Re: Another "What Motherboard Should I Buy" question

Stefan Patric wrote:
On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:09:41 -0600, Mark Adams wrote:

Stefan Patric wrote:
On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:01:44 -0600, Mark Adams wrote:

Greetings.

I'm looking for advice/recommendations on a new mobo and other parts. My current desktop is an Intel WN845D, 2.6 GHz P4, 1 GB of RAM, AGP4 slot. I'm running Mandriva 2007 and I just don't have enough horsepower to run the Beryl desktop.
Sure you have enough horsepower. 2.6 GHz P4? Plenty of power. What you
need is more RAM. I have friends running 3D desktops on 32-bit notebooks
in the 1.6 to 2.0 GHz range, and all run smoothly.

I may have not been clear about this point -- I can run the 3D eyecandy, but it's too slow to be useful. Oh! but I can't get some of the choicer effects, like water.

As is when I open a new Firefox window, the CPU load jumps to 100% and cruises there for several seconds while the window opens. If I've got two or three torrents downloading and some other process running in the background, I may wait 20 or 30 seconds for the window to open. I initially thought this might be because my ATI Radeon 9250 was bogging down, but that wouldn't account for the high CPU load.
Extra RAM will help. Check your swap. If it's getting hit hard or is
nearly full, then not enough RAM is the problem.

Swap isn't taking much of a hit at all. Gkrellm says it's 743M free of 996M. Pumping Azureus full of downloads will bump that up to something more like 50%, but I've never seen it higher.

Also, check the driver for that Radeon card. Is it the one that is
specifically for that card and enables the 3D rendering or just a
"generic" one?
It's the OS fglrx driver. I think it may be the generic OS Radeon driver. It allows 3D direct rendering with AIGLX.

You should get the dedicated ATI driver. It will improve graphic
performance tremendously. My 64-bit AMD system uses a Geforce 6600 PCI-X
card and with the Fedora Core 6 generic 'nv' driver, I only get between
100 and 150 fps on glxgears, full screen. With the 'nvidia' driver from
livna, I'll expect 8 to 10 times faster frame rates. (I haven't bothered
installing the native nVidia driver, since it was a low priority as far as
upgrading the system.)



Umm, "dedicated ATI driver"? Do you mean ATI's proprietary driver? If so, I can't get direct rendering under ATI's driver.

At any rate, time to upgrade. I am shooting for something like this:

Intel Core 2 Duo at about 2.3 GHz
2 GB RAM
Nvidia PCI express graphics
Gigabyte ethernet
Two SATA hard drives
A DVD writer (SATA?)
The usual handful of USB, serial, parallel ports,
Firewire ports for my video camera (PCI card is okay here)
And a powersupply that will put up a reliable, honest 500 Watts.
Oh and a snazzy black, half-tower case that isn't made of some exotic material like aluminum and doesn't have windows and lights in it.
Looks good. I'd suggest considering MBs only with an nVidia chipset,
since nVidia has native Linux drivers.
How about Intel boards. I'm looking hard at something like the DG965WH. The DG965 series come with something like the GMA X3000 onboard graphics. Beyond onboards, I'm looking at buying an Nvidia PCIE card.

I'm not up on Intel boards. In fact, I avoid them. Have read a lot about
incompatibility issues with them and Linux -- mainly Intel chipsets,
onboard graphics and ethernet chips -- especially since the Microsoft and
Intel collaboration to develop hardware that's "Vista Ready." I'm sure
this will change after the Linux community has time to write drivers,
etc.

I know I want the Core 2 Duo, but I have no idea what mobo to build this around. Anybody have any suggestions about any of this?
Go here and plug in your requirements: http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/
It'll spit out all the boards that satisfy them.
I can't get anything on core 2 duo boards. 8-\

MOBOT is a VERY picky database. For example, if you specify solely a Core
2 Duo CPU motherboard, there might not be any that take ONLY that chip,
but there may be a lot that take BOTH Core Duo AND Core 2 Duo CPUs, which
MOBOT considers not to be the same motherboard as ones that ONLY takes the
Core 2.

Start simple: enter only the socket type of the CPU you want; then, if
you get anything, search again, but with the form factor or chip set or
memory type or manufacturer, and so forth, one requirement at a time in
order of importance. If you enter too many requirements to begin with,
there may not be any motherboards that fulfills all those requirements,
and you'll get nothing.

Stef

I finally got a decent query looking for CPU "Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4, Pentium D". I don't see anything there that really floats my boat, but then there's quite a bit to sort through.

If I go this route, I'm thinking pick out a few boards that I think look good and then see what kind of deal I can wangle on a combo deal through Pricewatch.

At this point, I'm not sure what to do. The easy but kind of risky thing to do is upgrade. The cost-effective but riskier thing to do is sort it out and replace the video card.

--
Mark E. Adams, 2004 -- drop the "dot" to email me.
http://adamslan.shyper.com -*- Mandriva User# 263042

CONSIDER: ===========---------,,,,,,,,,............. . . . . .
Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading statements,sooner or later the product will speak for itself.
- Hajime Karatsu

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

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