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Re: Building a new desktop: hardware advice

Dotan Cohen a écrit :

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
Debian 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 either Debian or Linux in general, these
are the components:

Athlon 64 5200+
http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopCPUDetail.aspx?id=39

Asus M3A board
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1934&l1=3&l2=149&l3=592&l4=0
(we need both IDE and SATA, as my current 500GB hard drives are IDE)

2 GB Kingston Value memory

One of these video cards:
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1720&l1=2&l2=6&l3=551&l4=0
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=2&l2=8&l3=634&l4=0&model=2051&modelmenu=1
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
http://www.sonynec-optiarc.eu/en/exhibits/half-height-drives/ad-7200s

This machine will likely flip flop between Debian and Fedora about
once per year, with the occasional test drive of a different distro,
if my past experience is an indicator. 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.
Hard to answer this without starting '®' 'tm' wars, for the cpu it's a matter of budget I guess, no compatibility issues. For the Motherboard you'll have to watch the chipset if it's really new, www.phoronix.com could be a good information source. When on a budget I often found Asrock MoBos to be cheaper for the same features than Asus, I didn't run in any compatibility issue lately with it, but neither did I with Asus. For the video card amd/ati is improving it's proprietary drivers, and the open sources solutions (mesa and radeonHD) are improving even faster, but I think nvidia is still in the lead. If you don't want to play games I found integrated video chipset like nvidia 7025/50 really efficient and cheaper, it's really enough to playback dvd's even on a big lcd tv. Fanless is always a good idea for a computer which is going to sit in a living room, the smaller the fans the noisiest very often...
Can't speak about the dvd drive, I have several brands of sata dvd drives and they all work ok, I just had to switch the sata controller to ide "compatibility" mode in the bios to install Etch, but once the system is set up it's working fine in sata mode.
Google around with your hardware references and linux/debian/ubuntu/fedora as keywords, you'll most probably find interesting things. 

Tom
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