That gaming desktop I've been planning for a couple of years now is now close enough that I have the motherboard on order. (ASRock X870E Taichi Lite.) The CPU and GPU I want aren't out yet (Zen5 X3D and either an RDNA4 model or a Battlemage card, depending on Debian support at launch) but I know I'll definitely be using an AM5 CPU so I can at least get that ball rolling.

It begins!

Yay, motherboard is ready for pickup!

Dear AMD: RELEASE THE 9950X3D ALREADY PLZ

My current plan is still to build this new gaming rig around a 9950X3D processor when they're eventually released in Q1 2025, buuuut that 9800X3D is out now (stock availability gaps notwithstanding) and it's really very good...

👀

No, no. Stick to the plan.

All right, I'm snagging the RAM and power supply for that gaming rig today. After this the only major components left will be the case, CPU cooler, CPU itself, and the primary storage drive.

(Well, plus the GPU, but I'll be waiting until Q1 2025 (CES + delay for reviews) before making a decision about that piece. Everything else I've more or less settled already.)

One of the other reasons I'm not rushing this gaming PC build is that I want at least the option of picking an Intel Battlemage GPU - not because I expect it to offer anything but middle-of-the-pack performance, but because I expect the Linux drivers to be solid for the expected lifespan of the device. The xe2 driver should ship in the 6.13 kernel which I expect will appear in the Debian backports sometime around the end of January 2025.

Plenty of time, no need to speed ahead.

This weekend I picked up an interim GPU¹! Tracked down an Intel Arc B580². It's no performance king but it is great for its price; it will play a large chunk of the games in my Steam backlog more than well enough, and if the AMD RDNA4 cards in March or Intel's B7xx cards later this year outclass it I can retire the B580 to transcoding/Frigate duty on the household server.

¹: just in case tariffs make getting a GPU in a few months prohibitively expensive.

²: at MSRP, no scalper markup.

Now I'm just waiting on the 9950X3D to launch: that's the only missing component on my critical path. I still need to pick up a case and an all-in-one CPU water cooler/radiator, but the rad is not expensive or in limited supply and the case could be any of several easy options.

The last time I put together a gaming machine, it had an HD 7950 in it. This is going to be quite the jump in performance. Hopefully this one will last as long as the previous one did!

Picked up the all-in-one CPU cooler / coolant loop / radiator block / fan assembly for that gaming PC. Ended up choosing an Arctic Liquid Freezer III AIO - the staid black version with no LEDs. (Honestly a Noctua NH-D15g2 air cooler would have been more than fine, but I've never tried a liquid loop cooler before; I let my curiosity get the best of me.)

Just waiting on the CPU now, and a case.

I will not choose a silly SuYan A open air test frame, I will pick a sensible enclosure.

…

…

…

🤔

(it has a cute little HANDLE on top, just look at it, COME ON)

https://vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005008110790874.html

Today is release day for the AMD 9950X3D, the CPU I have in mind for the PC I'm building and the last component I need in order to begin assembly! Time to begin refreshing the stock level pages on a couple of local retailers, starting with the shop down on College Street where I get most of my parts. With any luck, this weekend I'll be swearing at Wayland, figuring out Proton and Vulkan, installing Steam on Debian, and flying an X-Wing!

Eeeeee

It took a while longer than I expected to get enough free hours in a row to actually put together my gaming machine, but it's done now!

Turns out the RAM I got (*from the QVL list*!!) is known to be flaky with my motherboard, so I'm running only one DIMM, but everything else... just works..? I got Steam installed, played a half dozen games, and they _just work_.

I'm having trouble getting X-Wing (1998!) to recognize my joystick, but it runs. Even the MIDI music works. It's astonishing.

The Intel B580 competes on value, not on raw performance, so I expect that when I get through my (very long) backlog of older titles I might encounter some newer ones that'll slow down at 4K. But that's not likely to matter to me this year, and by next year the GPU and driver landscape might be very different, hopefully better?

I am really looking forward to getting five or six large boxes out of the apartment tomorrow. I think I can call this project complete.

I'm so happy!!

And tired.

After wrapping up the system build I have one hardware problem & a couple of software problems:

1. On BIOS version 3.04 my second DIMM would cause an AA/21 POST code boot failure, slot positioning notwithstanding. (Tried every combination.) Updated to 3.20 and will try again.

2. I had to create a pipewire config file to let mpd under its own user play audio through my login session sound server.

3. Suspend worked out of the box but hibernate needed a (documented) one word grub config tweak.

Getting the Realtek RTL8126 NIC on the motherboard working meant installing kernel 6.12.x from backports, but I was going to do that anyhow for the GPU drivers. I used a USB NIC to get through the chicken-and-egg problem.

Getting Steam working required installing a _lot_ of i386 (32-bit) libraries on my amd64 system config, but after learning the apt syntax it was easy and fast.

I got MIDI synthesis for old DOS games working via Fluidsynth and Timidity, mostly for System Shock & X-Wing.

My OS and Steam recognize my Logitech joystick, but X-Wing, TIE Fighter, XvT, and Star Wars: Squadrons do not yet. Not sure what the gap is but I'll figure it out.

To get Bioshock working I had to pick the correct Proton compatibility option in Steam to offer it just the right emulated Direct3D shader version. That done, it runs perfectly.

Everything else I tried - Celeste, Factorio, Sublevel Zero, &c. - just worked perfectly, first try, no fiddling. I'm even OK with the Gnome desktop!

This is kind of a big deal for me: although I've been using Linux for... what, twenty years now? Longer? ...I've never really bothered with a GUI, it has always been terminal-only.

The desktop experience is simple, boring... _perfectly fine_. That's exactly what I want. Set up a little Gnome shell extension to monitor power consumption from the HX1000i PSU and temp probes from all the sensors and fan/pump speed reporting from my AIO water loop radiator. Zero ads, zero popups.

Oh, and I should mention the things that all worked perfectly on the first try:

- WiFi
- Bluetooth (well, after I remembered to screw in the antenna, d'oh)
- sound, including my microphone amp
- mirrorless camera rigged up as a webcam
- browser history sync, of course

I'm sure I'll run into some annoying websites that'll refuse to function in Firefox and insist on Chrome or Edge or something, but at the moment all my needs are being met by this setup.

Debian Stable makes a great desktop.

This new desktop machine wakes from suspend, reanimates from hibernation, and cold-boots so dang fast that I think I'm just going to leave it powered down the majority of the time.

Wake-on-LAN works perfectly so I'm not giving up any remote access convenience (the household server is always up), and it's easy enough to toggle off auto-suspend when SSH'd in (of course the desktop environment assumes if you don't have an active GUI session then the machine isn't doing anything & can sleep - feh).

While poking through my Steam library testing the compatibility of various titles I discovered that the desktop version of Plants vs. Zombies is _not_ infected with freemium microtransaction pestering the way the Android/iOS versions now are and accidentally lost like an hour revisiting a simple, old, fun title.

❤️🎮
🌻🧟‍♂️

I also finished up my steel and stone brick furnace lines in Factorio, won a run in Sublevel Zero Redux, and failed again to get my joystick recognized in X-Wing: Collector's Edition.

(The Steam version of X-Wing includes three versions of the game: the Windows 95 version, the CD-ROM version, and the original. The Win95 version could be convinced to function via https://www.xwaupgrade.com , perhaps; the other two run under DOSBox but too choppily to play. I'll keep working on it.)

Since I now have a functional desktop machine again I figured I should try some of these "graphical" "applications" people keep talking about, AKA apps that display a bitmapped graphical interface instead of using the terminal. (Weird, I know, but stay with me here.)

I started with Cantata, a GUI client for my mpd music server system. It's OK! Works decently well. But my search-then-pivot workflow with mpdel¹ is so much faster that I think I'll stick with it.

¹: https://mastodon.social/@gnomon/110194924782185560

Uhhhh I also stayed up way, way too late last night playing the 2023 Nightdive Studios System Shock remake, now that I can do that. It's super fun!

I had the interesting experience of physically noticing the computational load of running the game, too. The all-in-one CPU water cooling loop/radiator combo runs so quietly that I keep forgetting it's there, but it does warm up the air under my desk, near where my left leg rests.

Also, side effect of spending my whole life in the terminal and making a habit of reading error logs: I noticed a little note in the stderr stream from steam / pressure-vessel: it was regenerating the en_US.utf-8 locale from scratch on every launch (my system locale is en_CA.utf-8) and advising that it would launch faster if I updated my set of system locales.

One `dpkg-reconfigure locales` later, and what do you know, everything under steam launches 2-5s faster. Sweet! Worth it!

The WiFi/Bluetooth module built into this ASrock X870E Taichi Lite motherboard is run by the mt7925e Linux kernel driver. I have HW/SW version 0x8a108a10 running firmware version "____000000" (yes, really) / "Build Time: 20241104133053".

It takes about 10-30 seconds to reload the firmware for this device after resuming from suspend / hibernate. Apparently this is known behaviour. I might pick up a USB Bluetooth dongle with faster resume behaviour, just to polish out that minor friction.

Yooo, exciting news from yesterday for those using Debian Stable as a gaming machine: mesa¹ 25.0.4~bpo12+1 was released²!! (The previous version of mesa in stable-backports was 24.2.8~1-bpo12+1³.)

The changelog⁴ between 24.2.8⁵ and 25.0.4⁶ includes a lot of exciting improvements.

This is great, and an amazing release cadence.

¹: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/mesa

²: https://tracker.debian.org/news/1644008/accepted-mesa-2504-1bpo121-source-into-stable-backports

³: https://tracker.debian.org/news/1600926/accepted-mesa-2428-1bpo121-source-into-stable-backports/

⁴: https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes.html

⁵: https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/24.2.8.html

⁶: https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/25.0.4.html

*me at 11:45pm, wrapping up a work meeting*: hmm, since I'm running a 6.19 kernel now¹ I should see whether SR-IOV GPU virtualization works. Just a quick check!

*me at 4am*: OK I found a FAT32 MicroSD card and got my motherboard firmware version from 3.20 to 4.10 and that resolved the Intel MEI firmware error, got fwupdmgr installed from stable-backports to update four different firmware flavours on the GPU which igsc(1) claimed to update but didn't...

1/2

¹: https://mastodon.social/@gnomon/116258802612956397