[PLUG] local hardware

Aaron Ten Clay aaron at madebyai.com
Sat Mar 18 01:51:51 UTC 2006


On Fri March 17 2006 15:41, Michael M wrote:
> PC Club has a nice-looking AMD Athlon 64 2.4GHz with 512MB DDR and a
> Gigabyte motherboard with this chipset:
>  
> NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6100 and NVIDIA nForce™ 430; 
> Super I/O: Winbond W83627 chip; 
> Integrated peripherals; 
> VIA VT 6307 IEEE1394 controller; 
> CICADA VSC 8201 Gigabit LAN PHY chip; 
> Realtek ALC880 Audio Codec.
> 

Well, over the years my experience has generally been more comfortable using Linux on Intel-centric platforms. Intel's drivers are in the kernel for their NICs, and their P/S ATA controllers are some of the best-supported under Linux. AFAIK Intel is the only company who writes drivers that are actually distributed with the kernel. I like that, for reliability and guaranteed workingness (as much as it can be).

I've never heard of CICADA, and I configure on average 2 Linux kernels a day (I've never seen support either hacked in the kernel or natively), so that's the first red flag I notice. Also, I've had issues with realtek codecs under Linux recently, maybe the hacked drivers haven't caught up (I've never gotten their binaries to work at all)

Lately I've been recommending Intel D865GHZ boards with 3GHz Celeron Ds. The pair can be had for $120, then all you need is a hard disk drive, ram, case, and optical drive. (That board has audio, gigabit LAN, and video). And the 3GHz celeron Ds are very snappy, even without hyperthreading.

--
Aaron

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