GPUs these days use a whole lot of power. Ensure your power supply is specced appropriately.

Well, let's see:

• You no longer have to set jumpers to "master" or "slave" on your hard drives, both because we don't put two drives on the same ribbon cable anymore and because the terminology is considered kinda offensive.

• Speaking of jumpers, there's a distinct lack of them on motherboards these days compared to the ones you're familiar with: everything's got to be configured in firmware instead.

• There's a thing called "plug 'n play" now, so you don't have to worry about IRQ conflicts etc.

• Make sure your power supply is "ATX", not just "AT". The computer has a soft on/off switch controlled through the motherboard now -- the hard switch on the PSU itself can just normally stay on.

• Cooling is a much bigger deal than it was last time you built a PC. CPUs require not just heat sinks now, but fans too! You're even going to want some extra fans to cool the inside of the case instead of relying on the PSU fan to do it.

• A lot more functionality is integrated onto motherboards these days, so you don't need nearly as big a case or as many expansion slots as you used to. In fact, you could probably get by without any ISA slots at all!

Compared to those pain points building a modern PC should be a breeze. CPUs go in Zero Insertion Force sockets so as long as you remember to lift the little lever you won’t bend any pins. People don’t even wear static discharge wrist bands anymore (all though it couldn’t hurt) or worry about shorting things out. And power connectors only fit one way unlike the AT power connector.

Speaking of breeze your only pain point might be making sure you have enough air circulation for cooling all that gear.

There is no need for a separate sound card now, it is built in.

Some thoughts:

Ubuntu, most likely

I'd encourage you to take a look at Linux Mint, it alleviates some of the Ubuntu fuckiness. And if you want to join the "I use arch btw" crowd, maybe checkout EndeavourOS if you're feeling more brave than just Ubuntu variants (which is built on arch, but makes barrier to entry a little easier).

i9s are the latest hotness but don’t think the price is worth it

Take a look at last generation to soften the blow to your wallet. E.g., instead of looking at a 14900k, look at 13 or even 12 series. In fact, this is a useful strategy all around if you're being price conscious: go one gen older.

GPU that can support some sort of ML/AI with DisplayPort

Probably going to want to go with a discrete card, rather than just integrated. Other major consideration is going to be nvidia vs AMD, for which you'll need to decide if CUDA should be part of your calculus or not. I'll defer to any data science engineers that might wander through this post.

The rest of your reqs pretty much come as regular stock options when building a pc these days. Though another nicety for my latest builds, is multi-gig nics (though 2.5Gb was my ceiling, since you'll also need the network gear to utilize it). Going multi-gig is nice for pushing around a fuckton of data between machines on my lan (including a NAS).

Very last thing that I've found helpful in my last 3 builds spanning 15 years: I use newegg for its reviews of items, specifically so I can search for the term "linux" in any given product's reviews. Often times I can glean quick insight on how friendly (or not) hardware has been for other's linux builds.

And I lied, I just remembered about another linux hardware resource: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=search

You can see other people that have built with given hardware. Just remember to do a scan too once your build is up to pay it forward.

Good luck, and remember to have fun!

Get Nvidia GPU for AI, period.

Read the manual for the motherboard you want and make sure that the M2 slot supports NVMe rather than SATA. (Also, learn to tell NVMe from SATA chips.) M2 slots that are SATA usually share a SATA lane with the SATA connectors and if you populate the M2 slot you might lose a connector.

Another thing to read about is whether populating which M2 slot reduces the speed of one of the PCIe slots. Same reason (shared lanes) but with PCIe instead of SATA. These things should be spelled out next to the M2 connectors.

NVMe drives in Linux have /dev/nvme* designations not /dev/sd*.

For AI/ML workloads the VRAM is king

As you are starting out something older with lots of VRAM would be better than something faster with less VRAM for the same price.

The 4060 ti is a good baseline to compare against as it has a 16GB variant

"Minimum" VRAM for ML is around 10GB the more the better, less VRAM could be usable but with sacrefices with speed and quality.

If you like that stuff in couple of months, you could sell the GPU that you would buy and swap it with 4090 super

For AMD support is confusing as there is no official support for rocm (for mid range GPUs) on linux but someone said that it works.

There is new ZLUDA that enables running CUDA workloads on ROCm

https://www.xda-developers.com/nvidia-cuda-amd-zluda/

I don't have enough info to reccomend AMD cards

AMD is the gold standard for general user PCs in the last 5+ years. Intel simply cannot compete at the same energy expenditure/performance. At the same/close price/performance, Intel either burn a small thermonuclear power plant to deliver comparable performance, or simply is worse compared to similar Ryzens

Ryzens are like aliens compared to what AMD used to be before them

So I'd go with them

As for the GPU, if you want to use Linux forget Nvidia

lots of good advice here. I just want to restate: do yourself a favor and migrate your HDDs over to any solid state drive. Whether that means "classic" SSDs with a SATA-Port or M.2s is your prerogative, but in either case you'll start wondering how you could ever stand that s pinning noise and the vibrations and the slow, slow data transfer.

I'd defintely go with an M.2 SSD, you can get 1tb for 50€ and 2tb for 100€ now and they're much faster, more reliable and take up way less space.

For ML/AI stuff, you might be just fine using an AMD GPU. AMD GPUs are a lot easier to use on Linux and are also a good bit cheaper. I use Fedora with an AMD GPU and I just installed the packages for OpenCL and HIP and now I can run LLMs on my PC using my GPU. I've also used Stable Diffusion with that GPU on Linux before. If there's something specific you want to do regarding that, I'd look up first if you need an Nvidia GPU for that but from my experience AMD GPUs work just fine.

I'd take a look at AMD CPUs again. Last time I checked they were even cheaper (including mobo price) than Intel even though they're also more efficient (faster and less power draw). Prices might have changed tho. You should probably use a Ryzen 5, a Ryzen 7 will only make sense if you use all cores because game performance is pretty much the same. A Ryzen 3 is more of a budget option tho, I wouldn't use that. If it's in your budget, you should also use the newest generation that uses the AM5 socket because you'll be able to upgrade your CPU without needing a new mobo. I think it also only supports DDR5 RAM, which is more expensive than DDR4. If you use a Ryzen generation that uses the AM4 socket, it's gonna be cheaper but if you want to upgrade you'll need a new mobo with AM5 and new DDR5 RAM in addition to the new CPU.

As for Linux distros, my recommendations are Linux Mint if you want something very easy, EndeavourOS if you want something Arch-based or Fedora if you want something that's not quite as easy as Mint but more up-to-date. I personally use Fedora but I used EndeavourOS before. I detailed why I switched to Fedora in a reply here somewhere.

Honestly any parts you buy today probably won't be much good in 30 years.

I for one would not purchase any Intel hardware as long as AMD is around. Not that they're bad or anything, but AMD gives me much Kore "bang for the buck". To future proof your rig, I strongly suggest you go with the latest socket (be it Intel or AMD, doesn't matter) and make sure you get DDR5 RAM. PCI Gen 4, and then have at it.

Getting an 80 Plus Gold power supply is always nice too.

And then there's the cooling. I see you went with a radiator and fan, but I strongly suggest getting some type of liquid cooling. The prices are not that bad anymore (unlike about 10 years ago, which was insane).

As for the board, you'll get all kinds of different suggestions. Some people swear by Asus, I'd rather go with Gigabyte (love the Aorus line), so it'll come down to brand trust at the end of the day.

As for the card, I hear a lot of crap given to Nvidia about being closed source, and I sort of agree that's messed up, but ATI cards (while pretty good) are always a step behind Nvidia. Plus, most distros have them working out of the box.

It can be intimidating after so many years, but its way simpler than it was back then.

Good luck man, you got this, there's nothing to fear but fear itself.

You state i5s can't keep up with what you code. What do you code?

It is not exactly what you asked, but if it is customization and expand ability you are looking for, did you consider custom build cites like cyberpowerpc.com? You can select from wide variety of components, they build and test it for you, and make sure that everything is compatible and working. You do pay a bit premium for the assembly and tests but it is not that much, and you save your time and have a peace of mind that everything works.

A lot of great suggestions here already. But nobody is mentioning that if you really want to future-proof, you should go fully quantum.

I went through the same process myself a couple years ago, first PC build in a while. The biggest shock for me was finding out hard drives (SSD, HHD, etc) were outdated: its all about NVMe cards which look like a stick of RAM and plug directly on the motherboard.

They sadly don't have 3.5" [floppy] drives anymore, and both the ISA and PCI busses are nowhere to be found 😔

I used pcpartpicker for my latest build it's a good help when assembling and can help avoid those incompatible parts.

Here is my next planned build. Also with linux in mind. Get yourself that GPU. It'll get you there.

Seems like you got your answers already, but pcmasterrace community also exist

Someone might have already mentioned it, but M.2 is just a physical connector. You can have M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME drives. Prefer NVME (a modern motherboard should support it but older ones only do SATA)

Could you buy both an AMD GPU and a Nvidia GPU? You could pass the Nvidia GPU into a VM with vfio for AI and then you could daily drive AMD with Foss drivers. (AMD is in a little less demand) There is also the option of Intel GPUs as they should work pretty well under Linux.

I personally would avoid Ubuntu do to snaps as there are many other options. Do what you feel comfortable with but you also could go with Linux mint or Fedora both of which don't have snap.

For AI I'm less experienced but I would use containers as that will make the setup much nicer.