On 10/23/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > See an earlier post. I upgraded to an AMD64 by mistake. I was pleasantly > surprised that the Sempron 2500+ was actually compiling source packages > 3x faster than my Duron 800Mhz. I thought the 2500 was pure marketing > hype.
Great! What motherboard are you using? > Onboard video (VIA/Savage) has always been a problem for me. Twice I > wound up buying an ATI card (Radeon VE/7000 and Mach64). I'm now planning > to go for a Radeon 9250. So you manage to set up ATI cards properly? I read the advice here and elsewhere, and went for the Radeon 9250's competitor - GeForce FX 5500 (manufactured by Gainward) for my present Socket 478 rig. Only problem so far with the 'nvidia' binary driver is that it's wiped out whenever your system auto-updates the kernel. > DMA 133 is fast enough for my 4x DVD writing and TV capture sessions (the > only tasks where hard drive speed is critical for me). How much faster is > SATA II say from SATA I? I've read that people who really want > performance will settle for nothing less than a SCSI. Do you have more than one drive? I have only one drive, and when it's moderately busy DVD burning slows down to 2X as reported by growisofs. Even if I could add another PATA HDD, I only have two IDE channels so there will be contention. So any new device will have to be SATA. Since I plan on upgrading, might as well get the most out of it! SATA I without NCQ doesn't seem any better than PATA. As for Paolo's comment on the premium pricing, these drives don't look premium at all: My PATA current drive, 120 GB/7200 RPM/2 MB cache ST3120022A - 4,200 The SATA I/NCQ 120 GB/7200 RPM/8 MB cache ST3120827AS - 4,800! Source: http://www.rsuncomputers.com/products.asp?id=HDS&cat=HDS http://www.rsuncomputers.com/products.asp?id=HDD&cat=HDD Looks like the chipset to watch is the ULi. The ULi M1575 is compliant with Intel's AHCI and is well-supported by Linux. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#uli-ahci However, it's not yet being manufactured yet and is present as a reference board: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2562 I hope ASRock adopts this. They have an interesting board out, with an older chipset: http://www.asrock.com/product/product_939Dual-SATA2.htm Which supports AGP (and even PCI video, for what that's worth). This could save me from having to buy a new PCI Express video card with DVI. (Not cheap!) Or, I could go for onboard video, but from the state of things, it's NVIDIA who's pushing that. NVIDIA moves faster in developing the nForce with SATA II/NCQ but as I read somewhere, they "make boards for Windows gamers" so Linux compatibility is not a concern for them. By the time this is out, the Opteron should be down to its normal price of <$200. Sweet. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
