The new machine

My current laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 5-15ARE05. It is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processor, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD. It was my first computer with an Ryzen processor and it works very well, it’s hard to find any defects in it. It was also very cheap (~570 € without OS) when I bought it in spring 2020.

The laptop now has Arch Linux in dual boot with Windows 10, that I sadly use for work. I used the Btrfs filesystem for Arch because a driver for windows is available that works pretty well. This anyway contributed to produce a great mess with files: personal files are on Arch and I can read them from windows, work files are mostly on windows but something is also on Arch, both the partitions are almost full. Installing a new OS on this laptop would have been impossible, so I decided to buy a new machine, completely devoted to hobbies (installing, using and hopefully somehow improving GNU/Linux).

I’ve had this idea in mind for some time, and when I was given a voucher of 500 € to buy informatics devices I had the opportunity to realize it. Since I already had a monitor, keyboard and mouse that I used for the laptop, I decided to buy desktop computer, possibly a mini PC that could fit on my desk. The idea was to use one of those new Ryzen processors with integrated graphics, the Ryzen 7 5700G or the Ryzen 5 5600G. I almost immediately discarded the 5700G because it was too expensive and all in all I didn’t need that much power. Next thing was the case. After a little research I found the ASRock DeskMini X300, a barebone mini PC including only the motherboard and the case. Its dimensions, 155 x 155 x 80 mm, were just what I was looking for, and it supported the new Ryzen 5000 processors, so it was perfect.

Then I added RAM, an NVMe disk and a WiFi kit. In conclusion, the components were:

With a total price of about 530 €, I was quite satisfied with the build!