[olug] Mobo/Video recommendations

[Adam Lassek]

I wouldn't recommend getting a P965 board for a new machine, that tops out
at 1066MHz and is a generation old at this point. I have one of Intel's new
X38 boards:

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/DX38BT/index.htm

which is fantastic. 1333Mhz FSB, DDR3 memory, three full-size PCI-E slots
and the now-standard 6 SATA ports. It even has an e-SATA port for an
external drive. It's Intel, so fully compatible with Linux. I tried an ASUS
board before this one but it was awful, and not very well-supported.

The drawback to this board is that it's a little on the expensive side,
since it requires DDR3 memory. Well worth the money for the performance, but
probably not for an economy machine.

The OS that will be used on the machine is irrelevant, ATI = teh sux0rs
> and nVidia = teh r0x0rs, and has been that way for a while now.
>

In general this is very true, with one caveat: beware nvidia cards with G92
GPUs under Linux! NVIDIA only just released driver support for these cards,
and the only non-beta driver causes the fan to run at 100%. I had to compile
the SVN version of nvclock in order to lower the fanspeed manually. The
Windows drivers have also been plagued with bugs lately.

Unless you're going to do a lot of high-performance gaming, you're better
off with one of the cheaper cards.