New desktop after a few years of pause

So I just ordered the parts and I am putting together this

Zalman Z9 Plus case
Thermaltake TR2 500W
AMD FX-6300 + Arctic Cooling Freezer A30 120mm
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
G.Skill Ripjwa XF3 2x4GB 1866
Radeon R7 240 2GB

I have a few hdd's lying around and a HDMI 24" TV for the moment they'll do. I will mostly use the rig for photography. I don't intend to OC as I think the 6 core will do a decent job! My last rig was a Q6600 quite some time ago, so what do you guys think? Cheers, Chris

Tabarnak!

Any other opinions beside the French dude?

What Operating System(s) are you going to install on that PC, and will you use it also for some gaming?
If the main (or only) OS will be a Linux distro, I completely agree with ThunderRD's opinion that an Nvidia graphic card is at the moment clearly the best option by far.

I am planning to run VM on it since I need to learn a lot about AD and will use server 2012. But I also plan to install a couple of Linux distros. Any recommendations? Thanks.

Well I have received the cooler I ordered, now I only need to wait patiently for the rest of the parts lol. Wife asked me if I am building a spaceship or a computer LOL...

This is the keyboard, I just received the KB and the cooler LOL

UPS is delivering the rest and they rescheduled the delivery two times, the package should have been delivered yesterday or today but they have no idea where my package actually is. LOL

Just found out that is only the case which comes with UPS so I got the rest of the stuff today. Me thinks I am going to assemble them and start the damn thing up!

If you are interested in a Distro that keeps very recent packages, is rolling release but with big focus on stability, then Manjaro might be something you may want to look into.

Manjaro is based on Arch, but puts a lot of emphasis on being beginner friendly. I just recently spent some time testing it in virtualbox and like Arch it is very light weight, runs very fast, and I'd say it is quite beginner friendly.

Unlike the more common distros like Ubuntu and Mint, Manjaro does not make as big of an effort to hide the stuff going on behind the fancy GUI. Meaning you will see boot messages instead of some distro logo on boot, and by default the grub bootloader is also visible.

Just thought I would mention a slightly less known distro that is still easy on newcomers.

Yes, Mint or Ubuntu might be a better choice. Mind you, Manjaro does "just work" without requiring any particular knowledge, but the graphical interface for the package manager is not descriptive as you have in Mint or Ubuntu. However, apart from that I would not say it is any more difficult to learn. It is at least an option.

I will give you that as advice, Chris, give VirtualBox a go. It can be installed from the package manager of Ubuntu, Mint and most other distros. It allows you to try out installing an OS within a virtual environment. The best part is that you can run it in a window so you can easily keep a browser open for any info you might need. It will let you try anything you are interested in testing within a safe environment.

I don't have any experience with AMD cards on Linux. Only once did I use AMD on windows, and I had way too many issues with their drivers to want to try AMD again. From what I have read, the open source drivers are the better choice for AMD, but 3D performance is not as great as it could be. I have also read about many issues with the proprietary drivers requiring certain xorg versions, causing issues whenever xorg was updated. The proprietary drivers were actually dropped from the official Arch repos because of the many issues.

Hope you have a blast with Linux, it is a lot of fun once you realize that you truly can have full control of your system, and everything is customizable if you take the time to learn.

Manjaro.org is the official website for it. Since it uses the pacman package manager (only with a graphical interface) then it is very easy on driver install, at least in my opinion. I just checked Manjaro repos, and they have the newest nvidia drivers as default. During installation, it will automatically install either open source driver, or closed source driver, depending on whether or not you started the live environment with free or non-free drivers, which is an option when the live media boots.

Gaming on Manjaro should not be any different from most other distros, except that the base system is a lot more light weight than Mint. And even though Manjaro is rolling release, they are not as quick as Arch to use the newest versions as they want to avoid any bugs in the newest versions. I noticed Manjaro currently use the 3.10 long term support kernel as default, unlike Arch that is using the newest 3.12.6. So obviously Manjaro focus a lot on keeping the rolling release model stable, and not releasing any new package versions until they are proven to be stable.