[PD] [OT] PC hardware recommondations for Linux

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
B. Bogart hat gesagt: // B. Bogart wrote:

> This is pretty off topic.

Then why not go over to pd-ot? ;) Acutally I think, from time to time
talking about good hardware for Pd is on-topic here as well. Do you
know the "hardware" area on puredata.org? 

> I'm trying to figure out what PC to buy for my next linux machine. This
> machine is going to be specifically for PD/Gem stuff, maybe a little
> video here and there, but is meant to be a machine I don't depend on day
> to day, but can lease for installations and/or performance stuff. So it
> has to be solid.
> 
> My current PC is a duron 800 Abit KT7 with geforce2 card in it. I'm
> hoping to get some performance getting close to my g4 1.25Ghz powerbook
> with Radeon 9600.
> 
> For the graphics I'm looking at the Asus N6600 (256MB, FX6600) but I'm
> stuck on the mainboard. And will probably be running an AMD XP 3000+ or
> 3200+

Last week I was shopping for a new machine, which has replaced my main
machine now. As such, I also wanted a quiet machine, which means: no
P4 but Athlon64. 

As I'm a bit on a budget, I bought the 3000+ model. For a mainboard I
choose the ABit AV8+ with Firewire, which was only a half good choice
unfortunatly.

The reason is, that using the powersaving funcitonality ("Cool &
Quiet") leads to crashes, so I had to disable it. I strongly suspect,
that a wrong ACPI implementation on the board is the reason for this.
I hope, that the next kernels (> 2.6.11) will be able to work around
this. Also the ABit board is the wrong choice, if you want to
undervolt your processor, it's more targetted at overclockers, not at
silence freaks like I am.  But if powersaving is not important to you,
then this board is nice, everything as far as I tested it, is
supported with newer kernels (> 2.6.10 for the onboard ethernet). 

The AV8+ is an AGP board, which is good, because I want to reuse my
old Matrox-card.

Asus should be fine, too, but I think it's a bit expensive. Another
good brand to consider is MSI boards, which I was running on my
previous two machines. Maybe I should have bought an MSI this time as
well? 

I cannot recommend any graphics cards as I don't run hardware for
which vendors don't supply enough specs, so I'm more or less stuck
with older cards.

I would thus say, that Amd64 in general can still be a bit shaky, so
your choice of an older Athlon XP model will surely be easier to get
running in a solid way and of course it's much cheaper. 

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__
             
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