Hi everybody. My home desktop PC is finally beginning to die - the hard disk is failing, I want a faster processor, etc, so I've decided to build my own. I think I'm up to this - it'll teach me a lot, and, for financial reasons, I can pirate some stuff from the old one and gradually upgrade. Having had a good look around at various sites, I have some ideas, but I'd appreciate some input on components. My preference is for AMD, probably an XP 2100+ processor, and I'd like serial ATA, but I can't find much info using that in Linux (I'll be running SuSE 8.2 Pro and have seen Adam's post also). This will be a home machine, will need to do a bit of gaming (for my daughter) and I'll probably have to dual-boot with Windows XP, which I'd prefer to put on a separate drive. On looking at motherboards, I thought the Asus A7N8X was probably a good bet, but I think someone on this list has some problems with it. Any advice would be much appreciated, though sorry if this is a bit OT. David -- Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
Any advice would be much appreciated, though sorry if this is a bit OT.
Consider what you'd like, then consider what you *need*. Buying state of the art computer equipment is a fast and simple way to burn a lot of money. It'll be obsolete and worth half of what you paid for it before you get it sorted well enough to really use it. When building a new box for general use, I always look at components which are a year to 18 months out of date. They are easy to get hold of brand new (i.e. with warranty), very cheap to buy and well supported by modern software. The money saved by buying less than state of the art components can be spent on things which will really make a difference long term - like a gig of memory, or a fatter internet pipe. -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003
On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 11:35, Derek Fountain wrote:
Any advice would be much appreciated, though sorry if this is a bit OT.
Consider what you'd like, then consider what you *need*. Buying state of the art computer equipment is a fast and simple way to burn a lot of money. It'll be obsolete and worth half of what you paid for it before you get it sorted well enough to really use it.
Good advice, that.....and one I tend to forget. Thanks everyone for their input: I suspect I'll go with MSI for the motherboard, with Nforce2, and avoid serial ATA for the time being. David -- Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Monday 05 May 2003 06:23 am, David Robertson wrote:
On looking at motherboards, I thought the Asus A7N8X was probably a good bet, but I think someone on this list has some problems with it.
I have one, as I was hoping to get away from Via, but so far it hasn't been very nice. Here are the outstanding issues with 8.2, which I installed over the weekend. (yes, it takes that long to get in Canada...) - - To get the onboard NICs to work, you need to turn off acpi - - The 3Com NIC stopped bothering with ARP responses after a few hours. No amount of rebooting or cable checking fixed it. I had to use the Nvidia NIC with their closed-source driver - - You can only use Nvidia video cards, if you want 3d - - I could not get USB or Firewire to work at all, no matter what I did. That sucks because My GF can't sync her Visor and I have to use that stupid ps2 adapter on my mouse (It sometimes goes funny on the ps2 port) - - There's not a lot of fan connectors on the board What does appear to work: - - IDE DMA is fine, but there are only two IDE ports. I had 5 IDE devices on my old Soyo Dragon, and I had to move one of my drives to another computer and mount it via NFS. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get any more than 350 KiB/s over that, despite my network being 100Mb/s - - Serial ATA should work ok, as the chipset was the first one supported by Linux, thanks to the company who made it. I haven't been able to verify this beyond having the driver loaded, as I can't seem to find any serial ATA drives in Canada - - With a GF4 Ti4200, the video is quite fast. I'm using dualhead, too. I had to manually tweak my XF86Config file quite a bit, though - - The audio works, but only with the analog outputs - - Dual DDR seems to be ok, and the system is generally quite fast, especially considering the hammering I give machines (I had my PIII-500 laptop up to 40 load average at one point) After all of that, I regretted not getting a newer Soyo Dragon. I miss that board... - -- James Oakley Engineering - SolutionInc Ltd. joakley@solutioninc.com http://www.solutioninc.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+tnZ6+FOexA3koIgRAmKNAKCyYwCd93U/5eGl9EhFKfDcC9hkXwCgllhy 0JaaxMrPdH0dJsS7i8Vw/sM= =wvZe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On looking at motherboards, I thought the Asus A7N8X was probably a good bet, but I think someone on this list has some problems with it.
Well, I was going to suggest Intel system boards but I don't know if they work with AMD processors. I got bit by the bad cap issue that plagued Abit and others for a while. After that - and waiting 8 weeks for a replacement board from Abit - I swore off using anything other than Intel boards. Best part is replacements for bad boards are shipped overnight from Intel. Nice feature set on the boards as well. -- John LeMay KC2KTH Senior Enterprise Consultant NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-557-4848 Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions
On Monday 05 May 2003 19:07, John LeMay wrote:
On looking at motherboards, I thought the Asus A7N8X was probably a good bet, but I think someone on this list has some problems with it.
Well, I was going to suggest Intel system boards but I don't know if they work with AMD processors.
I got bit by the bad cap issue that plagued Abit and others for a while. After that - and waiting 8 weeks for a replacement board from Abit - I swore off using anything other than Intel boards. Best part is replacements for bad boards are shipped overnight from Intel. Nice feature set on the boards as well.
I went through about 4 months of hell trying to get a couple of ASUS boards to work. Kept sending them back and getting new ones. Then I heard from others than ASUS has really bad quality control and if you send a board back, they'll just turn it around and ship it to some other ..... sucker. In any event, I will never, ever buy another ASUS board.
-- John LeMay KC2KTH Senior Enterprise Consultant NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-557-4848 Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions
* Bruce Marshall (bmarsh@bmarsh.com) [030505 17:18]: -> ->I went through about 4 months of hell trying to get a couple of ASUS ->boards to work. Kept sending them back and getting new ones. Then ->I heard from others than ASUS has really bad quality control and if ->you send a board back, they'll just turn it around and ship it to ->some other ..... sucker. -> ->In any event, I will never, ever buy another ASUS board. Well, I just bought an Asus P4PE-L w/ a P4 2.4ghz cpu about a month ago. It's preformed quite well. One thing I might suggest is not to buy directly from any manufacturer. I would go to a local PC clone shop and buy from them, so that if the board or anything else is screwed up then you can take it back to them. It's much easier then doing the mail order..wait for days..get frustrated thing. *shrug* I like this mainboard it seems to be pretty nice. I do wish I would have bought the P4PE-LR which has a Promise RAID controller on it so I could have used more EIDE devices but I guess I can use the SATA controller when SATA drives are more common. All in all I would rate the board a buy. :) Cheers! -- Ben Rosenberg ---===---===---===--- mailto:ben@whack.org Tell me what you believe.. I'll tell you what you should see.
participants (6)
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Ben Rosenberg -
Bruce Marshall -
David Robertson -
Derek Fountain -
James Oakley -
John LeMay