Re: Recommendations for N00b try at DIY
- From: General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Jul 2007 00:35:58 GMT
On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:33:53 +0000, General Schvantzkoph wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:28:31 +0000, Rockinghorse Winner wrote:
I am going to try my hand at building a pc. I think I can handle the
mechanical chore of screwing it all together, but am trying to make
sense of the vast array of mobo's out there. I am looking for board in
the <100.00 range that will work with the major cpu's and be compatible
with Linux. I want to keep the project under $500. Any
recommendations?
Also, are there any other h/w *gotcha's* I should be aware of before I
start collecting the h/w? Do the mobos work with both 64 and 32 bit
chips? I would prefer 32 bit, but could I upgrade to a 64 bit chip
later on? What kind of interfaces for peripherals should I be looking
for?
*R* *H*
Modern CPUs are all 64 bit, your choices are Intel Core2 or AMD Athlon
64 X2s. AMD just cut their prices, Intel has a huge price cut coming on
the 22nd. The Intel Core2s are the best performing chips these days but
at the low end, where you are looking, the price/performance should be
comparable (when doing the comparison remember that Intel is about 25%
faster on a clock for clock basis so a 2GHz Core2 will be about equal to
a 2.5GHz A64 X2). Also the Intel Core2 has a lot of overclocking room,
the AMD chips tend not to have any.
For AMD processors you want an Nvidia Nforce chipset. There will be
absolutely no Linux problems with an Nforce board. For Intel you should
pick a board with a 965 Northbridge and an ICH8 or ICH8R Southbridge.
The 8R has more SATA ports but the boards will cost you a little more.
If you don't mind spending another $30 that's what you should do. There
is a newer Intel chipset that has appeared but I can't tell if there are
any Linux issues with it. One more thing about Intel boards, you need to
use the very newest distros, Fedora 7 for example, or you'll have to
upgrade the kernel in order to get the ethernet to work. The MACs on the
Intel boards require 2.6.19 or better. The FC6 installer has 2.6.18 as
does CentOS5. The AMD Nforce boards should work with any reasonably
recent distro.
For graphics I always use Nvidia. For 2D only the kernel drivers work
fine. For 3D and improved 2D you'll want to use the Nvidia binary
drivers. For Fedora you can either get them using the Livna repositories
or you can download Nvidia's installer (that's what I do). For Ubuntu
they are in the restricted driver repository. The Intel graphics chips
are completely open source so they would be the least amount of hassle,
however they are considerably slower then Nvidia's. Given your budget
you might want to pick a motherboard that has on board Intel graphics,
that will save you about $100.
For brands I like MSI. You should avoid ABIT at all costs, they have
terrible Linux compatiblity. ASUS has a good reputation, I haven't used
any of their boards but I haven;t heard anything bad about them.
For buying the parts, in the US Newegg is the place to do it. They have
a great website that will allow you to pick the features you want and to
read a lot of user reviews for each component, they also deliver
amazingly quickly, at least half of my orders have arrived in a day or
less. Even if you are not in the US you should use Newegg to do your
research. When looking at motherboard reviews you should search for the
word Linux, usually a Linux user will have posted a review. If you don't
find a Linux review then look at a different board.
One more thing, all drives including the DVD should be SATA. Modern
boards only have one PATA connector and on the Intel boards there are
driver issues with the chip that is commonly used to provide this
function.
.
- References:
- Recommendations for N00b try at DIY
- From: Rockinghorse Winner
- Re: Recommendations for N00b try at DIY
- From: General Schvantzkoph
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