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  • Building a new desktop: hardware advice

    I am building a new desktop machine for home use (no gaming, but we will output DVD and MPEG movies to the TV). I would appreciate the Phoronix community's opinion regarding my hardware selection, as this is the first non-MS machine that I am building. I have tried to select components known to work with Linux in general, these are the components:

    Athlon 64 5200+


    Asus M3A board

    (we need both IDE and SATA, as my current 500GB hard drives are IDE)

    2 GB Kingston Value memory

    One of these video cards:


    I am leaning towards the second card because of the quiet fanless design, but I am a bit concerned about a fanless card. It also mentions OpenGL 2.0 compliance, which sounds good.

    Optiarc AD-7200S DVD?RW sata DVD burner


    This machine will likely flip flop between Debian and Fedora about once per year, with the occasional test drive of a different distro. I am on a budget, so I tried to cut corners but not too many. Any advice and suggestions regarding the hardware mentioned are much appreciated. Thanks.

  • #2
    ok, well first off, i'd look at integrating as much as you can in to the board if your looking for linux.

    Biostar TFORCE TA790GX3 A2+ which has the following ready to go.
    • HDMI, DVI and VGA built in.
    • Radeon HD3300 video card w/ built in video memory ( 128mb )
    • completely fanless.
    • 2x 16X pci express slots and 2x 1X Pci express ( both are v2.0 )


    as for the network, it's gigabit and has good linux support ( you can pick up the driver from http://www.realtek.com.tw/ )
    similar story with the sound card... also made by realtek.

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    • #3
      If your going a ATI based chipset for a MB I would recommend switching that optical drive to a parallel based one instead of a Sata based drive and purchase some IDE --> Sata converters for your harddrives. Sata+Optical= can result in really weird issues ranging from drives not showing up to disappearing. Given ATI's southbridge Sata issues, the safest route would be to go with a ATA optical.

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