How to build the fastest Linux PC possible on a budget

[Devolz]

Introduction

There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a system boot up almost instantaneously when the power switch is hit. Long gone are the days of going to make yourself a brew while those spinning platters buzz and the display kicks into life, lazily dragging you into the GUI you call home.

But surely that luxury of speed is reserved for those who are willing to drop £1,000+ on a new system? Fortunately, this is not the case anymore. With advancements in technology over the last six years, and Intel’s aggressive push to keep reinvigorating its chipsets each and every generation, we’re starting to see more and more affordable budget, speed-oriented components finally making it to market.

The SSD has succeeded the hard drive with sub 10-second boot times and lightning quick file transfers. However, three years on and we’ve seen both the rise and fall of the SATA III bus. This was a standard that was supposed to last us until 2020, but now lies completely saturated, with only the ever enduring HDD still making good use of the connectivity.

Fortunately for us, workarounds have been found in the search for ever increasing performance and ever increasing speed. Utilising the PCIe bus to transfer data to and from any hard drive to the processor has proved to provide almost limitless potential when it comes to file transfer speeds – at least for the time being. And as  M.2 and U.2 PCIe SSDs have matured, so too  have their sequential read and writes, alongside a continual plummet in cost to  produce them. What this has led to is the potential to piece together a system for just over £400. 

And that’s a system we intend to walk you through today. A system including an Intel Core i5-6500 quad-core processor, one of the latest chipsets featuring the lightning fast and insanely energy efficient DDR4 memory standard, alongside a PCIe M.2 SSD. In our case, we’ve opted for one of Samsung’s OEM PM961 M.2 drives, specifically the 128GB variant.