Solved Building new desktop PC with perfect FreeBSD compatibility

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bsdcode

Hi FreeBSD community,

I'm in the process of selecting the components for a new desktop PC. FreeBSD is my preferred OS, hence I want to select the components with perfect compatibility. So let me show you the components I have chosen so far and I would really appreciate receiving comments and feedback about their compatibility with FreeBSD:

[FONT=Courier New]MOBO: MSI Intel Z370 GAMING PRO CARBON
CPU: Intel Core i7 8086K
RAM: 64GB Corsair (haven't decided on exact model yet. Is there a thing such enough RAM? I don't think so...)
VGA: 11GB MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming
SSD: 500GB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 3.0
HDD: 4000GB WD Blue WD40EZRZ
DVD: LG Electronics GH24NSD1 (for the very rare cases I want to read some old files from old backup CDs/DVDs)
PSU: 650W be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 Modular 80+ Platinum
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock 4[/FONT]

Best regards,
steps
 
In all honestly, you probably want to go at least one generation older in terms of compatibility as bleeding edge might have some driver/compatibility issues.
You might want to consider ECC memory instead of Non-ECC (will require another CPU and Motherboard)
In general as far as I know Intel Graphics have the best support but newer generations doesn't have driver support yet....
The video card is most likely way overkill for FreeBSD unless you want to use CUDA for something which I don't think works on FreeBSD
WD Blue is probably fine, I'd personally go for a Toshiba HDD instead as they provide correct SMART data and doesn't have (at least reported) TLER issues.
 
steps said:
CPU Cooler: be quiet!
Click to expand...
Well if you want cool start with a T- suffix chip. The K is for overclocking.
Quite the opposite of quiet unless you use liquid cooling. I never cared for electricity and fluids for silly safety reasons..
I understand the nostalgia of the 8086K CPU. I am a closet underclocker.

diizzy said:
In all honestly, you probably want to go at least one generation older in terms of compatibility as bleeding edge might have some driver/compatibility issues.
Click to expand...
I agree with this. It becomes particularly acute if you plan a FreeBSD desktop.

diizzy said:
The video card is most likely way overkill for FreeBSD
Click to expand...
Exactly. Do not even buy a video card. Use the onboard graphics. If later you find you need more, then buy something.
This comes back to using a CPU with supported Intel graphics for FreeBSD.
I am not sure where exactly the new Intel drm video driver reaches. I know Haswell and up. Up to what CPU I have not looked at.
 
Thanks for your advices diizzy and Phishfry. I'll definitely look into choosing a different HDD vendor. I wasn't aware of the issues with WD HDDs.

I'm actually planing to use this PC for gaming too. So a potent video card is a must. I know that FreeBSD might not be the best OS for gaming, but I have no problem with dualbooting Linux to get my gaming fix. But the serious work should definitely happen on FreeBSD.

I'll follow your advice and will choose the parts from an older generation for better compatibility.
 
As far as gaming goes, if you're running dosbox or wine, stick with Linux. I expected for FreeBSD to run Windoze programs faster, but this was not the case. Dunno why; OpenOffice and Firefox run faster on my BSD box.

Don't forget to keep your network card chipset under consideration. FreeBSD and Broadcom don't mesh well together.
 
Wine is almost as good as on Linux, with the exception of recent esync patches and maybe gamepad support. Stability is slightly lower as a function of fewer bug reports being submitted upstream.
 
Thanks for your comments Hawk and shkhln. The LAN on the motherboard is from Intel, so no problems. I don't use WLAN on the desktop.

I made some new decisions: instead of the WD HDD and regarding diizzys comment I'm now going for a 2000GB Toshiba P300 as harddrive. And a 250GB Samsung 970 Evo is probably enough. The 1080 Ti is most likely really overkill for my needs, so I decided on the 1080. It doesn't cost that much more than the 1070 or 1070 Ti, but saves a lot of money in comparison to the 1080 Ti. That savings are better spend on a good monitor. 64GB RAM are way more than enought for me, so I'll go with 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX.
 
It happened, my new desktop PC is here and I'm writing this from FreeBSD 11.2.
Everything works great so far, with a few hiccups regarding suspend under nvidia driver and playing music CDs. For that I'll open other threads.
Thanks for your suggestions and comments.
 
Indeed, it's just awesome :)
And this machine is quiet, really quiet. Unfortunately life got in the way and until now I didn't have the time to actually test the machine under heavy load. But compare that to my previous desktop PC: even when idling it was so loud that one would think that it'll take off to the moon any moment.

I'm very satisfied with my purchase and FreeBSD runs almost flawlessly on this machine.
 
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