On Sun 07 Apr 2013 11:29:17 NZST +1200, Phill Coxon wrote: > Intel i7 vs AMD CPU?
Doesn't really matter, they all go like oiled lightning. The generation you buy probably has more of a detectable effect to you. Sometimes I hear AMD is cheaper. > Recommended motherboards? Anything that works well under Linux... ;-) Mainly, check the chipst is well supported. Some nvidia chipsets (at least some years back) aren't well enough supported to be worth the bother. Stay clear of brand names like HP, their BIOSes are total rubbish. Half the options you want ain't there. AMD tends to get used more in gaming machines, but I don't see any actual difference in the hardware. The detrimental effect of that might be more that you end up with a BIOS that allows you to overclock whatchamacrapola in a gazillion different ways (only idiots touch that), but is too sumb to turn on disk smart monitoring on boot. Unfortunately you can't really work this kind of thing out before you buy. Ditto for whether lmsensors are properly supported. > Do I need to pay attention to the motherboard with regard to the UEFI > secure boot issue? I'd like to know too. It's probably more of an issue with laptops. > I'm most likely going to upgrade my current desktop rather than buy a > full new desktop so really looking only at motherboard, mid range i7 CPU > (or equivalent) and 16Gb of DDR3 RAM. Make sure the mobo has 4 memory slots and specifically supports that much RAM. Don't bother looking at anything that doesn't have DDR3, unless you have deep pockets. I found that hard disk performance improves noticably over 3 years, so chucking your old clunkers back in will limit your performance to some extent. Power supplies change connectors too, so after about 5 years you're probably better off to just get a new box and keep the old one as a backup, for testing, a home media server, ... Otherwise, buy the mobo on features. List up the peripherals you want, PCI slots (getting rare on mobos now), etc. Note that the slot to the left of the graphics slot is invariably useless (check it's not the only PCI slot there is, if that matters to you) because graphics cards are always 2 slots wide now. I'd stay clear of on-board graphics, have seen some very shocking Intel ones (unusable). The graphics integrated into some AMD chipsets appears to be good, but of course is only ever 2D. For 3D you need to buy a card, and check whether it has movie hardware decoding if you want that - the cheapest cards do not. HTH, Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
