Written up for the nerds who care.

I recently replaced my old mac-mini with a desktop.

Despite being a computer science PhD (and a processor design one at that) I’ve been using laptops since I arrived at Uni and I feel like I have very little clue about which processor and so on to choose.

In the end I used PC specialist which have a nice interface which says things like “The motherboard you choose doesn’t work with the processor you choose, are you sure?” and thus saved me lots of money and heartache (they also have a nice (and presumably profitable) feature that will recommend you upgrades)

The system I ended up with is this one:

Component Specification
Case PCS PRISM TG BLACK ARGB MID TOWER CASE
Processor (CPU) AMD Ryzen 3 4100 Quad Core CPU (3.8GHz-4.0GHz/6MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard ASUS® TUF GAMING B550-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.2, 6Gb/s) - ARGB Ready!
Memory (RAM) 8GB PCS PRO DDR4 3200MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card 8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3050 - HDMI, DP, LHR
Graphics Card Support Bracket NONE (BRACKET INCLUDED AS STANDARD ON 4070 Ti AND ABOVE)
1st M.2 SSD Drive 512GB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (3300 MB/R, 2200 MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply CORSAIR 550W CV SERIES™ CV-550 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable 1 x 1.5 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling STANDARD AMD CPU COOLER
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Card 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT
Wireless Network Card WIRELESS 802

To make matters more complex I, who have been using OSX for the best part of 20 years, took the opportunity to move over to Ubuntu - this was much easier than I expected - I’ve been heading in that direction for years and I’m starting to know my way around the terminal. To make matters even more complex I’m running i3 on top of ubuntu. I absolutely love it.

My vim setup can be seen in this github repo and my i3 setup can be seen in this one.

Everything is lovely and fast (I had to boot up the old machine for something recently and it was painful ) and I’m enjoying it very much.

Update - I bought myself an extra harddrive for photography reasons and while I was ordering I picked up some extra RAM.