TL;DR Looking to build a tower. Starting as a web dev machine but then home cinema and then maybe gaming rig that works well with Linux.

Firstly really it will be a web dev machine as that is my day job, but later I'd like to

- home entertainment theatre
- probably gaming
- possibly comp sci stuff

Initial budget is somewhere at £800, I think I have a 500 watt psu already, i do kind of want to build my own case to save money, but might be an intense challenge.

So don't know whether to buy a low budget gfx card at first, or whether the on board gfx of a good motherboard will be good enough.

Definitely AMD / ATI as Linux (screw you Nvidia).

I'm thinking ATX form factor, annoyingly I have a micro-atx case but that make it difficult to upgrade so much.

I'm pretty clueless really, I just want something that will run seamless with Linux.

Thanks for any help ranters.

!rant/story:

Aaayoo issya boi the OG rapper straight outta Compton, wassup?!

Nah, for real, though.: How are y'all doing? It has been a long time. I hope y'all are having a great time (can sense some peoples' incoming negative comments due to corona).

I built my completely new first gaming rig like a few weeks ago after my school laptop stopped showing any signals.

The specifications are the following.:
- Mobo: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (no iGPU)
- dGPU: KFA2 RTX 2070 SUPER OC
- 2nd dGPU: GTX 550 TI (this one gets a new rant/post)
- RAM: 2x G.SKILL Ripjaws V 8 GB 3600 MHz
- PSU: Be quiet 650 W (It was the platinum edition afaik. I originally bought the 600 Watt Gold edition, but somehow they sent me the 650 Watt for no additional charge... which is great for me haha)
- HDD: 2x 4TB NAS HDD in RAID1 configuration (to load all of my games around 2 TB right now. Got the two HDDs for 110 Euro including the SATA Data cables)
- SSD: One Intenso 240 GB SSD and a reused Samsung 256 GB SSD from my old broken Lenovo laptop
- Case: Be quiet Pure Base 500 black with a glass panel on the side

While building my first PC, it was one hell of a challenge. I knew how it all was working in theory, but to put it all together, practically, was a bit of a challenge, but it was a nice challenge. I learned a lot and have a performance gain I could only ever dream of.

I used to play my games first on a Toshiba satellite l750d laptop (around 40 fps in cs:go with the lowest gfx settings) and then on a Lenovo e51-80 laptop (around 30 fps max minecraft with no shaders and texture packs).

Now I play cs:go on Kubuntu with 400 fps at peak with ultra high graphics. It is unbelievable.

I couldn't trust the system when I turned on the fps display the first time I saw it.

I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!

Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.

The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.

I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.

My first exposure to computers was when I was about 5 at least that's what I remember. My dad and his friend built custom rigs for people in their spare time back then (late 90s) I remember playing some racing game. Other than that o eventual got one of their old computers and used it for a really long time, replacing it with a gateway until high school then hitting PC gaming and programming I built my first custom rig with my dad.