Time to upgrade my desktop PC, which - unlike most people - I do very rarely, which also means that I'm currently quite out of practice with buying new HW.
My computing and graphics needs are not great, so the only reason to upgrade is software's ever growing need for memory. My current PC is now 10ish years old and it reached its 16GiB RAM limit years ago. The OS I run is Fedora 28 (usually upgraded by 2 versions at once), I have 2 WD's 4TiB SATA disks in it (WDC WD4003FZEX-00Z4SA0 and WDC WD40EZRX-00SPEB0), and it's all packed in a very traditional midi tower case.
I prefer to not buy a completely new computer, but only replace the components. Therefore, my major aim is a new motherboard with some serious RAM support, a decent CPU (I'd consider two if not too expensive), and anything I'm forced to replace/add to the mix.
I found ASUS Z10PE-D16 WS, which should be possible to upgrade with more memory for many years. Right now, I'd likely go for 2xCrucial CT64G4LFQ4266 DDR4 64 GB LRDIMM and buy more when this becomes too little. I don't insist on 1 TiB RAM support on the motherboard, but 256 GiB or more would be very welcome.
My first question is: would the above work OK together, on Fedora? Further, are there better suggestions (for example, cheaper ones that don't perform significantly worse), while maintaining upgradeablity of RAM, to avoid the hassle of motherboard shopping in long term.
The second question is obvious: whatever the motherboard suggestion is, which CPU would you suggest with it? I'm looking for a nice balance of power and price since, like I said above, I don't need high-end computing power.
Once the above is decided on, I also need to decide about graphics. I have no interest in high end gaming/rendering GPU, but I do need decent support for 2 screens (Dell U2311H; each supports VGA, DVI-D, and DisplayPort). My current motherboard (HP 3647h) has this built in, but it seems that it's now considered wiser to have a separate graphics card, and most people seem to think that AMD works best with Linux. My third question: what would be a good recommendation in this department?
Last, but not least, do I need to look for a new power supply, or my 10 years old one should work? If I need a new one, what would the recommendations be? My current one shows "not specified" for all fields provided by dmidecode --type 39
, including the name and the manufacturer, and it's kinda hard to reach it at the moment.
Bonus points: it'd be nice if all of the recommended stuff was available on AmazonUK, since I feel quite confident with their return policy.