I bought a refurbished dall latitude 7490 for like 270$. For the price it’s a powerful machine, 16gb ram and i7 processor. Installed fedora on it and I’m in love with it. For the price it puts out the power I need for software development.
You didn’t say what CPU you are choosing. 5500X3D and 5700X3D are literally around the corner. But for gaming the 5800X3D would be best in slot for AM4.
You also didn’t say If you live near a Microcenter:
I am very happy with it. I did switch from Kubuntu to Manjaro KDE, but that was not because of the GPU. The only thing that bothers me is that the fans can be noisy during some games at high load. But during everyday desktop use the fans are idle since its passive cooling capabilities are good (I have one from Powercolor, so any other brand may be different on this point). For me, the temp stays at <40°C for normal desktop use. I haven’t seen it go over 83 during gaming. You can adjust the fan curve with Corectl and even overclock it (I haven’t) if you want; but everything else just works without additional drivers/software. Now, I don’t play heavy fps games, but the games I do play are lag/stutter free. My most taxing game atm is Cities Skylines 2 and I get a solid 60fps with that and my heavily modded Minecraft runs smooth as butter. All in all, I think the card gives excellent value for money.
Awesome,that is great to hear. I was looking at the Sapphire version of that card but Powercolor also came up.
My current card is about 12 years old so anything would be an improvement at this point!
Not an issue. I did the same thing a while ago, switched from nvidea to amd. After i confirmed the radeon was working fine i purged all the nvidea stuff
I just upgraded from a 1080ti to a 7900xt last month and I just plugged it in and it worked. Then I uninstalled the Nvidia binary drivers and libraries.
Can confirm, I use an old HP elitebook from work. Battery life is great, beats my wives new lenovo. More than powerful enough to browse the web and play in the terminal. Also only gets hot if I run a game on it; I wouldnt advise that though.
A heads up if you have a G-Sync monitor from that same era: it may not do variable rate with Freesync. I was ready to pull the trigger and upgrade my 1080 Ti to an AMD card when I caught that detail. So now I need to justify the cost of a new main monitor as well if I want to have smooth variable refresh. Good luck!
My Gigabyte…what’s this thing’s model number? M34WQ is AMD Freesync compatible but not Nvidia G-Sync. Wait, do either of those two technologies work with Linux?
As others have mentioned, secondhand laptops and surplus business laptops are very affordable and probably better value for the money than a chromebook. My understanding is that drivers for things like fingerprint sensors, SD card readers, or oddball Wi-Fi chipsets can be issues to watch out for. But personally I don’t care about the fingerprint sensor and only the Wi-Fi would be a major issue to me.
A couple years ago now I picked up a used Acer Swift with 8th gen intel and a dent in the back lid for something like $200 to use as my “throw in a backpack for travel” laptop, and it has been working great. In retrospect, I would have looked for something with 16GB of RAM or upgradeable RAM (8GB soldered to the motherboard, ugh), but aside from that minor gripe it has been a good experience.
Aside from removing /etc/X11/xorg.conf because I had generated one via Nvidia’s XServer settings - nope! The custom config there did prevent X from loading properly, switched to a tty to delete the config, restarted, and was perfectly fine afterwards.
Yes. X11 these days usually auto-configures on its own (to my understanding, at least) - when you generate one with Nvidia’s settings it will add some stuff that is specific to the Nvidia driver, and thus once the card/drivers isn’t present, then X11 can’t start.
I had removed the drivers before swapping out the card in preparation, so I’m not 100% sure if said proprietary extensions doesn’t load because of the lack of drivers, or the lack of the card itself - probably both to be honest.
But either way, X11 wasn’t affected by the removal of the custom config, and there wasn’t ever one present until I made one via nvidia-settings (other than, it started working of course).
Also, unless you’re very dependant on some specific X11 apps, you don’t need Xorg any more so I reckon you should switch to Wayland for a better experience (smoother, no screen tearing, high refresh rates, better multi-screen / multi-DPI handling etc).
When you say “couch” my first thought is a recent-ish Celeron or Pentium Silver fanless laptop. Performance akin to a Core 2 Duo but no fan to get blocked sitting on the couch. Like the Latitude 3210(?)
Laptops that appeal to me are often bottom breathers so it’s one thing I miss from my old MB Air.
Others have said this, but just adding to the pile: I had a system running Pop and a GTX 970. I removed the 970 and installed an RX 6600 XT and had absolutely no issues (and it was the nvidia version of Pop – I simply removed the nvidia shit at a later time).
The ultimate couch laptop will be an M1 MacBook Air as it has no fans and a suped up phone chip so it doesn’t heat. It also has amazing battery life… But it’s still pretty expensive and it cannot be repaired. Otherwise old MacBooks should be pretty good because most of the Intel models used relatively low end chips because their thermal design was so limited
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