I would appreciate some advice on moving up.... I have been using SuSE on our home systems since V7.x and although I worked in I.T. I am now semi- retired and haven't upgraded our systems for some years.

Needless to say using older Celeron based systems can be extremely frustrating to say the least. We run our network 24/7 and operate our own mail server via a broadband connection,

We have been using SuSE 9.2, and after getting the new hardware I intend to do a new install of SuSE 10.0 ,or 10.1 I have been doing a lot of reading, googling and general preparation for making the changes and will be building the system myself.

I expect the changeover to have a dramatic improvement in speed and user pleasure, and I will do the diplomatic thing and replace my wife's system first.

Wife's machine is used for the usual email, OpenOffice functions, surfing, card games etc. but she also wants to be able to work with her photo's. Presently she uses Digikam and is learning Gimp. So the graphics are important.

I would appreciate any comments on the following to assist me with deciding the final configuration..

1. I would like to move to an AMD 64 processor and gather that I can use the 64 bit version without any issues and that 32 bit programs will still run OK. is that correct? Yes, but the issue is a bit more complex. Some things aren't available in 64bit, and where you run programs that depend on 32bit libraries, you run into trouble. For example, mplayer can use windows codecs to play stuff like quicktime and windows media video and a host of other formats

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 14:42 +1000, John wrote: that don't have proper opensource tools available. However, the windows codecs are 32bit, so mplayer needs to be 32bit. Now if you just watch the occasional clip, this isn't much of a problem and the packman rpms would do you well. But if you're serious about your multimedia, you find that you have to have many more things installed as 32bit binaries/libraries in order for it to work well. I've gotten myself tied up so badly in this I'm thinking of just loading 32bit SUSE again, seeing as I do very few things that could benifit from 64bit processing.

2. I am going with a 939 socket m/b, my initial preference is Giga-Byte (eg GA-K8N Pro-SLI, GA-K8N-SLI) as I have had reliable service from three GB boards for over 5 years. I've built many more than three (three hundred maybe) machines with Gigabyte boards, and have never had any problems with them.

3. The CPU I am considering is the AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or 3700+ San Diego, there is a reasonable price difference between these and a cache of 512 or 1mb. Would there be a significant difference with the 3700+ given the nature of the usage mentioned (photos). I don't know what the CPU speeds are, but the cache makes a significant difference with CPU intensive stuff. My notebook is a Turion64 1.8GHz with 1MB, my desktop is a 2GHz AthlonXP with 256k. In both video encoding and image processing, the Turion outperforms the Athlon by a factor of 2.

4. I would install a minimum of 1Gb ram or should we look at 2Gb. If you can afford 2GB, get it - you'll grow into it eventually.

5. Where I would appreciate some advice is on the graphics side, graphic cards to date have only been an early Nvidea PCI with 64kb, and a later upgrade to an AGP ATI Radeon 9200 with 128Kb. What would be a reasonable choice for a graphics card to give her a real benefit in handling photos? On two machines, one with a 64MB Radeon 7000, the other with a 64MB GeForce2 GTS, but otherwise identical, I could not tell the difference.

6. I am also looking at cases, we are in australia and our summers here can get quite warm so I am looking at effective cooling and quiet (no water systems thanks) with reasonable styling and installation with minimum screws. I am considering the Thermaltake Soprano, Silverstone TJ06 or an Antec case (without the side windows). Can't really help you much here. The best case I've ever owned, as far as thermal design goes, happens to be the cheapest, and it's a no-name. One that does work fairly well is Gigabyte's full-ATX boxes. Here in South Africa it gets pretty hot too, and my housemate doesn't have any cooling issues with his.

Hans