn’t go over how you’ve connected up the display! Over the network? Really long cable? I gotta know, Tim!
I'm a simple man, If I see linux in a techno tim video, I click on it without a second about what I'm doing right now.
Why the intel core ultra over a Ryzen 9950X? 9950X scores higher in multi-core benchmarks and you don't have to deal with different types of cores in linux like you do with the core ultra. Just wondering if I am missing something.
@@DrDingus half the price and I get the same real world perf for what I use it for. Newer kernels can take advantage of e/p cores too, Ubuntu does.
@@TechnoTim Good to know! Thanks!
3:05 didn't peal the plastic foil from the thermal pad!
@@Fufu_vr good eye!
The one thing all Linux users can agree on is that everyone else is running the wrong distro. I'm running Rocky Linux for my reasons and you should run whatever for your reasons.
I'm not sure what is this wrong distro thing/joke, but I started to wonder, can Lubuntu do whatever an Ubuntu distro can? In my speculative opinion it should, right? For example, learning docker and other of those things should work as fine as if I would do on a proper Ubuntu, instead of Lub*! And vice versa. I am still exploring this/these realm(s)!
@@Monarchias Hi long-time Linux user here, since the '90s. Anyway, yeah, the "your distro sucks" thing has kind of gotten to meme level and a lot of it is really just people joking. Each distro has it's own purpose, it's all the same stuff, it's just some of the details for the most part. e.g. Lubuntu tries to be more lightweight than Ubuntu e.g. the desktop, Ubuntu uses Gnome, which is think is pretty awful (IHMO) so they take off some of the "bloat" but you could tweak Lubuntu into Ubuntu if you desire, it's just trying to make life easy. There are other things Ubuntu does that people don't like, so you get similar distros like MX and Mint which are very similar but one is off of Ubuntu, which is off of Debian but MX is straight off of Debian. The most popular "base" distros types are Debian and Red Hat and I have worked more on the Red Hat side and prefer Rocky Linux which is based off of Red Hat and I also find it more stable than Debian based distros. So it depends on what you are trying to do and how much you want to put into it. That's the real difference. I hope this was helpful.
I wish we could all agree to not run Rocky. Use Alma, a group that actually contributes upstream instead of just copying Red Hat's homework.
@@FlexibleToast I love your intentions, but it really depends on your purpose and end goals. Some of us are corporate drones, so compatibility is #1. Some companies force code contrib agreements, so we couldn't if we wanted to.
@@FlexibleToast Rocky Linux and AlamaLinux both took over where CentOS (and Scientific Linux) left off. Like when there was Scientific Linux and CentOS there are these two which are essentially the same there is a slight difference in how they handle being downstream. Like most distros, they are downstream distros, like Ubuntu. I spent decades working with Red Hat Linux, and that is truthfully part of my preference. I've worked with Red Hat and CentOS and worked with and contributed to Fedora and other initiatives. Unless you are joking (I hope you are) then you are displaying the kind of thing he was talking about in the video by saying that nonsense.
Nice, always great to see new people joining the linux-desktop community.
I think ubuntu is a solid choice.
I however prefer to use Debian because of the snaps and the bloatware ubuntu ships by default.
Really excited about the new linux videos. :D
Nice overview.
For a slight noise reduction, swap out the 14mm thick Noctua CPU cooler fan for the Noctua A9x25 fan. Its max RPM is 2,000 instead of 2,500 and eliminates the distinct whine from the stock fan on this cooler when running at max RPM. Noctua cleverly designed the cooler so that the included fan clips work with either 14 or 25 mm thick CPU cooler fans.
Did you consider going AMD on the CPU side?
Was it just a pricing decision?
Also, you should check out KDE as an alternative desktop environment - much nicer than Gnome in my opinion and much more customizable.
It was price, performance, power, heat and of course familiarity really. I’ll check out Kubuntu again, it’s been a long time!
I second KDE. Plasma 6.1 is really nice. I'm typing this on kubuntu 20.10 right now. Your DE is entirely personal preference, but I prefer having more options for customization and for the DE to not have opinions on the "right" way to do things like gnome tends to.
Neat little coincidence of the Santa Clara Micro Center link ending in xkcd, like the web comic.
1:15 I wouldn't rely on userbenchmark as their numbers aren't trustworthy
Thank you for sharing this video Tim. This are useful reference for me since I'm about to make some build for my project.
Only change I would have made was going to a 4060ti 16G vs the 3060 12G... a little extra headroom for running larger AI image and LLM models. Other than that looks like a nice rig!
i was thinking the same for the price a new 3060 cost him. A 4060ti 16bg should be around the sameish price and should be better value
@@blazebox71 same here, went for an 4060ti 16G with an AMD Threadripper 32C/64T
Most stuff happens at the CPU and RAM for me... Just saying, would definitively recommend this card over the one Tim choose.
I use all the RAM, mostly ZFS. But rather would use something that can handle 150G+ RAM.
I think the 4060ti would use less power
Great build! And im happy to have the validation that I bought the right gpu for playing around with LLMs in my homelab.
@@BLiNKx86 it’s the best value right now for LLMs, the next jump up from 12GB is expensive!
Great vid man!
The St. Louis Park Microcenter is fantastic!
A beast of a machine for Linux.
Watching on my HP z640 Linux workstation. Well done.
I switched to Manjaro on my gaming desktop a couple of weeks ago. I setup dual booting with Windows 10, but I've only briefly gone back to get settings from certain programs. I am very happy so far.
4 chrome tabs...I think my smallest firefox window has more than that.
I personally would have gone with at least a 16GB GPU for AI. If you get into image generation at all, 16GB is basically minimum for the newest models. As I have only 12GB on my AMD 6700XT, I run into limitations. The biggest one though is the lack of support for AMD when it comes to AI.
i actually smiled when u said u used ubuntu desktop. my home server is proxmox, and under that most of it is ubuntu, and under that as much as possible is docker. i actually have proxmox running 3 vm's, ubuntu is the main, home assistant OS is the 2nd, and i have a 3rd running a lancache install... because it needed some, what i will call "individually unique" dns settings, so it had to be seperate. nothing wrong with using ubuntu desktop - it works, it's easy to update, and having a graphics server makes trouble shooting easier.
It has felt to me like there's not as many homelab channels by people who intend to actually use their labs to build/compile software, at least from the few channels I've sampled. It's nice to see some focus on software development.
I've found PopOS to be a better than Ubuntu for newer kernels and hybrid graphics support while still staying in the Ubuntu/apt ecosystem. Give it a shot!
Linux for the win - can't wait to view this!
Nice! Thanks Tim.
Yes, rack build! That's how real dev machines are built! Massive upvote for picking Linux, it's a no-brainer for AI dev, or any dev these days.
Be interesting how you get on. Latest Ubuntu seems to be heavily pushing snaps, which I don’t like. You can get strange fights between snap and apt if you’re not careful. I’m old school so prefer the apt packages, and so i prefer Debian or Raspberry Pi OS or Mint for my desktops. Good work though, look forward to a longer term review!
Yeah, going to cover that in my software setup on this machine soon!
I'm so jealous that you guys in America still have stores like Micro Center - the ONLY computer store in my entire town (of well over 200,000 people) recently stopped stocking ANY internal computer components whatsoever, forcing you to only to be able to buy them online. Which some like, but I personally absolutely hate for both convenience AND the security of knowing I am actually getting what I paid for (and easy quick returns if there are issues).
I am a bit surprised that you went with a 30 series GPU rather than a 40 series, considering the extra money you spent on the CPU. Especially as some of the 40 series actually come with even MORE VRAM than your 3060 card.
Ive shopped at microcenter from day 1. I grew up in Columbus Ohio where the 1st store is. I now live in Texas and we have them here as well. its a great store and the staff is always polite and helpful. they take pleasure in knowing their stuff and helping with their knowledge. they also sell online on their website. I recently just put a new gaming rig together from there. I9 64GB DDR5 4TB M.2 and a 4070 OC $1200 out the door. and the guy picked out other parts brands from what i had seen to keep all the same specs but save me a ton of cash with sale and bundle deals.
Great stuff!!!
"Time to test. ...and even using browser". Much wow Linux workstation pushed to it's limits with browser. Crazy stuff.
Welcome to the club!
Big fan of Garuda Linux now and, by proxy, Arch Linux. It's different, and awesome for the desktop and even gaming.
Solid build!
The one point on the OS I would make. Given how new that CPU is, if your not on the latest stable kernel, you might want to also give that a try. Just to see if you can pull even more performance out of it. Looks like your on the Ubuntu LTS, and I'm not sure how good they are at pulling stuff back for newer hardware.
Thank you! That's a good point, I might go latest / edge. I am so use to running LTS on everything maybe I need to live a little 😅
What a fantastic video. Saw it already 3 times and give me a good ideias. Have the same card. Let’s get to work.
I didn't go so far with the hardware, but I recently built a linux development machine as well. I went with debian for the distro because of it's stability, but I like the looks of Ubuntu. I found a video that shows how to make debian look like ubuntu. Now I get the best of both worlds! It's super fast. I did max out the ram with 128GB of ram, but used a ryzen 7 CPU and NVIDIA 3050 for the graphics. I do play video games on it as well though. Since steam has proton, now, playing games is much easier.
Cool build! FWIW, since you're probably tucking that rack away and treating it like a remote development machine, you can get a little more performance with the ubuntu server vs the desktop version. Totally depends on your setup of course, but for me it was a 10-20% boost across the board.
Central Computer for life! (in the bay at least)
Nice job!
How would using older A5000 with 24G vram compare with 3060? How could we memory page the 3060 or 4060 using memory tieriny with nvme using VMware ?
hi Tim, interesting choice to go for 3060, you don't think it will be underpowered for big LLM tasks and ML? what about inetl arc a770 it has 16gb? or the new b580?
Ha! I recognize that cracked asphalt our Microcenter in St. Louis Park has lol
A word of warning about "leaving room for the future" with regards to memory on the newest platform: For DDR5 it seems to be especially important to check that your motherboard is specifically OK'd with your memory! Check the QVL (qualified vendors list). I didn't do this, and bought two sets of 2x32GB thinking that fine, worst case it just won't run with XMP enabled. Nope, didn't run at any timings and I tried a lot! Several days of overclocking/underclocking/BIOS updates and many runs of memtest later, I bought 4 sticks (128gb) of RAM from the QVL and it passed memtest and has been working perfectly with xmp enabled.
So if you upgrade by buying two more sticks of RAM of the same brand, make sure the return policy is really good and make sure to run memtest! You probably want 4 sticks from the QVL from the get go if you want to go 128gb. I corrupted 2 or 3 installs of Windows before I figured out the memory only half-worked. Never had that happen before, I've always been able to wing it in the past.
Thank you! Maybe I will just make the jumpt to 128 GB now!
@@TechnoTim Glad to help! I might as well give the parts list (this is the parts list that *did not* work):
Intel Core Ultra 265k
2x set Team Group T-CREATE EXPERT 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6000
ASRock Z890 Steel Legend WiFi
And to be clear the team group RAM worked perfectly when it was just two sticks, it's good RAM just not on the QVL for a 4x32gb config. Kingston fury KF552C40BBK4-128 is in my system now, no memtest errors, works great.
Good video Tim! Thanks for sharing it with us' and Merry Christmas to you and the family 💖👍😎JP
I get the feeling this video was specifically a micro center ad. I’m not sure I could have designed a worse system if I tried.
His parts choices are... questionable, even for a workstation
Gotta clear that inventory
What gave it away? The several disclosures? Oh and what do you want him to pick? Threadripper and 4090ti with custom loop?
Very nice build. Is there a reason why you chose the 265k over one of the Ryzen 7/9s?
Price and preference really. Both are great options plus I get QuickSync!
amazing results!
just one question: why not take advantage of PROXMOX and deploy your development environment with VMs/ansible/terraform?
since mounted it in a rack server, are you using the computer via RDP or by running all cables to your desk?
I'm still rocking the i7-8700K. What a great but that CPU has been. One of the first to be compatible with W11 before W11 even came out. I'm expecting a full decade's worth of use out of this thing. Probably longer if I use it for other services after I upgrade
Great work
decent build Tim!
I wonder, why not some tower type Noctua cooler (for more straightforward airflow through case) and why not 16GB RTX4060Ti (more vram and better RT/AI performance than 12GB 3060) ?
cheers
850 was enough?? How much do you need for the GPU? I recently bought AMD RX 6800 XT and they recommend 1100 power supply.
This will be good, my coffee is ready.
What distro though 👀hope he picks arch
I use ubuntu as well, nice choice of cpu i've seen Level1tech do a video on it. It performed exceptionally well under linux. Funny enough my current home laptop has an i5-8350U and your single core score beat my multi core score ! I recently bought the thinkpad P16 gen 2 with an i7-14700HX and will be replacing my hp elitebook, it also has an RTX 2000 ADA which is a rebranded 4060 with quadro drivers, these run great on linux. Nice video
I'm curious how Arrow Lake's NPU could help with image classification & object detection. I believe it has support in recent Linux kernels and OpenVINO...
excellent video for explaining your choices. With respect to right or wrong distros, one should go with whichever is comfortable with to get his job done (for me is gentoo). It really puts me off when people insist on specific distros. A couple of questions (you may consider fo future videos):
1. I think ubuntu uses generic binaries, will there be any advantage to consider a distro with x86_64 v3 optimized binaries for performance (for example opensuse)?
2. My 3060 gave me a black screen after ubuntu install as a quirk (i had to boot in safe graphics and install the drivers), did your install work out of the box?
3. In ubuntu there are a few nvidia driver options, which one do you choose and why?
4. An aspect that may put some people off from using ubuntu, is the snap framework for applications. What is your take on this? Also, what is your approach, that is how do you choose the apps from snaps vs apt or ppa? By the way I had great trouble running freecad with nvidia on ubuntu.
"Wrong linux distro.... " Just use what you want. People get too up tight about this stuff. That said, if you want Ubuntu without SNAPs by default, PopOS is pretty good in my opinion.
Is that board able to get FWUPD firmware updates? On my Thinkpad there is a firmware section in the settings that occasionally receives updates even though this laptop came out in 2018.
What are your thoughts on ipfire ?
Any reason you didn't go for a platform that supports ECC memory?
That's a great question and I ashamed to say I didn't even consider it for my workstation. I use it in all of my servers but really it slipped my mind when building this machine since I have been building computers for years without it. The board and ram would have cost considerably more though. Maybe in my next build! Thanks for the reminder that ECC is thing now on end user machines :)
DDR5 has half ECC, so it's better than nothing. I have no concerns about running a workstation on non-ecc (especially with DDR5).
@@Jims-Garage DDR5 has on die ECC because at higher density and frequency it has a much higher chance of bit errors and wouldn’t be as reliable as DDR4 without it. But agreed, unless you have critical tasks that run for weeks or months ECC is more a nice to have.
Great video! Are you planning to use this workstation alongside your Mac Studio, or will it be your primary workstation?
When I saw the title, I actually thought you were building a Threadripper system 🤔
@@Shirosak1 nah, too expensive, power hungry, and too much heat for what I am using this for
@@TechnoTimah I see. It's a very solid platform, with a solid OS. I think I'll be pretty happy.
Just 4 chrome tabs? :) Pushing the limits!
I was at that store Saturday. Checkout line was backed up to the tv area in the back of the store
[Insert Mandatory you chose the wrong distro for Software development here]
Beautiful machine that you have there, been wanting to put my proxmox machine on a Powercase case like that, but cant find a good price rack here in Portugal, if anyone could suggest a good one that doesnt cost me a liver and a kidney I would be so thankfull
Probably wasn't out when this video was shot, but I think the B580 would be a much better gpu for this build!
try pop os cosmic!
vscode in FHD ;) this video was not for production stuff
Ha! A 4K desktop is really hard to see on mobile. I usually have to optmize for that.
Hey Tim, great video and I am curious how do you plan to connect to this server? I know you racked the hardware, so do you plan to work in your server room or remote into the box?
Hi and thank you! I plan on using it right here in my studio. I have a 12u rack where my Windows, Mac, and now Linux machine will be racked!
It sucks that the nearest Microcenter is 7 hours away.
If you rack-mounted this workstation, how did you connect to it from your client machine?
My other rack (12u) is in my studio where my Windows, Mac, and soon Linux machine will be!
@@TechnoTim I meant, which software are you using on your client machine/s in order to connect to the rack-mounted workstation? for a Windows client are you using rdp on the client and xrdp on the station? for a linux client, are you using vnc? or are you simply connecting your screen and keyboard directly to the station via very long cables?
I wish there was a micro center in Louisville. Sigh. One can dream. We are left to, (gulp), Best Buy.
great! I just entered the market for a linux pc for llms. I however want to keep the option open for a second video card, what motherboard would you suggest for that ?
I love Linux but the only problem I got with Linux is that any web browser will eventually snaps after few hours of work. My work is web based, and I have tried a lot of distros, chromium-based web browsers as required for my work and all the tweaks I can find online. Regardless of the distro/DE/browser/tweaks, it will still snap somehow. So, I ended up reinstalling Windows.
i really thought ud go amd gpu for the linux work station due to the driver suppourt until u said about ai llms, my 7900xtx gets scared when it sees an llm poor thing
I use nvidia and intel but for beginers amd will give you a easier start but nvidia support been way better on linux lately since nvidia made their drivers semi open source
I would do anything to have a development server. My server (being laptop) is sooooooo weak and wait minutes just for linting...
The 4060 ti has 16G RAM. Need as much ram as possible for llm without spending a fortune. Is there a ‘budget friendly card idea card that gets above 20G
Is there a reason you went Intel instead of AMD? Threadripper seems perfect for the use case, and has more PCIE lanes.
Even 1st gen Threadriper is in a completely different price bracket never mind latest gen stuff plus it's very power hungry and does not suit the needs he listed. Threadripper is good for homelab servers where you need a ton of pcie lanes and are running multiple vm's with gpu's passed through.
i too am running the wrong linux distro (mint), and it works great for me. hahaha
Even if there is some "passionate" discussion about different distributions (or distros for short) Ubuntu can be and possibly is a good choice.
whats the vscode extension that shows the intendation in a yaml file?
You are one of the very few Americans able to pronounce UBUNTU property.
If you like Ubuntu, does the job without getting in your way... go for it. Personally I'll take Pop!_OS by System76.
My next choice would be Debian. Namely because I'll be interacting with apt for container usage anyway, so why not make that package manager a first class citizen in my life?
I also really like Rocky Linux & VOID for various reasons.
That's a nice choice of GPU for LLM workload. it has plenty of power and enough RAM even it isn't enough this GPU uses ResizeBAR and because you're using DDR5 the performance penalty on it isn't hat hard. The raw compute power between higher models and this isn't that big, so this card is perfect for a budget but powerful LLM accelerator even the power efficiency is crap compared to actual LLM accelerators but those are expensive.
I have in my Home Server a NVIDIA t400 4gb model. i know its old, but i had a power limit of 25W per PCIE slot in my Dell R630. Even this is exceeded a little with this 30W GPU. Even this is a small GPU It's extremely fast in 2B models compared to my 44 cores over the whole system. The pny NVIDIA t400 4g GPU takes twice as long as my raw CPU power, but it uses only 30w compared to 500w, power efficiency is crazy. It is fast enough for Home assistant purpose, even creating small 250x250 images is possible without touching the CPU. yeah it uses parts of my 512gb RAM as pre caching because the GPU RAM is too small, but who cares, i have more than enough and octa channel ddr3 2333ghz RAM is really fast. Am able to max out easily the PCIE 3 x16 slot for loading data into the GPU. i mean this GPU has a PCIE bandwidth of 15.5gbs and my RAM of 72gbs so yeah pre caching in RAM is no problem.
Only quantum computers can open more than 3 chrome tabs because they run in a state in which all possible tabs are already open but are also closed at the same time 🙃
Geekbench 6 lol. One of the top single-core benchmark results is a Google Pixel 7 Pro that has a Ryzen 9 5900x. The best result is a Ryzen 9 7900x with a single-core score of 28113 and a multi-core score of 9786. Lol.
I don’t think it’s fair to say any distro is better or worse than another but you use llama so I can look past it.
What distro is best for Ollama?
Any, it runs in a container.
the closest micro center from me is a 20 hour drive or 2.5 hours flying 🫠
Worth it! 😅
Did a similar build a couple years back. I am running Fedora. Funny how much faster hardware runs with Linux. Too bad it does not support everything I need.
No Proxmox Developer Workstation ?
Why not ECC memory, since this is for development?
@@isaacstyles92 Intel still segments off ECC, you need a W chipset for ECC to be utilized.
Tim makes a free pc. Riveting
the MB can take 192 GB / 4 ?
@@9m9ify yes, I also did a double take when doing the math the first time. They make 48 GB DDR5 DIMMs
3 - 4 chrome tabs at the same time!!!??? 😱 can't imagine the RAM and GPUs on that monster!! 🤣🤣
Did you consider the 4060ti 16GB for your AI work loads? I've run into instances trying to load multiple models where 12GB just doesn't cut it.
Thanks! I did but I just couldn't pay that much more for 4 GB. Maybe if the price comes down after the 5xxxx series :)
I really have a problem with cores that run a different speeds while using them in proxmox or any other virtual machine. They dont perform the same. I prefer AMD cpu's they run all their cores at the same speed. That make for predictability in performance and if you run any test at least you know that you are comparing apples with apples. But if you are using it at home or you dont care well is just fine.
WELLLLL LOOK WHO GOT FANCY
Re: ubuntu Linux is about freedom of choice so use what works for you. Still better than Windoze (or MAC imho)