That ATX board would be great. The mATX B650M PG is also better than the previous one, it is good enough. If you can find the B650M-HDV/M.2 in stock that is even better if you don’t need 3 m.2 slots.

That monitor was indeed a lucky deal. It looks to be a good combination for this setup.

The draft is pretty good. Only a few points to consider changing:

• That is an entry level Motherboard which may limit your upgrades in the future. It overheats with a 16 core ryzen 9.
• The ram size is good, but the speed and latencies are just as important nowadays. A 6000 MT/s CL30 Expo ram could improve CPU performance, but it’s a kind of OC so not every combination is fully stable at the highest speeds.
• Especially with competitive and indie games it’s easy to run them at high FPS. I would consider getting a 1440p high refresh rate (144+ Hz) monitor if you don’t have one already. It’s a huge upgrade coming from 1080p60Hz.

The mobile and TV clients are often limited to the codecs with hardware acceleration. Or just selecting a lower bitrate on the client will cause transcoding.

if the integrated one is good enough for gaming

No, the iGPU is only meant for testing and basic desktop usage like video playback on the 7000 series. There are 8000G series with better integrated graphics but even those are much weaker than any dedicated GPU.

If you are looking to reduce the build’s cost consider a cheaper motherboard or a used GPU. The Asrock B650M-HDV/M.2 is the lowest you should go if it has all the connectors you need. As for buying used video card it’s always a bit of risk, but as the most expensive component you could save the most on that. Since all AM5 CPUs have an integrated GPU you could build without the dedicated GPU first.

There is an even more relevant video of using external storage trough USB. He recommends using software raid:

Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs?

Are both drives fully encrypted with LUKS? Is trim enabled in both crypttab and fstab?

Thanks for the links! I updated my config from z3fold to zsmalloc and adjusted the vm.page-cluster to test these out.

Reading a bit more, I think when using large max_pool_percent (>30) with Zswap the two solutions are more similar than not. A crucial difference is what use-case is more acceptable since Zswap can cause unresponsiveness (and potential lockup) under high memory pressure. While Zram could result in an OOM crash in a similar worst-case scenario.

It is possible, it’s just not generally supported be ISP routers. Also there is a possibility of performance issues since IPv4 NAT often relies on hardware acceleration which might not work for NAT6.

Even tough IPv6 is technically superior to IPv4 for the network operator it doesn’t have clear benefits for home users.

Having global addresses instead of NAT means less control over your LAN and these unique public addresses can track users more accurately.

Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set.

And enable/automate maintenance services for BTRFS. For example: balace should be run on heavily used system disks or scrub could help detect errors even on single disks.

ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).

Could you explain the preference of ZRAM over ZSWAP? I thought the latter was the more advanced and better performing solution. Is there some magic in Pop’s config?

Happy to help! Tough you are right, this is a rather generic error that doesn’t help much just confirms that the GPU is the issue.

At this point it could be a driver issue since there are similar open bug reports. A hardware problem is still possible since you previously said that it’s unstable on windows too, and power related issues can also lead to this error message.

Most distros use systemd and its logging solution: journald. You can use journalctl to read the logs around the time of the crash for e.g.:

• journalctl -S -5m this shows the last 5 minutes. Use this when a game crashes but the system continues working and did not reboot.
• journalctl -b -1 -S -10m this shows the last 10 minutes from the previous boot. Use this if the crash froze the whole system and rebooted.

Look for red lines (errors) and what wrote them. AMD GPU faults usually have the ‘amdgpu’ mentioned, memory errors could appear as ‘protection fault’.

Did you check the system logs to see what caused it?

Many things can result in seemingliy random crashes. Any overclock (including XMP and Expo) or undervolt or even a bios version can be problematic.

I would check first if it’s stable on windows.

For the storage you have an additional option: converting a PCIe slot to M.2 Nvme is possible with a passive addin card. This way you could keep the current OS drive and add a 2TB m.2 instead of a SATA one. Since M.2s are quite cheap I went this route last year. Just be warned that secondary x16 slots are slower: it looks like 2.0 x4 for the b450-a pro max.

What filesystem are you using? Is it encrypted?

Could you run a benchmark to verify if reads and writes are both affected? KDiskMark is like crystaldiskmark or Gnome Disks has a built in benchmark.

Do I need to disable compression on my swap subvolume?

Short: No

Long: it doesn’t matter when mounting multiple subvolumes of the same btrfs partition the options from the first one (usually /) will apply to all. So even if you disable it, that will be ignored.

The old way of creating swap shows the chattr +C line which disables CoW. The same method should work for your Downloads folder since CoW is needed for snapshotting.

You’re right, I linked an old article and it should have been fixed, but there are newer reports of remaining issues. But even this should be fixed in your kernel version already so it was probably a bad guess.

There were issues with TPM so that might affect the older bios versions. You could try disabling it.

No, there isn’t any more risk buying a mining card than any other used card. In both cases you should use a platform/marketplace with buyer protection options. Maybe one additional step is checking the VBIOS when testing.

The non XT is the best value of the 6600 family but depending on local pricing the 6600XT, 6650XT and even the 7600 could make sense. Just keep in mind that these are the same performance class. Some charts show the mentioned GPUs.