Building pc, hardware question on security and compatibility, and bios

[himeshlem79]

Hello the community I’m new to Linux and virtualization things(,I’ve seen information about incompatibility of Qubes is and hardware and hardware backdoor. Those things become my major concern when I need to consider components for my setup), and I now think of:

-ryzen 9 of the newest series (ie. 3950)

-32 GB of ram

-Radeon gpu (ie. 500 series)

Question -will amd components work properly with Qubes os? usps tracking

-what motherboard would you recommend? (Secure from backdoor) showbox

-anyone that are using these components in your build and it work fine? speed test

-is default firmware/bios of the hardware safe enough (if not , is it possible to install open source bios and have Qubes run appropriately?(I have just heard of the concept and don’t know much detail))

-is disabling psp via bios with new AGESA update sufficient for safety?

Edited December 11, 2020 by himeshlem79

[niphilim222]

So what is your Budget, and welcome to the nexus.

[JimmyRJump]

Latest AMD processors are the 5000 family and AMD's new video cards have been announced on the 28th of October and are the RX6800, RX6800XT and the RX6900XT (available 18 november and 8 December for the 3900XT). All of the latter are trading blows with NVidia's RTX3000 series. Getting the latest AMD CPU with a 500 series motherboard and a 6000 series GPU will boost graphic performance with between 2 and 10 percent, depending on the game and ray-tracing with the 6000 cards is better than with NVidia's RTX2000 series but not as good as with the RTX3000 series.

 

AMD have an equivalent of DLSS in the pipeline.

 

I've never used Linux so I can't answer any of the questions you have regarding that OS.

 

Like niphilim222 asked, what's your budget? A decent budget is the difference between dreaming and reality.

[RitualBlack]

Just out of curiosity what are you doing that requires top end gaming hardware plus such high level security? If you were going with an Epyc/Xeon solution or using workstation cards I could understand wanting to focus more on a professional use Linux environment (though not this OS)

 

Simply going to the hardware requirements page demonstrates what the requirements are:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/

 

 

I have not used this distro it but seeing as it highly focused on a virtualization/trust system and recommends iGPU (dedicated must be troubleshooted and can be problematic as mentioned on the page) I highly doubt it is performance oriented. Also few tasks utilizing the upcoming AMD RX 6xxx series would perform as expected. In addition to that the Ryzen 9 series do not include integrated graphics which may be problematic for your specific interest based on the sites requirements page. In addition to that, it is unlikely (though not impossible) that you will accidentally install a bios level virus.

 

I am not sure the adoption of this distro, though I would assume it to be quite low as the user experience seems too challenging to distribute it in a standard small business for general users where you don't have the expensive enterprise security and are wanting free added security. I almost feel like perhaps one of the few use cases outside of paranoia would be someone who deals with a lot of files from unknown sources (perhaps some sort of security analyst) or someone who has critical/sensitive information and is looking to prevent any risk of say a day 0 virus happening which could result in lost or stolen data.

 

I currently use Windows for my gaming computer (Linux Server for more work stuff) but if you're interested in getting into Linux for gaming I would recommend looking into using something like Ubuntu / Arch along with Proton for game compatibility.