Thank you, Paul and others, for your comments. Paul Stimpson <p...@stimpsonfamily.co.uk> said: > I generally reckon on 3-5 years' life for a PSU. If your PSU is older > than 3 years then I would pension it off or, more likely, get a new case > so my new toy is shiny too. If your PSU is that age, it may not have > SATA power connectors for newer drives either. Has the old PSU got > enough watts for the stuff you intend to put into the machine? If the > machine has legacy PATA (IDE) drives then they are probably towards the > end of their service life too and you would get better performance, and > freedom from the worry the drives are going conk out on you, from going > to modern SATA drives.
I assembled the machine in 2002. There is a 12v connector (assuming wire colours are consistent with respect to the main ATX connector), but of course, it might not fit a modern board. Drives are IDE, there are two unused smaller power connectors, I have no idea what they are for. If I have to replace the PSU, that just leaves me with a case with a slightly sticky power switch. Not worth the trouble. Time for a new machine, I think, and to avoid a lot of hassle, one with Debian already installed. > What is your intended use for the machine? I'm into 3D rendered games > and handling video. The highest performance CPU I could find that would > fit in that board was a dual core. For my usage, I would consider it a > little underpowered. I've no great interest in games (the only one I thought was any good was called bz and it ran on a cluster of Silicon Graphics machines - that was years ago) and so far, I have not done any video editing. However, that is something I might do. I am considering getting one of these: https://secure.dnuk.com/systems/configure/d340.php a Deskstar D340, which is where I got the idea of an AMD 75 chipset from. I am not sure what motherboard DNUK are using, but if not the MSI FM2-A75MA-E35, it must be something very similar. There is the option of a quad core processor. How good is standard Linux software at exploiting these? For example, if the GIMP was processing an image, would it split it into 4 parts and process them concurrently? That is something I would find useful. <arturla...@gmail.com> said: > As I wrote in previous thread, there should be no problem with any > motherboard, but I will go to Intel platform - all because of AMD > graphics card driver. You are going to use integrated GPU and I am sure > that Intel HD Graphics will be much less problematic. DNUK are only offering AMD and I suppose must have solved any graphics problems. I have not found any supplier of Intel-based machines with Debian installed. Some years ago when I was using SuSE, I did have graphics problems - the machine would crash sometimes. With Debian, I have not attempted to install any 3D drivers and have had no such problem. I have not found out how to make Debian use all my 1GB of RAM with an AMD processor, but as the minimum RAM DNUK offer is 4GB, they must have solved that problem as well. Gordon Scott <gor...@gscott.co.uk> said: > My only personal issue with Ubuntu itself is the Unity desktop I am quite happy with Debian KDE, and intend to stay with that. I have nothing particular against other desktops, it is just what I have got used to. > Most stuff just installs and runs. I suspect I will have to re-compile some 32-bit C software, but I have the source code along with make files etc. Peter Alefounder. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
