Simon Hansman wrote:

> Firstly the motherboard I think I'll get is a Gigabyte GA-7VTXH, it's pretty 
> new and seems to be a good deal. It has onboard sound (Creative CT-5880)
> and onboard lan (Realtek 8100 10/100Mb) Does linux treat onboard hardware the 
> same as say a pci realtec lan card? Or do I need special drivers for them?

 Should be OK.

> And does linux treat AMD as i386? 

 Yep; I think I compiled my kernel as i686 (I have a Duron).  I admit to rarely 
booting Linux on this machine though.

> I'm thinking about getting it from Dragon PC....I haven't got anything from 
> them before....anyone have any good/bad experiences with them?

 The guy's pretty good.  Sells out of his lounge to keep overheads low.  When I 
was looking at bits for my current workstation I found that he actually had 
some of the best parts I could find.  And his prices convinced me to get a 
Geforce 2 GTS instead of the MX variant (the GTS was about $200 cheaper 
than anywhere else).

 Just let him know what you plan to buy and he'll tell you what is and isn't in 
stock.  Let him know when you're coming to pick up, and he'll have your 
invoice printed up.  In my case, I had a bit of a wait for the video card.  When 
that arrived the hard drive was out of stock.  I asked him to courier the hdd to 
me when it arrived and a couple of days later he delivered it personally.  He 
also gives a date when any out-of-stock item is due to arrive.

 Only a couple of things I don't like:
1- he doesn't take credit card (fair enough),
2- he can be difficult to contact by phone (he ignores it when dealing with 
customers, which from the customers POV is a good thing),
3- when I was there he had no static protection while handling my CPU and 
memory (although he was careful not to touch the pins).

Cheers,


- Dave

David A. Mann, B.E. (Elec)
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/

"Why is it that if an adult behaves like a child they lock him up,
 while children are allowed to run free on the streets?" -- Garfield

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