[olug] Advice on a new rig

[Luke Dashjr]

On Monday 24 November 2008 03:11:19 pm T. J. Brumfield wrote:
> Beyond that as I look to the future I have to consider if when I buy the
> rest of the rig, do I go with a new AM3 socket motherboard and DDR3 memory. 
> Has anyone heard anything about upcoming AM3 socket motherboards?  What
> about possible pricing on Phenom�X4 920/925 procs?

For some perspective, my newest machine is an Athlon64 3200+.
I do not yet see a need for upgrading, myself.

> I can likely get 8 gigs of DDR2 for less money than 4 gigs of DDR3. More
> memory is USUALLY the better way to go, but I don't really ever run out of
> memory with 4 gigs on my current rig.  8 gigs won't help me if the memory is
> always unused.  But in the next two years will I suddenly need more ram? 
> Note, I have no intention to touch Vista.  I dual boot openSUSE 64-bit and
> Windows XP Pro x64.

I used to swap pretty hard even with 3 GB RAM. I don't anymore, probably at 
least in part due to KDE 4 being lighter than 3. So on the KDE/Linux side, 
memory use would appear to actually be decreasing over time.

3 GB is also the top limit for 32-bit x86 without some weird stuff. And 64-bit 
doesn't quite mix with 32-bit all that great. If you really need more than 3 
GB, you might want to seriously consider a non-x86 platform-- I know PowerPC 
and MIPS handle this decent (no, Windows won't run natively on either anymore, 
but XP won't be around much longer anyway).

> For motherboard chipsets, I have used NForce chipsets for years with no
> complaints, but I'm open to moving to a different chipset in the future.  I
> need good Linux drivers (including the on-board sound to pump out HD audio).

I've always used VIA chipsets and never had to worry about it.

> As for video cards, I'll likely revisit the more in the spring as drivers
> evolve, and market prices change drastically in a matter of months, but as a
> lifelong Nvidia guy, I'm suddenly looking at ATI cards more seriously.

I've been using ATi for many years since my last nVidia card (GeForce 2) died 
on me. The only issue I've had is recently an integrated laptop chipset has 
been locking up a lot with 3D acceleration enabled, but I expect that will be 
fixed sooner or later. The support for their high-end HD cards is still in 
development, but IIRC do work now also.