On Friday, February 11, 2005 10:50 AM Torsten Foertsch wrote:
I am planning to buy a new computer. I thought of:
- Mainboard ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe - CPU Athlon64 3500+ (Winchester) - RAM 2048MB
The mainboard is a PCI express one. Will it work with suse 9.2?
I've just put together the exact same spec. It works like a dream with 9.2.
Now I am looking for a SATA RAID controller. I have heard much
positive of
3ware escalade 8506. But it is a PCI (without express) card. Will it work with the board?
There are 8 on-board SATA connectors, including RAID. The RAID controller is recognised by the kernel, but my two SATA drives are non-RAID (so far), so I can't say how good its RAID implementation is. If I were you, I'd hang onto my cash until you've tested the onboard RAID. If you find you need a full-blown RAID card, there are three normal PCI slots on the mobo, so you shouldn't have any problems getting it to work.
I have got an old AVMB1 PCI ISDN card. Will it work with the new board?
I don't see why not. I'm using all three PCI slots (SCSI card, audio and TV) with no compatibility problems.
What graphics card do you recommend? 3d is nice to have but not necessary.
I went for a Radeon (ASUS EAX800XT PCI-Express), passing up the opportunity to make use of SLI because I've had hardware failures with identical symptoms from three different generations of GeForce cards. The first time I put down to bad luck and replaced the board. The second time it failed inside the warranty period and was replaced with the next generation. The third time was the last straw.
Good linux compatibility is more important. It should support old VGA and LCD displays.
I'm using the ATI proprietary driver, but if you don't need accelerated 3D, you can get by with the xorg's radeon driver. Note that I had to upgrade to xorg-x11-6.8.2rc3-2.1.x86_64 and its friends. The version on the 9.2 DVD wouldn't work with the ATI driver. I've used it with a CRT from VGA resolution up to 1920x1440@75 and with two LCDs 1280x1024 and 1920x1200 (nice) using both VGA and DVI ports. I had no problems with any set-up.
I am trying to build a system with good disk- and network-IO-performance and CPU performance.
I'm pleased with all of them so far (even without switching to stripy RAID). I get the feeling that the components are nicely balanced, so that no one component is causing a bottleneck. All previous PCs I've used have tended towards becoming either CPU or disk bound, but with 2Gb RAM, there is plenty of scope for buffering to let the CPU ease the disk burden. For a system containing such new components, I'm amazed I've not had any real headaches. Finally, to give some idea of the performance: CPU: a raytracing landscape generator I'm writing (not 3D-accelerated, so very CPU intensive) used to take around 20s per frame on my 512Mb Athlon 2200+ ASUS V8X system. The same scene now takes a shade over 2 seconds per frame. Memory: AFAIR, running memtest reported a memory bandwidth of around 2Gb/s. Disk: It's hard to quantify disk performance because I've not come close to filling the memory yet so there's lots of cached data lying around. All I can really say is that installing a whole bunch of RPMs is a *lot* quicker than my old system (using the same SATA drives) Summary: go for it. HTH Phil -- ********************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.mimesweeper.com **********************************************************************