chippydingo

I was thinking the same thing about Fedora since I have installed it on two purpose built gaming PCs using new or last gen hardware and a very old Dell Inspiron laptop and the experience has been very good outside of a couple minor issues like installing the WiFi driver on the Dell.

One of the best things I have found with Linux is the live-disk distro testing option since you can test how much you like the interface and execution of each OS+DE and how well they behave with your hardware situation without having to reformat anything first. Personally, since my goal was to move as far from the windows experience as possible, I opted for Fedora Workstation since I also tested the KDE version and I just didn't like it at all. GNOME seems to have its detractors (and for valid reasons) but after using Apple computers and Ubuntu a long time ago, I just preferred the intuitive layout and clean desktop experience. Using Windows11 at work is horrendous and I look forward to being back on my own machine every evening.

Another thing to consider is X11 vs Wayland since that ended up being what made me give up on Mint when my new hardware refused to run without persistent and horrendous screen tearing in 3D games. X11 just didn't work for me and everything I tried to tweak was either not helpful or would leave me in an un-bootable condition that required recovery via rollbacks or terminal commands using the live-USB.

Did I mention that I also got my kid on the Linux train? He is using Fedora Workstation and loves it compared to his old Win10 laptop and the POS Chromebook the school district gave him. In any case, as a Microsoft refugee I think Linux is a wonderful and viable alternative and while there may be some bumps along the way, the community is very helpful and you can often find solutions or you can just ask.

Good call. I think this post has definitely been worth the effort since you guys are giving me some ideas I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Thank you!

That is really interesting and I wouldn't have considered doing that since I already replaced both of them with a fresh set. I guess only concern with the long term benefit of going down to a single stick would be giving up 16GB of RAM (since this is a 32 GB kit) and then I might get higher speed but I would also get lower bandwidth overall since I lose the dual channel benefit. Weighing that option vs running the dual mode with 32GB at a slightly lower speed makes for an interesting conundrum. I will test this option if I can't get stable and error free performance from adjusting the SOC setting down. Thank you again.

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't tried pulling one stick but I did replace them both so I figured that eliminated them from suspicion. I also tried manually adjusting all of the primary timings and the speed to see if the XMP defaults were just being applied wrong. I think the voltage settings are my most likely culprit in this case so at least I have another thing I can try which doesn't involve a complete tear down and waiting another week for yet another part to get to me.

Thanks Shadow. I had never considered something like this and all of the other suggested fixes I found via forum posts pointed to the physical hardware being the most likely causes. I will try and manually set the SOC voltage tonight to a fixed value (since I am 100% it is set to Auto) and do some more testing.

Just out of curiosity, what voltage ended up working for your setup? From what I am reading in the linked post and a post which is linked within it, I could go lower (0.9200-0.9600; leaning towards 0.925 VDC) or higher to something like 1.1VDC, but one comment mentioned higher voltage can actually increase instability...ugh. Anyways, thank you for the reply and suggestion!