Building a new GNU/Linux PC with Core i3 6100 and Samsung SSD
Building a new GNU/Linux PC with Core i3 6100 and Samsung SSD
3rd April, 2016
I have two PC's (one at home, one at the office) on which I do all my work - old AMD Athlon/Sempron systems with 2gb of RAM. They are still going good, and I have no plans to retire them. Unfortunately, these systems have started to show their age when it comes to audio/video processing. I needed a more powerful system, and as an AMD enthusiast, my first look was at the AMD FX six/eight core CPU's.
A bit of research on the net was enough to show that AMD has fallen behind Intel considerably (maybe they will make a comeback with Zen). The best bang-for-the-buck processor out there in the market these days is the Skylake Core i3 6100 available for less than Rs.10k from Amazon.
I ended up with the following:
- Core i3 6100
- Gigabyte GA-B150M-D3H Motherboard
- Kingston 8GB DDR4 2133MHz
- Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SATA SSD
- Corsair VS550 SMPS (450w would have been more than enough)
- Cooler Master Force 500 cabinet
Spent some time day before yesterday putting all the stuff together.
The most recent versions of the Linux kernel seem to have no problems with Skylake processors. I am running Xubuntu 16.04 (64 bit) beta 2 without any issues.
SSD's are magical: Xubuntu installation was over in 3-4 minutes! New system boots in 10-12 seconds! Firefox/Chrome/Libreoffice (and all other memory hogs) start up almost instantaneously on mouse click.
System runs very cool - CPU temperature was around 41-42 degree celsius with the stock cooler.