Re: An AMD64 or my (or your) dreams - what to buy?
Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote:
So, the question is:
What would you suggest to buy as a complete AMD64 machine?
The more details you could give (so that I could check whether my store
has this hardware) - the better. Altough I can spend reasonable amount
of money on that machine - I don't need things like more than one CPU,
Hyperspace-3d graphics accelleration (altough I might play Quake or
UT once in a while... ;-) or a HDTV tuner...
I recently bought a 3000+ with an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe which works well
except for the network card which is a Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet
which seems to have problems because of a buggy eeprom from ASUS. The
driver continuously complains about an "internal software error",
slowing the system down seriously. There is a patch available providing
a work-around (see
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0404.3/0090.html).
I havn't installed Kernel 2.6.7 yet, so maybe it's fixed already?
However, if you are going to use a precompiled 64bit Kernel to install
Debian which you most likely are, I'd recommend to use another network
card with this board before compiling your own Kernel.
As for video cards, I use an ATI FireGL 8700 (based on a Radeon 8500)
for which the ATI drivers fail to detect my digitally connected LCD an
turn that off. I have contacted ATI in this matter, but their support is
slow, you have to answer the same questions over and over again to keep
them working on it, but no results. There are Opensource DRI drivers,
but you have to patch and compile your own X-Server to get a version
supporting s3tc textures (read: compressed textures with which games
look much more beautiful). You also have to use a recent DRM Radeon
kernel module to get AGP working (the one from Debian package
drm-trunk-module-* works) and enabling DGA lets X crashes immediately
(DGA used to work with the FireGL on my old Athlon TB system though). So
my clear recommendation: NVIDIA (I'm going to get one really soon now).
They provide 64 bit drivers already.
The rest of my configuration works flawlessly, i.e. the onboard Sata,
Sound, USB, Firewire etc. on the K8V all work with no problems.
Cheers
Bastian
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