Re: MB recommendations -- budget upgrade?

Jeroen Geilman <jeroen@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
Whoever wrote:
Graphics: preferably onboard,

Gawd no!
2 reasons: one, they raise the price of the mainboard

The cheapest Socket 939 board (Asus A8V-VM) I see on our local price
comparison site has onboard graphics (interestingly, a similar board
without on-board graphics (ASUS A8V-XE) costs about EUR 11,- more.

without adding any
actual value to it, and two, they suck.

The value is that one does not have to buy a graphics card if the
onboard graphics works under Linux. However, the reviews I have read
don't say nice things about the signal quality of the on-board
graphics (most separate cards are not so great, either).

fully open-source support (in other words, not nVidia).

Erm.. Why?
No lofty ideals please

Why not? It's Whoever's decision. Also, you may be happy with making
yourself dependent on Nvidia and their choices when to support what
card on what Linux and X versions with what quality level, and may
consider the freedom from that a lofty ideal. I consider it a
practical advantage.

- you're on a budget here, and I take it as a given
that you want the biggest bang for your buck - else your entire post is
meaningless.
So yes, get a good nvidia card

Nvidia do not offer more bang for the buck; and if you look at what
you can do with free drivers, they offer less bang for the buck.

Especially when I am on a tight budget, I would buy the most expensive
motherboard I could afford, and the cheapest CPU.

I don't think this is very good advice. I have seen cheap
motherboards work well (and some work badly, but that's just a case
for warranty replacement); and a few years down the road, when Whoever
wants to upgrade the CPU, both the cheap and the expensive board are
worthless, because there is no better CPU available for them at that
time (hmm, maybe second-hand), and the RAM for the old type is then a
specialty item that costs more than the then-current RAM, so Whoever
will buy a new board anyway.

Also, I am not sure that an expensive motherboard is a guarantee for
high quality. E.g., I was very happy with a cheap Soyo board I bought
in 1998, and I am not so happy with the ASUS K8V SE Deluxe, that I
bought in 2003 and that was relatively expensive at the time (both
boards are VIA-based, so that's not the issue).

God no - they are virtually extinct, completely prohibiting you from ever
upgrading the CPU.

My experience is that CPU upgrades usually require a motherboard
upgrade. That is, the CPUs that you can upgrade to without changing
the motherboard are usually not worth it.

It might be a good choice if you decide now that you won't upgrade the
machine in any major way - it just won't be worth the money.

Yes, especially if you are on a budget, do not invest into general
upgradability; if you have a fixed upgrade plan that you want to
pursue, that's different, but don't invest into options that you
probably won't take.

Cool 'n Quiet is totally unnecessary on Linux, since it will simply do
nothing when not required to.

And yet, when an Athlon 64 X2 does nothing at 1.2V, it consumes 9W
less than when it does nothing at 1.3V. See
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/computer-power-consumption.html>

Even so, CnQ is not an optional feature, it is present on all AMD64 CPUs.

But it has to be enabled in the BIOS in order to be available under
Linux, as I recently noticed.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
.

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