[Techtalk] Buying a machine without Windows

Nicole Zimmerman colby at wsu.edu
Mon Oct 29 16:03:32 EST 2001


> That's a good point.  I'd love to hear people's experience with
> the newest AMD processors for Linux.  

I use an AMD Athlon 850 and my husband has an Athlon 1.1 GHz and we have
had no problems with them in linux. I use the hardware sensors on my
motherboard with some neato linux software to monitor temp and voltage.

There is a hardware debate to be had about what motherboard to choose,
though. Some people strongly dislike Via and ALI chipsets, I could really
care less. I use the Asus A7V and my husband uses the Asus A7A266 and
neither of us have had issues except his brief experience with DDR RAM (an
RTFM). Admittedly I have not played with my Ultra ATA 100 Promise
controller.

If you want to put together your own box, I think the biggest things to
watch out for are video, sound, and network cards. I use a Soundblaster
Live with no issues on the sound front. Video... my husband uses the
Matrox G400 and it works great, but is getting a little slow for massive
gaming. It is a great card for occasional game-playing workstations. I use
a Radeon 64MB DDR, which is now no longer a bitch to set up but still not
as happy go-lucky as the G400. Better video quality, though. I have heard
decent things about the nVidia cards, but never used one in a linux box (I
opted for the open-development Radeon). Networking-wise, I always use 3com
cards with no issues. The Intel eepro cards are also good.

I guess if you use a modem, that would be an issue, but I have no
experience here. Best advice is stay away from winmodems ;o)

Another thing to watch out for as far as hardware goes is hard drives.
Don't buy an IBM 75GXP, they are being RMAd left and right and there is
much word of a class action suit. I have had bad experiences with Maxtor
drives but others have had no trouble. Currently my husband and I both use
IBM 60GXP drives.

-nicole





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