Table of contents

In January I ordered the components for a new PC and expected that I would publish a successor to my 2022 high-end Linux PC 🐧 article. Instead, I am now sitting on a PC which regularly encounters crashes of the worst-to-debug kind, so I am publishing this article as a warning for others in case you wanted to buy the same hardware.

Components

Which components did I pick for this build? Here’s the full list:

Price	Type	Article
140 CHF	Case	Fractal Define 7 Compact Black Solid
155 CHF	Power Supply	Corsair RM850x
233 CHF	Mainboard	ASUS PRIME Z890-P
620 CHF	CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 285k
120 CHF	CPU fan	Noctua NH-D15 G2
39 CHF	Case fan	Noctua NF-A14 PWM (140 mm)
209 CHF	RAM	64 GB DDR5-6400 Corsair Vengeance (2 x 32GB)
280 CHF	Disk	4000 GB Samsung 990 Pro
940 CHF	GPU	Inno3D GeForce RTX4070 Ti

Total: ≈1800 CHF, excluding the Graphics Card I re-used from a previous build.

…and the next couple of sections go into detail on how I selected these components.

Case

I have been a fan of Fractal cases for a couple of generations. In particular, I realized that the “Compact” series offers plenty of space even for large graphics cards and CPU coolers, so that’s now my go-to case: the Fractal Define 7 Compact (Black Solid).

I really like building components into the case and working with the case. There are no sharp edges, the mechanisms are a pleasure to use and the cable-management is well thought-out.

The only thing that wasn’t top-notch is that Fractal ships the case screws in sealed plastic packages that you need to cut open. I would have wished for a re-sealable plastic baggie so that one can keep the unused screws instead of losing them.

Power Supply

I wanted to keep my options open regarding upgrading to an nVidia 50xx series graphics card at a later point. Those models have a TGP (“Total Graphics Power”) of 575 watts, so I needed a power supply that delivers enough power for the whole system even at peak power usage in all dimensions.

I ended up selecting the Corsair RM850x, which reviews favoribly (“leader in the 850W gold category”) and was available at my electronics store of choice.

This was a good choice: the PSU indeed runs quiet, and I really like the power cables (e.g. the GPU cable) that they include: they are very flexible, which makes them easy to cable-manage.

SSD disk

I have been avoiding PCIe 5 SSDs so far because they consume a lot more power compared to PCIe 4 SSDs. While bulk streaming data transfer rates are higher on PCIe 5 SSDs, random transfers are not significantly faster. Most of my compute workload are random transfers, not large bulk transfers.

The power draw situation with PCIe 5 SSDs seems to be getting better lately, with the Phison E31T being the first controller that implements power saving. A disk that uses the E31T controller is the Corsair Force Series MP700 Elite. Unfortunately, said disk was unavailable when I ordered.

Instead, I picked the Samsung 990 Pro with 4 TB. I made good experiences with the Samsung Pro series over the years (never had one die or degrade performance), and my previous 2 TB disk is starting to fill up, so the extra storage space is appreciated.

Mainboard

One annoying realization is that most mainboard vendors seem to have moved to 2.5 GbE (= 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet) onboard network cards. I would have been perfectly happy to play it safe and buy another Intel I225 1 GbE network card, as long as it just works with Linux.

In the 2.5 GbE space, the main players seem to be Realtek and Intel. Most mainboard vendors opted for Realtek as far as I could see.

Linux includes the r8169 driver for Realtek network cards, but you need a recent-enough Linux version (6.13+) that includes commit “r8169: add support for RTL8125D”, accompanied by a recent-enough linux-firmware package. Even then, there is some concern around stability and ASPM support. See for example this ServerFault post by someone working on the r8169 driver.

Despite the Intel 1 GbE options being well-supported at this point, Intel’s 2.5 GbE options might not fare any better than the Realtek ones: I found reports of instability with Intel’s 2.5 GbE network cards.

Aside from the network cards, I decided to stick to the ASUS prime series of mainboards, as I made good experiences with those in my past few builds. Here are a couple of thoughts on the ASUS PRIME Z890-P mainboard I went with:

• I like the quick-release PCIe mechanism: ASUS understood that people had trouble unlocking large graphics cards from their PCIe slot, so they added a lever-like mechanism that is easily reachable. In my couple of usages, this worked pretty well!
• I wrote about slow boot times with my 2022 PC build that were caused by time-consuming memory training. On this ASUS board, I noticed that they blink the Power LED to signal that memory training is in progress. Very nice! It hadn’t occurred to me previously that the various phases of the boot could be signaled by different Power LED blinking patterns :)
  • The downside of this feature is: While the machine is in suspend-to-RAM, the Power LED also blinks! This is annoying, so I might just disconnect the Power LED entirely.
• The UEFI firmware includes what they call a Q-Dashboard: An overview of what is installed/connected in which slot. Quite nice:

CPU fan

I am a long-time fan of Noctua’s products: This company makes silent fans with great cooling capacity that work reliably! For many years, I have swapped out every of my PC’s fans with Noctua fans, and it was always an upgrade. Highly recommended.

Hence, it is no question that I picked the latest and greatest Noctua CPU cooler for this build: the Noctua NH-D15 G2. There are a couple of things to pay attention to with this cooler:

• I decided to configure it with one fan instead of two fans: Using only one fan will be the quietest setup, yet still have plenty of cooling capacity for this setup.
• There are 3 different versions that differ in how their base plate is shaped. Noctua recommends: “For LGA1851, we generally recommend the regular standard version with medium base convexity” (https://noctua.at/en/intel-lga1851-all-you-need-to-know)
• The height of this cooler is 168 mm. This fits well into the Fractal Define 7 Compact Black.

CPU

Probably the point that raises most questions about this build is why I selected an Intel CPU over an AMD CPU. The primary reason is that Intel CPUs are so much better at power saving!

Let me explain: Most benchmarks online are for gamers and hence measure a usage curve that goes “start game, run PC at 100% resources for hours”. Of course, when you never let the machine idle, you would care about power efficiency: how much power do you need to use to achive the desired result?

My use-case is software development, not gaming. My usage curve oscillates between “barely any usage because Michael is reading text” to “complete this compilation as quickly as possible with all the power available”. For me, I need both absolute power consumption at idle, and absolute performance to be best-of-class.

AMD’s CPUs offer great performance (the recently released Ryzen 9 9950X3D is even faster than the Intel 9 285K), and have great power efficiency, but poor power consumption at idle: With ≈35W of idle power draw, Zen 5 CPUs consume ≈3x as much power as Intel CPUs!

Intel’s CPUs offer great performance (like AMD), but excellent power consumption at idle.

Therefore, I can’t in good conscience buy an AMD CPU, but if you want a fast gaming-only PC or run an always-loaded HPC cluster with those CPUs, definitely go ahead :)

Graphics card

I don’t necessarily recommend any particular nVidia graphics card, but I have had to stick to nVidia cards because they are the only option that work with my picky Dell UP3218K monitor.

From time to time, I try out different graphics cards. Recently, I got myself an AMD Radeon RX 9070 because I read that it works well with open source drivers.

While the Radeon RX 9070 works with my monitor (great!), it seems to consume 45W in idle, which is much higher than my nVidia cards, which idle at ≈ 20W. This is unacceptable to me: Aside from high power costs and wasting precious resources, the high power draw also means that my room will be hotter in summer and the fans need to spin faster and therefore louder.

Maybe I’ll write a separate article about the Radeon RX 9070.

Installation

UEFI setup

On the internet, I read that there was some issue related to the Power Limits that mainboards come with by default. Therefore, I did a UEFI firmware update first thing after getting the mainboard. I upgraded to version 1404 (2025/01/10) using the provided ZIP file (PRIME-Z890-P-ASUS-1404.zip) on an MS-DOS FAT-formatted USB stick with the EZ Flash tool in the UEFI firmware interface. Tip: do not extract the ZIP file, otherwise the EZ Flash tool cannot update the Intel ME firmware. Just put the ZIP file onto the USB disk as-is.

I verified that with this UEFI version, the Power Limit 1 (PL1) is 250W, and ICCMAX=347A, which are exactly the values that Intel recommends. Great!

I also enabled XMPP and verified that memtest86 reported no errors.

Software setup: early adopter pains

To copy over the data from the old disk to the new disk, I wanted to boot a live linux distribution (specifically, grml.org) and follow my usual procedure: boot with the old disk and the new (empty) disk, then use dd to copy the data. It’s nice and simple, hard to screw up.

Unfortunately, while grml 2024.12 technically does boot up, there are two big problems:

1. There is no network connectivity because the kernel and linux-firmware versions are too old.

   • r8169: add support for RTL8125D https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f75d1fbe7809bc5ed134204b920fd9e2fc5db1df

2. I could not get Xorg to work at all. Not with the Intel integrated GPU, nor with the nVidia dedicated GPU. Not with nomodeset or any of the other options in the grml menu. This wasn’t merely a convenience problem: I needed to use gparted (the graphical version) for its partition moving/resizing support.

Ultimately, it was easier to upgrade my old PC to Linux 6.13 and linux-firmware 20250109, then put in the new disk and copy over the installation.

Stability issues

At this point (early February), I switched to this new machine as my main PC.

Unfortunately, I could never get it to run stable! This journal shows you some of the issues I faced and what I tried to troubleshoot them.

Xorg dying after resume-from-suspend

One of the first issues I encountered with this system was that after resuming from suspend-to-RAM, I was greeted with a login window instead of my X11 session. The logs say:

(EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Failed to acquire modesetting permission.
(EE) Fatal server error:
(EE) EnterVT failed for screen 0
(EE) 
(EE) 
(EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
(EE) 
(WW) NVIDIA(0): Failed to set the display configuration
(WW) NVIDIA(0):  - Setting a mode on head 0 failed: Insufficient permissions
(WW) NVIDIA(0):  - Setting a mode on head 1 failed: Insufficient permissions
(WW) NVIDIA(0):  - Setting a mode on head 2 failed: Insufficient permissions
(WW) NVIDIA(0):  - Setting a mode on head 3 failed: Insufficient permissions
(EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.

I couldn’t find any good tips online for this error message, so I figured I’d wait and see how frequently this happens before investigating further.

Feb 18: xHCI host controller dying

On Feb 18th, after resume-from-suspend, none of my USB peripherals would work anymore! This affected all USB ports of the machine and could not be fixed, not even by a reboot, until I fully killed power to the machine! In the kernel log, I saw the following messages:

xhci_hcd 0000:80:14.0: xHCI host not responding to stop endpoint command
xhci_hcd 0000:80:14.0: xHCI host controller not responding, assume dead
xhci_hcd 0000:80:14.0: HC died; cleaning up

Feb 24: xHCI host controller dying

The HC dying issue happened again when I was writing an SD card in my USB card reader:

xhci_hcd 0000:80:14.0: HC died; cleaning up

Feb 24: → UEFI update, disable XMPP

To try and fix the host controller dying issue, I updated the UEFI firmware to version 1601 and disabled the XMPP RAM profile.

Feb 26: → switch back from GeForce 4070 Ti to 3060 Ti

To rule out any GPU-specific issues, I decided to switch back from the Inno3D GeForce RTX4070 Ti to my older MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.

Feb 28: PC dying on suspend-to-RAM

On Feb 28th, my PC did not resume from suspend-to-RAM. It would not even react to a ping, I had to hard-reset the machine. When checking the syslog afterwards, there are no entries.

I checked my power monitoring and saw that the machine consumed 50W (well above idle power, and far above suspend-to-RAM power) throughout the entire night. Hence, I suspect that the suspend-to-RAM did not work correctly and the machine never actually suspended.

Mar 4th: PC dying when running django tests

On March 4th, I was running the test suite for a medium-sized Django project (= 100% CPU usage) when I encountered a really hard crash: The machine stopped working entirely, meaning all peripherals like keyboard and mouse stopped responding, and the machine even did not respond to a network ping anymore.

At this point, I had enough and switched back to my 2022 PC.

Conclusion

What use is a computer that doesn’t work? My hierarchy of needs contains stability as the foundation, then speed and convenience. This machine exhausted my tolerance for frustration with its frequent crashes.

Manawyrm actually warned me about the ASUS board:

ASUS boards are a typical gamble as always – they fired their firmware engineers about 10 years ago, so you might get a nightmare of ACPI troubleshooting hell now (or it’ll just work). ASRock is worth a look as a replacement if that happens. Electronics are usually solid, though…

I didn’t expect that this PC would crash so hard, though. Like, if it couldn’t suspend/resume that would be one thing (a dealbreaker, but somewhat expected and understandable, probably fixable), but a machine that runs into a hard-lockup when compiling/testing software? No thanks.

I will buy a different mainboard to see if that helps, likely the ASRock Z890 Pro-A. If you have any recommendations for a Z890 mainboard that actually works reliably, please let me know!