On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 6:06 PM, geoffrey mendelson < geoffreymendel...@gmail.com> wrote:
There are plenty of them around. No one wants them because you can buy a new > computer with 1g of DDR2 or DDR3 RAM for less money than 1g alone of DDR(1) > RAM. Exactly. > There are two different Intel Graphics chip sets. I don't know which is > which, but a quick search should answer the question. The earlier ones are > chips that Intel bought a license to manufacture. They are not very good in > general and have closed source drivers. This makes them OK for Windows, a > problem for Linux. The second are the newer ones Intel designed and builds. > Well, i5-650 is supposed to be a member of the Clarkdale family, and its little brother (i3-530) was reviewed, e.g., here http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzkwOA - driver problems reported, GPU hangs, etc. But the date is Jan 22, 2010 - maybe there has been driver progress in the last 11 months? Intel's support/download page does not say a word about Linux - there are drivers for every Windows in the Galaxy, but there don't seem to be any proprietary Intel HD Linux drivers. Oron, can you comment? ;-) As for buying an I5 processor, there are newer I3's with similar performance > (for example 3gHz instead of 3.6gHz) for a lot less money. > Indeed, i3-540 3.06GHz is ILS505, while i5-650 3.20GHz is ILS815 at KSP. >From what I see, the latter has VT-d that I may want to play with (or maybe not) that comes with Intel TXT ("trusted execution technology"), unfortunately, and Turbo Boost Frequency that sounds nice to have. Various benchmarks that I saw (lies, damned lies, statistics, and benchmarks) seem to indicate a difference in overall performance, but not all that much. Thanks for pointing this out. > > As for realtek, they tend to have cheap chips, which generallty work well. > If you are concerend about support, check the exact model number of the chip > as they keep changing them and the linux drivers do not always "keep up". > > When you buy a mobo make sure you are getting one that supports full 64 bit > addressing. The H55 chipset seems OK in this respect - http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/322169.pdf Be warned that most of the current production really cheap (around 600 NIS) > LCD screens only have VGA ports. My LCD has a DVI port, but I never bothered to get a cable. > There are not a lot of things that run on Linux that use the extra > acceleration in expensive graphic cards, on the other hand if you are also > going to run Windows on it Not unless it is in a VM for some as yet unidentified specific purpose. > (see my other comment below) and play high end games (Fallout New Vegas > anyone?) you will need an extra "hot" graphics card. No, I did say games were out of scope. If you plan on running Windows on it, then IMHO you should buy a name brand > such as HP, Packard Bell, etc. The difference in cost between them and a > roll-your-own system is about the cost of a Windows license. If you do not > plan on running Windows on it, it pays IMHO to buy a "local" company's > product, e.g. Ivory or KSP and avoid the extra cost. > No Windows or Mac OSX, so I'll stick to KSP or Ivory who seem to have competitive prices. Besides, I don't like HP for various reasons, and I wouldn't touch PB (they still exist?!) with a ten foot pole. ;-) Thanks, Geoff, -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org
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