Build a power efficent and silent desktopsystem for Qubes-OS
bored lord
i sitting here next to a Desktop PC which is almost as loud as a freaking datacenter. Due to my old gaming habbits its not supposed to be silent, nor energyefficent.
I am in love with qubes-os for my daily struggles and tasks ;-).
But, i'd appreciate to have a system which won't start up every fan possible once i start another vm.
So i am looking forward to build a small, energyefficent and silent system, which will run qubes-os ootb without any problems.
As i happen to be a dad now, busy splitting my time between family, projects and work. I'd appreciate your guys help for building a micro/miniATX PC for Qubes OS
Specs:
- +16GB RAM
- +512GB SSD
- if possible a small nvidia-card for cuda and some occasional gaming. (not mandatory),
- Dual-Head-Graphics (uHD) is Mandatory
- WIFI (Mandatory)
i'd love to build it by using a case comparable to the Thermaltake CA-1D5-00S1WN-00 Black SPCC Micro ATX (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2F84EA2140)
Any ideas? i'd really appreciate your help.
Yethal
CPU: i7-6800K. Virtualization is a workflow that scales pretty much linearly with the core count so there's really no reason to hold back here. Do NOT go for Ryzen until the Ryzen bug on older kernels is resolved
RAM: Corsair LPX 32GB. Just like the CPU, sky is the limit here.
GPU: Nvidia GTX 750TI. Bought it because it's small, quiet and consume little to no power. Do not buy Nvidia cards. Installing proprietary nvidia drivers in dom0 is a pain in the ass and nouveau is average at best. Also, due to lack of function level reset you'll lose video after resuming from sleep. Go for integrated or AMD (Even if you plan on gaming in a VM you should still buy an AMD card. Nvidia drivers crash when they detect they're being run in a virtual machine)
MoBo: Asrock X99 mini-itx. Not much choice here since it's one of two X99 mini-itx mobos. Has an included cooler which is nice. Supports PCI-E bifurcation so if you ever feel like going really overboard you can install two full size gpus on a mini-itx board. Included Wi-Fi card (Broadcom BC4352) does not work out of the box.
SSD: Samsung m.2 pro evo. Always go for M.2. Not only are they faster, the cable management gets 10x easier with those.
Cooling: Cooler Master Seidon 120. One of few coolers compatible with this board. Keeps the six-core CPU below 30C on idle and below 60C on full load
Case: Lian-Li TU100. Great office/workstation case. Terrible gaming case (due to lack of GPU cooling). Can be modded to be a great gaming case but unless you're willing to cut holes in it, you should look elsewhere.
Also, check whether your keyboard supports PS/2 connection and if it does, plug it via PS/2. If not, buy a PS/2 compatible keyboard (most mechanical ones are). Just trust me, it simplifies things a lot.
ludwig jaffe
MORE RAM!
16GB is not enough.
Have 32GB or more as there are many VMs to play with. All of them eat a lot of RAM.
Think about 4GB per VM if you use 64Bit OS. The 64Bit systems are more wasteful
with memory as most things are now 8-byte aligned, so any variable uses 8-byte even if it is shorter like char or uint32. Maybe there are some space-optimized libraries but for performance reasons, as 64bit machine works with bigger natural address spacing, the data in RAM will be aligned for the 64bit machine, eating almost double of it!
Or use 32bit VM Guests for some minor stuff.
Memory is like engine displacement it can only be substituted by more engine displacement or more memory, respectively
Yethal
pixel fairy
havent measured its noise output, but no one putting their ear up to it has been able to hear it yet. its in a coolermaster half case, 40 x 43 cm (15.5 x 17 inches) with the two front fans replaced with noctuas. dont remember the cpu fan, but its on a quad core i7 and doing fine. there are no cards on the motherboard since the onboard video is just fine for qubes.
16 gigs seems to be plenty for most uses of qubes. i was able to mostly work on 8 gigs, but it was tight. ive worked with 32 gigs, and of course, it was fine, but i doubt it would have been any worse in 16. unless, of course, your doing something that needs lots of ram. i would go with a 1tb ssd and 32 gigs of ram, given that the prices isnt much more than 16.
note that much of my work is text editing, occasional compiling, and otherwise over ssh to other machines, or in a web browser. throwing in office docs, and image editing would probably be the simlar memory wise, though photoshop could easily push that to 32 gigs. most things i can think of which would need more ram cant be done on qubes anyway, due to the lack of color calibration, 3d acceleration, hypervisor nesting etc. in those cases id have a dedicated offline work station and use qubes for everything else.
since its a desktop, you can also do a removable drive tray for other OSes.
pixel fairy
for the cuda and gaming stuff, put windows on a removable drive tray and tell qubes to ignore the nvidia card. within qubes, you should be able to pass the card to an hvm to use cuda without it trying to use the display, but ive never tried this.
the case i was talking about is the coolermaster haf xb evo which has two removable drive trays. it goes for 90usd
Tai...@gmx.com
(coreboot supports a few but they aren't sold anymore)
I would get a KCMA-D8 (libre motherboard) with one of the 35W opteron
CPU's and an AMD graphics card (nvidia doesn't like open source or
virtualization on their "consumer" products)
It can support 128GB RAM, it has various expansion slots and a TPM header.