It's a rainy Sunday afternoon as I finally press the buy button, I reflect on what was learned:
1) That http://www.phoronix.com is a kick ass hardware review site for us Linux dweebs! 2) Don't by the cheapest crap to fix a problem with the cheap crap that you bought last time. Aka it pays to do good research and get good options from as many people as you can. 3) Don't over buy either, I was up to $210 for just a mother board and a video card, when some off line discussions let me see it's more important to keep all my components in service for as long as possible ( keep them out of the land fill ). That I don't need a $120 video card when a $45 will do all that I need for the next 6 months. 4) That this LUG can definitely be split into two groups, those who care about video/images and those who don't ( the command line crowd ), and ( like the vi / emacs discussions we have) one group can not seem to 'educate' the other. 5) That ATI has made progress in delivering unencumbered specs and deserves a second look, while Intel is faking it: AMD Releases Display Library For Linux (March 18, 2009) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_adl AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide (May 07, 2009) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_700_guide Intel Linux Graphics On Ubuntu Still Flaky (July 31, 2009) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_q309_flakes Thus I picked the lowest cost MB that fits my needs and so that I can keep it in production and out of the landfill for 2 or more years ( it will EoL as a low power linux server ). Since I'm not going to 'throw away' my Athlon64x2 4600+ 65w I really don't need the best and most expensive mother board chipset. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128376 I chose the Radeon HD 4650 and not the 4850 since the FOSS drivers work with the rv7xx GPU which both use. Again not to over buy the 4650 came out to be $41 after rebate, and the 4850 when up from $89 to $120 do to lack of availability. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127417 I only need enough GPU power to complete my HD-TV video experiments which can be done with the 4650, Unlike nVidia I can now play with two drivers 1) The FOSS x.org radeonhd driver written by Novel with full support of ATI/AMD and 2) the close source ATI driver. No one needs to comment, again this is to wrap it all up. Joe Awaiting for the delivery some time this week ;-) _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jul 1 - Linux High Performance Computing Aug 5 - TBD Sept 2 - Linux and HDTV
