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I have a gaming PC I mostly use to edit videos and images in high quality.

Specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8 cores, 16 threads.
RAM: 32 GB G Skill - 1466 MHz on dual channels. Latency: 16-18-18-38.
MOBO: MSI B350M PRO-VDH.
GPU: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 Ti.
Disk drives: Samsung SSD and Seagate HDD.

I have an external soundcard Steinberg UR242. Sound EQ is important too.

I would like to install Linux on my PC. Which Linux distro would be the best choice to get all the power from the PC, and to get as much control as possible?

It has to be clocked, both RAM, GPU and CPU and be able to control fans/temp.

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    I am not sure that "gaming PC" and "I mostly use to edit videos and images in high quality" are the same thing. Do you want a Linux which is optimized for gaming or for video editing? Oct 24, 2018 at 8:23

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Regarding raw power currently nothing can beat Clear Linux. Although it was made by Intel, it's fast even on AMD CPUs. All the benchmarks you can find on the internet in the recent years will show you that it is faster than any other distros in most of the tests. You can find some of them at the end of this answer

I'm not sure which games you're targeting, but Steam does support it


However it's not a ready-made distro for everyone and you must have some knowledge of Linux before installing. For non-power users Ubuntu Studio might be a lot easier to use

Ubuntu Studio is a free and open source operative system, and an official flavor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is the most widely used multimedia orientated GNU/Linux distribution in the world. It comes preinstalled with a selection of the most common free multimedia applications available, and is configured for best performance for the Ubuntu Studio defined workflows: Audio, Graphics, Video, Photography and Publishing.

It uses a low-latency kernel that's tuned for multimedia applications, thus might be more responsive to events but a little bit slower than the normal kernel in general

Note that gaming and video editing are not the same because they have different objectives. For example while playing games you can drop a few frames but it's not allowed while rendering a video frame in the final file. That's why there are different GPUs for gaming and GPUs for professional work like NVIDIA Quadro.


Some Clear Linux benchmarks

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I would probably suggest the latest Ubuntu based on your specs. It allows you to easily install proprietary drivers (e.g. NVIDIA graphics cards) and is probably the distribution with the most guides out there for more easily fine-tuning your required setup.

Fan speeds can be controlled with easily-installed additional packages. Here's a good low-down on how to do it

Steam is also officially supported on Ubuntu, which may be beneficial for you.

However, if you are really comfortable with most aspects of the internals of a Linux system and want to squeeze every last drop of 'power' from a setup, Arch Linux may be your friend - be warned though, Arch can be fiddly where Ubuntu will do most things for you.

Both offer easy installation of Linux-based image and video editing software such as GIMP, Blender, Kdenlive, OpenShot, etc.

E.g., on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install gimp

or Arch:

sudo pacman -S gimp

My advice, go for Ubuntu, play with Arch in VirtualBox if you like playing with Linux systems and see how you get on.

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