How compatible will my new PC be with Linux?

[EarthMind]

I'm setting up a new computer and before I make the purchase I'd like to know how compatible the components will be with Linux.

The PC exists out of the following parts:

AMD Phenom II X4 955
ASRock K10N78 (will probably need to be flashed to enable support for the PII 955)
Details: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K10N78
Seagate ST31000528AS 1 TB
G.Skill DIMM 4 GB DDR2-1066 Kit
2 x Arctic-Cooling AF12025 PWM
SilverStone ST50F-230
Sharkoon Desperado Economy

I will also purchase an Nvidia GTX 260 graphic card and a better sound card (need to find one with good Linux support) at a later time.

I'm also open to suggestions.

Thank you for your time

[deanjo]

I'm setting up a new computer and before I make the purchase I'd like to know how compatible the components will be with Linux.

The PC exists out of the following parts:

AMD Phenom II X4 955
ASRock K10N78 (will probably need to be flashed to enable support for the PII 955)
Details: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K10N78
Seagate ST31000528AS 1 TB
G.Skill DIMM 4 GB DDR2-1066 Kit
2 x Arctic-Cooling AF12025 PWM
SilverStone ST50F-230
Sharkoon Desperado Economy

I will also purchase an Nvidia GTX 260 graphic card and a better sound card (need to find one with good Linux support) at a later time.

I'm also open to suggestions.

Thank you for your time

Should be fine.

[Adarion]

CPU = fine & fast but a powersucker, AMD has better models, though these 125 should be a TDP and average consumption may be far lower. Make sure to have ondemand/conservative governor and the appropriate AMD driver in kernel activated.
Board = huh, well. If Asrock works for you... I don't trust them too far but that's the pure HW quality side, compatibility should be ok.
Though you should take note that nvidia does not have free drivers. The nv one is only 2d and noveau... *cough* noveau to all honors but they are still long behind the HW development (can't blame them) since reverse engineering and trial + error is one hell of a job and time consuming.
You'll have the binary drivers only.

ASRock Instant Boot sounds like some Linux derivate. Can you flash the BIOS without having to use windows? Check if they provide some in-BIOS flash program or at least their chips can be flashed using a freeDOS boot media.

HDD, RAM fine
PSU looks overdimensioned to me. What's the efficiency on lower power usage? Don't be fooled by 85+ or something, that's maybe when your system really draws 450 of the 500W. But if should normally be far lower.

Nvidia GTX 260
see the issue with the drivers, don't have power usage numbers now

a better sound card
Why? You don't need one. These onboard chips are far better than back in the early 90ies. I don't see a point in it unless you do really lots of professional audio work.
If you need one Creative is definitely not the one to look for. They had their golden time back in 486 days but the issues of the last years on Linux as well as W32 were just horrifying me.

Anything else? Optical storage? Cardreader, something? Generally you could review the power profile.

[EarthMind]

Hey Adarion,

I certainly agree on the CPU part, it's a powersucker indeed. But so are the other AM3 chipsets and since I'm not a fanatic I'd like to use my computer as long as possible and make it easy to upgrade certain parts, other than the CPU & motherboard, when really needed.

Can you please elaborate on this:
Make sure to have ondemand/conservative governor and the appropriate AMD driver in kernel activated.

Finding the right mainboard was a really tough call (I spent 2 full days on finding the right hardware...) and the ASRock one was the best one from the list and worth less than 100 EUR (I don't want to spend more on the mainboard). If you feel like, kindly have a look at the AM2+ list (note: site is in German but it shouldn't cause any problem) here and tell me if you find something better but please follow these requirements:

- It has to support at least 8GB 1066 RAM (to be one the safe side)
- It has to have at least 1 PCIe 2.0 port and at least two PCI ports (or better)
- At least 6 USB ports in total (front & back of case)
- Onboard Nvidia, at least from the 8 series with a VGA port (No new ATI card on Linux for me yet)
- Onboard Realtek sound card, ALC888 or better (I trust them more than the VIA ones)

I read somewhere on the net that it's possible to flash the BIOS in BIOS mode but I'm going to re-check that. If it isn't possible it wouldn't be much of a problem since I also will be installing XP on my new PC for the games and Photoshop.

As for the power supply, in my (not-so-experienced) eyes it looked like a good one, taking into account that it should be able to handle an NV GTX 260 + Phenom II 955 + 4GB 1066 RAM at 500W, which is the minimum requirement for a GTX 260 card. Once again I'm open for suggestions and will certainly appreciate your input :-).

I know Nvidia has very bad open source driver support but I'm taking the overall quality of the hardware + driver in mind (yet again, not a fanatic). Despite the driver being proprietary, nvidia has great support for Linux, plus they also already have VPDAU (the biggest reason for my choice) in Linux while there is no ATI alternative available yet. To be honest, I was really tempted to get an ATI card because of the nice balance between quality & price but unfortunately it was a no go.

There is no need for me to buy a new drive because my current one isn't older than 1 or 2 years. It's a Plextor DVD writer and I'm very happy with it, although I did have DVD formatting problems in the beginning with other software than the official Plextor burning tool. I don't know if it's solved now because I haven't burned a DVD in a long while.

No need for a card reader yet, enough said :-).

Oh and there is also the WLAN adapter: Edimax EW-7711UTn. My D-Link is giving my periodic lag while I don't have it really long. At first I thought this was a driver issue because of it ocurring in Windows games only at first but after my upgrade to Jaunty I started noticing it in Linux games too. So no more D-Link for me in the future.

There is one more question I'd like to ask because you seem to be very experienced. Is the 1066Mhz RAM an advantage over 800Mhz RAM? I've checked several benchmarks and they do say so but I'm having my doubts since I also read that DDR2 RAM above 800Mhz are all factory overclocked and that they are not so stable as 800Mhz DDR2. Another thing was that the website where I'm buying the hardware at mentioned they would set the RAM to 800Mhz because of some reason written in German and that I couldn't understand.

Many thanks for your help!

[Ex-Cyber]

I also read that DDR2 RAM above 800Mhz are all factory overclocked

They aren't all factory-overclocked, but most of them are. More importantly, they're overvolted in order to achieve this. The standard voltage is 1.8V (which OCZ has the temerity to call "low-voltage").

[Adarion]

I certainly agree on the CPU part, it's a powersucker indeed. But so are the other AM3 chipsets and since I'm not a fanatic I'd like to use my computer as long as possible and make it easy to upgrade certain parts, other than the CPU & motherboard, when really needed.

Well, upgrading... I started with that in mind when I had my first own 486 and it was upgradeable. But that won't help for longer than maybe 3 or 4 years. After that sockets change and then you can buy a
whole new mainboard, CPU, RAM, sometimes even the ISA/PCI stuff since a new technique has come, or the PATA HDDs because today everything ships only with SATA and poor PATA support, a new PSU and even a new tower (AT->ATX)

Besides: You can still be upgradeable. There should be models with lower wattage by AMD on the market and you still can upgrade the CPU if neccessary. The CPU itself isn't that expensive. I got my 4850e (passively cooled) (without the passive cooler) for 45/50 Euro. They aren't that expensive. And the computing power should last a while.

Can you please elaborate on this:
Make sure to have ondemand/conservative governor and the appropriate AMD driver in kernel activated.

How familiar are you with Linux kernel configuration? Or what distribution are you going to use?

Finding the right mainboard was a really tough call (I spent 2 full days on finding the right hardware...)

Yes, recherching can take some time. Especially when one is picky like me and each board I evaluated had one no-go with it so I was never really satisfied. :/
But that's nothing in comparison to notebooks where you don't have the choice of parts.

> and worth less than 100 EUR
Well now I wonder where you did look. I know tech equipment is more expensive in .de than in the US but it shouldn't be more expensive than in .be.
So ASRocks normally go from 30 E to 70E.

here
Deutsch ist kein Problem. I am German.
But alternate is not really cheap. Anyway there are plenty of boards e.g. at mix-computer.de for 30 to 100 Euros and only a few "deluxe" models with questionable addons for >100E. (e.g. you probably don't need 4 graphic card slots)


> It has to support at least 8GB 1066 RAM (to be one the safe side)
Surely. Surely. I still have 3 boxes going very fine with 512M. Linux doesn't eat memory like some Windows Vista does. Note that you will need either a 64bit system or PAE to access all the memory above the 4GB-32bit frontier.
Some things are still not available on the 64bit side (Windows and Linux).
8 GB is more than enough unless you do openoffice dev+compiling every day or do scientific calculation.

> It has to have at least 1 PCIe 2.0 port and at least two PCI ports
Keep in mind that now most things are graphic cards that are really available for PCIe. 2 PCIs should be there, indeed. Especially since there are a lot of PCI cards around. And they're often cheaper than PCIe equivalents.

> At least 6 USB ports in total (front & back of case)
Can't speak for all manufracturers but the average ASUS motherboards comes with 10 to 12. USB is not a problem anymore today.
However USB3 will someday hit the shelves (Linux kernel already has a fist implementation to use it) but then you would have the upgradde problem. But on the other hand USB2 should fit most purposes nicely.


> Onboard Nvidia, at least from the 8 series with a VGA port (No new ATI
> card on Linux for me yet)
VGA? Okay, if you want some analog output that's fine. But it should also offer DVI.

> Onboard Realtek sound card, ALC888 or better (I trust them more than
> the VIA ones)
The new VIA onboards aren't that bad but with Realtek you're normally on the safe side. However, make sure it is not a special run of chips. I think some MB manufracturers had RealTek make chip series only for a certain issue of boards and then there is sometimes no specs and thus no driver for the chip (or at least not so soon).
But I guess the ALC888 should work. In doubt check ALSA's list.
And depends on the Kernel version you distribution is using. (But anything recent should do fine.)

> I read somewhere on the net that it's possible to flash the BIOS in
> BIOS mode but I'm going to re-check that.
Yeah, same mechanism but every vendor has a different market name for it.
These solutions are very nice and comfortable. I have a horror flashing a BIOS from any multitasking environment.

Give GIMP (capablilities of PS) and Inkscape (vector imaging) a try if you're already doing PS.


> As for the power supply
Umm, sadly the test from Germany's popular and serious mag c't (heise press) is quite some time ago. They had a nice number of PSUs tested and shown a lot of values, including efficiency on ultra-low (ACPI-off), low, med and high usage. Note: they refuse to have "test winners". So they give you the pure values and facts and let you decide in which situation which would be the best for your purpose.

> I know Nvidia has very bad open source driver support but I'm taking
> the overall quality of the hardware + driver in mind (yet again, not a
> fanatic).
Umm, yeah. Well. Time will show. I had nvidias back some years (some still in use on older computers) but they have this "legacy" issue so I switched to 2d use only on them with the free "nv"-driver.
I'm going with ATI now and yes, it's not all perfect but ok and developing. I just would suggest you not to invest too much money into a graphic card for now until the situation has cleared. (Unless you need it e.g. for Windows gaming)


>Plextor
Uh. Bad PR with the linux folks. Very bad. Someone wrote a tool that implemented the capabilities of the PlexTools on Linux and the mother company sued him. Even though it was free software. Furthermore Plextor has gone relabeling, a.f.a.i.r. they don't build drives anymore.
Anyway, I you already got it and it still works...


> My D-Link is giving my periodic lag ...
Humm, well. I'm not so familiar with different WLAN adapters and I do not trust WLAN in general. I have seen quite some boxes with WLAN at friends and most of them were not really well working (some better on Linux than Windows, some only on Windows and so on, but most of them often had sudden interrupts of connection or other crazy behaviour).
Can also be a router problem sometimes. Difficult to find a reason quickly. You will have to try (and hope).


> Is the 1066Mhz RAM an advantage over 800Mhz RAM?
Not that much if you ask me. The memory controller on the AMD-CPU must support it otherwise it will work with just the fastest speed the controller can do. But the Phenom2 should do the job.

>thing was that the website where I'm buying the hardware at mentioned
> they would set the RAM to 800Mhz because of some reason written in
> German and that I couldn't understand.
Can you send me the link or the text? I can look at it and translate it for you into English.

[deanjo]

They aren't all factory-overclocked, but most of them are. More importantly, they're overvolted in order to achieve this. The standard voltage is 1.8V (which OCZ has the temerity to call "low-voltage").

Actually DDR2-800 is a JEDEC specified speed and only the older OCZ ram modules require overvolting to reach that speed. Depending on series, DDR2-800 modules even from OCZ run @ 1.8 volts and higher voltages are only required for tighter timings (ie so called SLi ram or EPP ram) and OCZ specs them out at their more aggressive timings (the white sheets that come with the ram often will show a voltage operating range of 1.8 to 2.x. They will run fine at less agressive timings @ 1.8v)

How familiar are you with Linux kernel configuration? Or what distribution are you going to use?

I haven't seen a distro out there in a long long long time that did not have powerstepping enabled by default.

> Is the 1066Mhz RAM an advantage over 800Mhz RAM?
Not that much if you ask me. The memory controller on the AMD-CPU must support it otherwise it will work with just the fastest speed the controller can do. But the Phenom2 should do the job.

Actually if he is going a 4 DIMM layout then he will be limited to 800 Mhz unless he manually forces it in the BIOS (no guarantees with a ASRock BIOS) Even the Phenom II's memory controller only supports 1066 speeds when only two chips are used.

[EarthMind]

Hey Ex-Cyber,

Thanks for the reply. It seems like I've chosen the good RAM then since these are 1.8V ones .

Hey again Adarion,

Well, upgrading...

I've had my current PC for ca. 10 years now. In the beginning it was only a 1Ghz, 256MB RAM, 20Gb HDD, CD writer. After like 5-6 years I added 256MB more RAM, replaced the HDD with a 40GB one and replaced the CD writer with a DVD writer. That's what I meant with upgrading; just replacing the broken parts and upgrading the outdated stuff as it was really necessary and not making big changes such as replacing the motherboard or CPU as long as both are good enough for recent software. As long as it works smoothly there is no reason to upgrade. If I would want to change the CPU I'd be buying a complete new PC anyways just like now.

How familiar are you with Linux kernel configuration? Or what distribution are you going to use?

I'm very unfamiliar with the kernel, I'm just a level or two above a regular user and don't know much about the insides. Google helps me most of the time. Btw, I'll be using Mandriva and/or Ubuntu.

Yes, recherching can take some time. Especially when one is picky like me and each board I evaluated had one no-go with it so I was never really satisfied. :/

I know what you mean, I think I'm as much of a perfectionist as you on this matter, I just need to find the right stuff for the money.

But that's nothing in comparison to notebooks where you don't have the choice of parts.

That's also one of the reasons I won't be buying a notebook instead of a new PC (lifetime being the biggest one).

Well now I wonder where you did look. I know tech equipment is more expensive in .de than in the US but it shouldn't be more expensive than in .be.
So ASRocks normally go from 30 E to 70E.

That's true, only some hardware are cheaper than in my own country, especially the AMD processors. But other than the processor being much cheaper German shops mostly have a wider range of choices while in BE I either have to go with the really expensive or cheap junk hardware, there isn't much of a choice really. A big difference in price is for example the Phenom II 955. Here it would cost me 220 EUR and in Germany only 170-180 EUR. That's 40-50 EUR cheaper!

mix-computer.de

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look soon.

Surely. Surely. I still have 3 boxes going very fine with 512M. Linux doesn't eat memory like some Windows Vista does. Note that you will need either a 64bit system or PAE to access all the memory above the 4GB-32bit frontier.
Some things are still not available on the 64bit side (Windows and Linux).
8 GB is more than enough unless you do openoffice dev+compiling every day or do scientific calculation.

Yeah, I know about the 4GB with 32 bit thing. I read it yesterday that 32 bit systems only support up to 4 GB RAM and that the graphic card's RAM has to be taken into account too. Since I'll be buying a GTX 260 512MB RAM I'll only be able to use 3.512GB RAM. I'm not sure whether to go 64 yet because of compatibility issues.

However USB3 will someday hit the shelves (Linux kernel already has a fist implementation to use it) but then you would have the upgradde problem. But on the other hand USB2 should fit most purposes nicely.

That's not a problem, I've been working with USB 1.1 for years after USB 2.0 came out and in the end I bought a PCI card with USB 2.0 ports. As I said, I'm not an enthusiast .

VGA? Okay, if you want some analog output that's fine. But it should also offer DVI.

Yes, I didn't mention DVI-I as it's available on almost every recent graphic card. And the reason why I want VGA is because I'll still be using my CRT screen with the new PC for as long as I have the money to buy a good TFT one. Next to those, HDMI would probably come in handy too.

Yeah, same mechanism but every vendor has a different market name for it.
These solutions are very nice and comfortable. I have a horror flashing a BIOS from any multitasking environment.

About the BIOS part, I contacted ASRock about it yesterday and found out that I'll be able to flash the motherboard with a bootable floppy disk. I hope it won't matter if it's floppy disk or CD because I won't be using a floppy drive in my new PC.

Give GIMP (capablilities of PS) and Inkscape (vector imaging) a try if you're already doing PS.

I'm very familiar with GIMP but unfortunately it doesn't meet my needs. I find PS to be much easier to work with and I've never been able to let GIMP do some things which I could do in PS.

Umm, sadly the test from Germany's popular and serious mag c't (heise press) is quite some time ago. They had a nice number of PSUs tested and shown a lot of values, including efficiency on ultra-low (ACPI-off), low, med and high usage. Note: they refuse to have "test winners". So they give you the pure values and facts and let you decide in which situation which would be the best for your purpose.

That's a shame...

Umm, yeah. Well. Time will show. I had nvidias back some years (some still in use on older computers) but they have this "legacy" issue so I switched to 2d use only on them with the free "nv"-driver.
I'm going with ATI now and yes, it's not all perfect but ok and developing. I just would suggest you not to invest too much money into a graphic card for now until the situation has cleared. (Unless you need it e.g. for Windows gaming)

I'll be testing with the onboard one first and if it works as it should I'll be buying the GTX 260. And yeah , I'll be needing it for windows/Linux games mostly.

Uh. Bad PR with the linux folks. Very bad. Someone wrote a tool that implemented the capabilities of the PlexTools on Linux and the mother company sued him. Even though it was free software. Furthermore Plextor has gone relabeling, a.f.a.i.r. they don't build drives anymore.
Anyway, I you already got it and it still works...

That's too bad, I have good experience with Plextor. I used AOpen in the past and had many problems with it, it also had a low lifetime. After I tried Plextor all these problems - except for the *new* DVD formatting feature problem - were gone and I'm still using it . As long as it works I won't buy a new one and when it's time, I think I'd be buying something else than Plextor anyway.

Humm, well. I'm not so familiar with different WLAN adapters and I do not trust WLAN in general. I have seen quite some boxes with WLAN at friends and most of them were not really well working (some better on Linux than Windows, some only on Windows and so on, but most of them often had sudden interrupts of connection or other crazy behaviour).
Can also be a router problem sometimes. Difficult to find a reason quickly. You will have to try (and hope).

Trust me I've tested and tried (drivers, routers, USB ports, etc. etc..) a lot and in the end I could not think anything else than the adapter causing the problem. I'm not a fan of WLAN myself and would like to go ethernet mode but unfortunately that's not possible.

Can you send me the link or the text? I can look at it and translate it for you into English.

Der von Ihnen gew?hlte DDR2-Speicher entspricht nicht dem JEDEC Standard. Daher werden wir diesen Speicher auf JEDEC-konforme DDR2-800 Timings einstellen, falls Sie die Konfiguration inklusive Zusammenbau bestellen.

Actually, I don't really know what they mean with the standard. I tried Googling but there just was too much to read...

Hey deanjo,

I haven't seen a distro out there in a long long long time that did not have powerstepping enabled by default.

Thanks for telling, I'm glad that will save me some trouble.

Actually if he is going a 4 DIMM layout then he will be limited to 800 Mhz unless he manually forces it in the BIOS (no guarantees with a ASRock BIOS) Even the Phenom II's memory controller only supports 1066 speeds when only two chips are used.

So in other words: you think 800Mhz RAM would be better in my case?


Thank you all for your help!

[deanjo]

So in other words: you think 800Mhz RAM would be better in my case?


Thank you all for your help!

When it comes to end user performance you won't be missing anything. Synthetic benchmarks will show you a small increase but real world apps don't show any appreciable difference. Save some money and headache, go with DDR2-800, and use the money saved to send me a case of beer.

[EarthMind]

When it comes to end user performance you won't be missing anything. Synthetic benchmarks will show you a small increase but real world apps don't show any appreciable difference. Save some money and headache, go with DDR2-800, and use the money saved to send me a case of beer.

Thanks for the suggestion . I'll consider that case of beer