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Jamin@lemmy.world

GPUs (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by aaa999@lemmy.world to c/minipcs@lemmy.world

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I have a laptop nearing the end of its life with (what I thought was) a good cpu/ram and an integrated graphics card. It was fine at running a DAW but it couldn't run 10 year old games at a non fucky framerate. I would include its details but I didn't memorize them and don't have access to it right now.

I'm looking at replacing it with a minipc because laptops are getting more user hostile but I like the idea of having something I can move around occasionally. So I look on the reddit spreadsheet, and I'm struggling because there often seems to be a gap between the listed specs on the spreadsheet and the actual thing itself (ie "this thing has this gpu" vs "this thing has a slot for you to install a gpu").

I absolutely need something that will run Reaper or an equivalent well with a billion tracks and add ons at the same time. I would very much like to run ten year old games reliably at a good framerate. And if possible I'd like to badly run a local ai which I understand basically requires a decent standalone gpu, but it isn't that important because they're a dumb toy that has no actual use. Is there a minipc that I can buy prebuilt that does that, and if not how close can I get? I don't know enough about hardware to answer my own question with the spreadsheet sorry.

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[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Dang. I know nothing about Reaper, but I got one of these about a year ago with a Ryzen 7 in it; they're no longer available, but it was so cheap I swapped out the RAM and maxed it out at 64Gb, because that was fairly cheap, too. I think, all in, I spent maybe $500 on it, with the extra RAM? $390 for the computer, another hundred-ish for the 64GB 3200 MHz DDR4 SO-DIMMs.

With this AMD, RAM is shared between the GPU and the CPU; the CPU has 16 cores. The only game I've run has been Factorio, and even in demanding scenarios I haven't had a stutter. I'm happy to run a benchmark, but I suspect Toms would have better information.

This thing blows my 6y/o XPS (Intel) out of the water on all other benchmarks - mostly compile times, and I've been quite happy with these AMD Ryzen chips. I think they're supposed to be laptop ICs? I don't really follow the CPU/GPU space anymore. But it's connected to three monitors running at 1080p each, and it seems up to whatever task I throw at it.

Arch went on no problem, and everything worked.

Wish I could help on the Reaper part. But I really do like these Trigkeys - easy to get into and replace memory and M.2 NVMe port accessible immediately under the backplate. If I were to need another, I'd look for whatever the latest AMD version of this Trigkey is selling.

I think an almost identical product, differing only by case color AFAICT, is sold under a different brand name.

Oh! I just found out you can get the one I bought for $260. Their top line is currently a Ryzen 7 7840HS at just under $500 - and, yeah, mine's a 5800H. I have no idea what any of these designations mean, but one has the bigger GBs so it must be better, right?

Edit: found a direct comparison.