Re: [opensuse] installing openSUSE on an older pc

On 08/29/2011 04:40 PM, george olson wrote:
On 08/29/2011 11:33 PM, Tejas Guruswamy wrote:


A couple of points worked in your favour:

Different memory types (SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3 ...) are keyed differently - that
is, they have physically different slots. So if it fits without forcing into
your MB, it's the right type.

Also, memory speeds don't have to match. If you have multiple mismatching
sticks on your mobo, they all run at the speed of the slowest. Hence the usual
recommendation to buy matching ram speeds, but it's not necessary.

Ah, cool! I didn't know that - I thought they always had to be matching speeds.
I am learning a lot through all this!


And if you stick with generic consumer RAM and consumer mobo's (no ECC, no
crazy timing settings), you are very unlikely to encounter brand
incompatibilities.

So if it fits in the slot, it'll probably work ;) the benefits of
standardization ...

Regards,
Tejas

Thanks again!

George,

A couple of other point with older boxes. You can make them very responsive by focusing on the normal bottlenecks of disk I/O and graphics I/O. A dependable 7200 rpm drive compatible with your system will do as much for you as is possible on the disk side. On the graphics side, you can get a used nvidia card for the box for less than $20 that will make a huge amount of difference with graphics response. The hardwaresecrets site used to have a comparison chart for all the gpu's going back 5-6 years that compared memory clock/pixel clock/shader clocks etc.. that was a great reference for older cards. What you care about is 'memory bandwidth' or 'memory transfer rate'. Here it is:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/132

(there is also an ati page, but I'd stay with nvidia)

If you can get a card with a memory transfer rate in the 18GB/s range, you will be fine. (14 GB/s range is OK, anything less -- well, you could do better) You want a 256-bit card, not a 128 bit card. I did a short write-up on why that matters a few years back: http://www.3111skyline.com/hardware/graphics.php

I have an old dell PIII-800 w/384M that I put an old nvidia 5900 Ultra graphics card in. Running kde3, that box works fine (it has long since been replaced by other boxes many times over -- but I still have it because it simply -- won't die!) System responsiveness is enjoyable. It handles all the apps you could want (just one or two at a time :)


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David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
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