Re: future of ATX?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Slightly off topic but I'm soon going to be making a new computer (my first in 12 years) and will be using AMD with Debian. The standard board/power/box form-factor has been ATX for a while. Does anyone see anything else on the horizon? I plan to buy a good case and power supply with excellent cooling for long life. If theres a new standard soon to replace ATX then I'll wait and get that; if not, I'll stick with ATX. There is mini-itx, and I believe there is a board that takes an amd processor. Of course it is not going to replace ATX, no way. Nice if you want something really compact though, and don't need multiple pci slots. . . Helge Hafting -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 10:23:04PM +0100, A.E.Lawrence wrote: > PCI Express is a significant advance over standard PCI. (Better physics, > primarily.) High speed unidirectional serial links, versus slower parallel bidirectional links. It's a good change. Whether you want PCI slots or PCIe slots depends on which cards you intend to install. Most people don't add very many cards anymore, so it may not matter to most people. I think personally I would prefer 2 or 3 PCI slots and 2 PCIe slots (preferably x4 or x8 slots), plus one or two PCIe x16 slots for video card(s). -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 03:18:56PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Are there any other form-factors on the horizon that would make a good > ATX box and PS obsolete? Are there boxes that are future-oriented (lots > of bays, lots of room for air to flow, bottom cooling like AMD suggests) > that will take ATX, BTX, and whatever else may be coming? Is any > particular brand better at making a box than their competition (with the > same features), e.g. the stuff that doesn't make it onto a spec sheet? ATX cases you can buy anywhere. BTX often requires buying an ATX case that is BTX capable, along with a BTX conversion kit. Finding a BTX motherboard is also very hard, since it really is only used by OEM's. You can get inverted cases which put the power supply on the bottom and simply install the ATX board upside down. Just make sure you don't get an ATX board that uses heatpipes for cooling then since they don't work upside down (which rules out most high end Asus boards, or in my case, rules out upside down cases). I don't know why no one seems to make a case that has the power supply at the bottom but leaves the motherboard orientation normal (actually my silverstone case put on it's side would be such a case, since the power supply is actually mounted next to the PCI slots, not next to the CPU.) > I know that processors keep getting faster, but is the other technology > that makes up the computer settling out? E.g. PCI has been out for a > long time. > > For motherboard brands, are some better for Linux and reliability in > general than others? AMD tech-support says they're all the same. Do I > just list the jacks I want and see which is cheaper, integrated vs. > separate PCI cards? (Assuming lots of RAM in any case) Some motherboard makers are better at writing BIOS's than others. Lately it seems mainly that some BIOS's have bugs in ACPI which makes linux unhappy. Most seem OK though. Some boards allow memoery remapping (required BIOS and chipset/memory controller support), while others don't. Without it you really can't have more than 3GB RAM in your system, or at least you loose between 512 and 1024MB of your ram between 3 and 4GB, with anything past 4GB being available just fine. Early athlon 64's could not remap memory, while most of them can. All current models certainly can. Some chipsets for intel cpus can remap memory, although as far as I know the majority never could. I think the latest ones may be able to (I sure hope so). -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 03:18:56PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > For motherboard brands, are some better for Linux and reliability in > general than others? Tyan as one definite ace in its sleeve that I appreciate much, and that you may appreciate or not: They support LinuxBIOS on all their Opteron motherbords; see http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Products#Tyan_Computer and http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Supported_Motherboards#Tyan -- Lionel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 03:18:56PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > For motherboard brands, are some better for Linux and reliability in > general than others? AMD tech-support says they're all the same. Do I > just list the jacks I want and see which is cheaper, integrated vs. > separate PCI cards? (Assuming lots of RAM in any case) I think the "consumer side" features are mostly the same, but there are finer details which may be interesting or not depending on what do you want. For example, I have a Gigabyte board, that is almost feature-equivalent to an MSI board I have access to - at least on the marketing level. But on the MSI board the second gigabit ethernet controller shares the PCI bus with the Silicon Image SATA controller, while on the Gigabyte board the second ethernet controller is connected using PCI-E and thus does not have to share bandwidth with the SATA controller. Now I do not have gigabit equipment here so I cannot test the speed difference (and I'm using the nForce SATA controller anyway), but these small details can make the difference between "a desktop board that is good for a server as well" and "a desktop board that I wouldn't put in a server". Gabor -- - MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute Hungarian Academy of Sciences - -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I know that processors keep getting faster, but is the other technology > that makes up the computer settling out? E.g. PCI has been out for a > long time. PCI Express is a significant advance over standard PCI. (Better physics, primarily.) ael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 02:05:09PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 08:00:23PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > The standard board/power/box form-factor has been ATX for a while. Does > > anyone see anything else on the horizon? I plan to buy a good case and > > power supply with excellent cooling for long life. If theres a new > > standard soon to replace ATX then I'll wait and get that; if not, I'll > > stick with ATX. > > ATX doesn't seem to be going away. BTX on the other hand seems to be a > short lived dead end. > Are there any other form-factors on the horizon that would make a good ATX box and PS obsolete? Are there boxes that are future-oriented (lots of bays, lots of room for air to flow, bottom cooling like AMD suggests) that will take ATX, BTX, and whatever else may be coming? Is any particular brand better at making a box than their competition (with the same features), e.g. the stuff that doesn't make it onto a spec sheet? I know that processors keep getting faster, but is the other technology that makes up the computer settling out? E.g. PCI has been out for a long time. For motherboard brands, are some better for Linux and reliability in general than others? AMD tech-support says they're all the same. Do I just list the jacks I want and see which is cheaper, integrated vs. separate PCI cards? (Assuming lots of RAM in any case) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 08:00:23PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Slightly off topic but I'm soon going to be making a new computer (my > first in 12 years) and will be using AMD with Debian. > > The standard board/power/box form-factor has been ATX for a while. Does > anyone see anything else on the horizon? I plan to buy a good case and > power supply with excellent cooling for long life. If theres a new > standard soon to replace ATX then I'll wait and get that; if not, I'll > stick with ATX. ATX doesn't seem to be going away. BTX on the other hand seems to be a short lived dead end. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: future of ATX?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Slightly off topic but I'm soon going to be making a new computer (my first in 12 years) and will be using AMD with Debian. The standard board/power/box form-factor has been ATX for a while. Does anyone see anything else on the horizon? I plan to buy a good case and power supply with excellent cooling for long life. If theres a new standard soon to replace ATX then I'll wait and get that; if not, I'll stick with ATX. Doug. BTX has been replacing ATX for years, and still doesn't have much penetration beyond OEMs like Dell. ATX will still serve you fine - if you're really worried, get a combination case like a Lian-Li V1000-series. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
