[olug] Advice on a new rig

[Obi-Wan]

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

My new machine (February) is an Athlon 64x2 5000+.  I don't game, but I
do a fair bit of batched, multi-threaded photo editing, which means I
frequently peg both cores for many minutes at a time.  MRTG reports
that from 10pm-12:30am last night, my *AVERAGE* CPU utilization for the
entire 2.5 hours was 85%.  It hovers around 20% when I'm not sitting at
the console.  I need to look into overclocking.  If hardware failure
hadn't forced my time table, I'd have waited for AMD's phenom problems
to settle down so I could have gotten a quad core CPU.

>> 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.
> 
> 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.

I run 4GB of DDR2 with a 32-bit kernel, and I've never had any problems.
Going beyond 4GB (not 3GB) requires 64-bit or hugemem kernel support.
With 4GB, I page only occasionally -- usually during the aforementioned
photo editing sessions.  The rest of the time, my RAM is all used for
filesystem cache, since I do run a number of web & mail servers off
this box.

For me, memory speed isn't a big deal, but gamers may feel differently.
For average applications, I don't think there's much point in getting
uber-fast RAM unless you're also getting an uber-fast CPU.

>> 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.

When I was specing out my new box, several people on this list advised
that I avoid VIA chipsets.  I went with nForce and have no complaints.
All the on-board stuff worked perfectly.

-- 
Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth                             obiwan at jedi.com
   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins