Jarrod Major wrote:
Jarrod, I just recently spec'ed a system for my nephew, and here is my 2 cents...-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Hey Gang,
I have been feeling the need to upgrade my machine at home. It has now become imminent due to one of my Christmas presents (Doom 3). I am somewhat out of the loop of late or at least I feel I have kind of lost track of things. I am very happy with my AMD so I will most likely stick with them for processor. I am seriously considering getting an Athlon 64. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? Looking at Memory Express it seems that I have a wide choice. Plus it's complicated by the socket type, it appears I have a choice of socket 939 and 754, which is better? I have used ASUS boards for most of my computers and wasn't planning on using anything different this time around. I'm sure the guys at Memory Express would be more than helpful in choosing an appropriate mobo. I would rather get a board without the extras as I have decent sound, video and NIC cards already. I have also been less than happy with the bundled hardware in any case.
Also, considering I will most likely be running a 64-bit processor, what should I be looking at for distro? Do the current versions support 64-bit out of the box? It looks like SuSE does, I'm not sure about the others.
This is very frustrating, I have built several systems from the ground up and for some reason this time around feels different.
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If your budget allows I'd go with the socket 939 Asus board and cpu if you decide on 64 bit. Socket 939 allows the fastest possible A64 CPU without needing to use registered (Slower and more expensive) RAM.
The socket 754 is geared toward budget systems AFAIK and I am not sure how long AMD will keep it around.
The asus board has the Via K8T800Pro chipset, for wich an AGP patch was posted to LKML back on June 29. AFAIK, the via chipset is currently best supported in the current 2.6 kernel...
I know of fedora, suse, and gentoo have A64 ports. The nice thing about Athlon 64 is it runs 32 bit code natively (No performance hits) So if you are unsure of the state of 64 bit distros, you can install a 32 bit one and wait for the 64 bit stuff to mature some more.
Robert.
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