Not sure if this is the right place to ask, though I guess people can talk about what hardware SuSE runs well for them on. If you want to get a handle on the different processor chipsets, buses, etc, have a look at wikipedia. I found it (mostly) a good way to get a simple summary (no padding to get the right number of words you get in magazines) of how things have moved on, and what's available. Things are not perfectly linked up, though (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_64 does not link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_939 or even mention sockets at all) so you may have to do a bit of googling in parallel. Tom's hardware is (or was) a good site, too. Russell Jones Dylan wrote:

Hi all,

I'm looking to build a machine for some fairly hefty audio, video and graphics processing. I'm having trouble getting through the information about x86-64 processors and motherboards and chipsets. Sound and graphics cards, hard drives and optical media I can deal with. Basically, I'd like to aim for a dual processor machine with plenty of memory. Unfortunately, I can't afford to lay out for the final spec in one go so I figure I'll start off with lower spec and upgrade as I need to/can afford to. To that end, I have some questions:

Which processors can I use in an SMP setup? I know they need to be a "pair", but do all the x86-64 units play SMP, or only a few?

Is it possible to upgrade from an Athlon to an Opteron on X2?

Any reccomendations as to motherboards would be most welcome.

Thanks

Dylan