**Edit: This message if very long winded, but I covered a lot about newer hardware here.
VIA isn't my favorite chipset by any means. It's sort of a bargain-basement chipset in my opinion. They seem to be kind of "hit and miss" when it comes to performance and reliability. nVidia, however, has made a substantial commitment to the open-source community and Linux in particular. Their chipsets are very well featured and perform very well. The NV-RAID isn't great, though. Boards with Silicon Image RAID controllers are quite awesome, though. MSI makes a board that uses the nForce4 and has SI-RAID. The only kicker is that most drivers are considered Beta for PCI-E chipsets and hardware... Especially if they run x86-64. Since you want to run an AMD64, I recommend Gentoo. I don't know about Ubuntu, but if you get the AMD64 disks from Gentoo and compile most apps yourself, you're guaranteed to compile your binaries to take advantage of the extra 64-bit extensions. If that sounds like a lot of work, you might consider a Sempron instead. It's basically the Barton core and the new 90nm versions should be spec for socket 939. It doesn't do 64-bit. If you want to step away from PCI-E as well, you can get an nForce3 chipset instead which still runs very well and uses AGP and PCI. You also mentioned drives. The new Seagate 7200.8 supports something called Native Command Queuing. What this does is re-arrange the order in which operations are performed so that the heads don't have to move around as much. It makes for a much faster data transfer rate and quieter operation, but it kills seek times. In ATA you can't beat the WDC Raptor for seek times. Second to that the new Maxtor drives with 16MB of cache have very good performance, hold a lot, cost less and run quiet(er). I don't know what Linux's take on NCQ is, though, but it shouldn't matter since it's handled in the BIOS. Again for Video, I suggest nVidia. The open source driver for Linux gives excellent performance and if you compile it yourself to take advantage of your systems specific architecture it will run faster than a Windows Box. ATi also provides linux drivers and perform well, but there's just something about matching your chipset to your video card. RAM is universally compatible and is not OS-Specific. The lower the latency the faster. Latency is the number of clock cycles of the CPU required to perform an operation on the memory. It's normally listed like w-x-y-z. Each number corresponds to a specific operation. The first one is pre-fetch. I'm not sure on the others, but lower is better... and more expensive. CD/DVD writers are also standard. The more cache it has, the less chance of making a coaster and the better performance on short operations. Even though a drive says it's 150X or whatever, there's still the time it takes to get up to speed to account for. The more expensive drives tend to spin up faster and thus reduce seek times. Pioneer drives have been very reliable for me. As burners, Plextor drives have had unsurpassed performance. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeff Shippen Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 3:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [RLUG] opensource chipsets I did a little search online, and I got the impression that VIA is an Open Source chipset, that is all I could come across. All I'm asking is for maximum linux compatability, which hardware manufacturers &/or chipsets should I look for, and which should I avoid? And thanks Gary, I will give Ubantu a try Jeff Shippen Gary L. Allen wrote: > Jeff Shippen wrote: > >> Mark & all, >> I will be buying a new, super computer, custom of course. I want as >> much computability with Linux as possible, as it will be my main >> Linux box. I'm planning on buying most my parts on newegg.com I do >> not know which manufacturers provide O.S. drivers, could you please help me out. >> I will be purchasing the following: >> motherboard (64 bit AMD) >> ram >> processor (AMD 64, socket 939) >> cd/dvd burner >> video card >> hard drive (Seagate was my plan) >> I currently use Mandrake 10 (now known as Mandriva) and will also be >> trying Ubuntu &/or Gentoo <------ just an FYI. > > > Hi Jeff, > > I use Ubuntu and, IMO, it just plain rocks. Not too big, works great > with my hardware, and was easily as expandable as I wanted it to be > after install. They have some really good support information on the > site for newbies like myself. Great stuff- I highly recommend it. > > Best regards, > -Gary > _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
