StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The story so far: About a year ago, the IDE controller on my motherboard started giving me trouble, and corrupted my boot partition (thankfully a very small 32MB partition that contained only my Linux kernel and bootloader) before I disconnected my hard drive to prevent further damage. After that, I spent a while running everything from a Knoppix LiveCD that I had luckily burned a few months earlier, before buying a cheap laptop which has served me reasonably well for Internet browsing and other essentials, but is, as the French say, rather crap when it comes to games.

Fast-forward to the present day, in which my financial situation has improved quite a bit and I figure I have good reason to believe that I'll be afford the nevessary parts to upgrade my main computer to present-day standards. However, I'm a bit out of dat when it comes to the latest offerings by the various hardware companies, so I'm turning to the forum for help.

My graphics card selection is mostly made for me due to the fact that Nvidia is the only company out there that makes reasonably powerful GPUs with decent Linux drivers, so it's just a matter of me finding whichever one of their cards best suits my price point. I mostly need help choosing a motherboard. I'm not looking for something absolutely bleeding-edge, but whatever I get needs to be enough to play any games currently on the shelf at a decent speed with decent detail settings. I'm, of course, not going to be using the MB's onboard video hardware, so I don't really care if it's somewhat rudimentary or even non-existant. I might even be getting a dedicated sound card, so that doesn't need to be included either (although I don't know if they even still make motherboard without onboard sound. The three games that the new computer absolutely positively has to be able to run well are Dreamfall, Supreme Commander and Bioshock.

Mostly, I'm looking for something reliable that won't introduce any unexpected bottlenecks and won't crap out on me like the ECS POS I used to use did. Also, I've been and AMD fanboy for a while now, but I've heard that Intel's got a new line of chips that offer better performance for a lower price than anything AMD has at present. Is it finally time for me to jump ship and join the Intel camp?

This computer will be dual-booting between Linux and Windows. The Windows installation will most likely be either the Win2K Professional that I used before the IDE issues began, or the WinXP Home Edition that came with my laptop (since I'm pretty much only going to be using the Windows partition for games anyway.)

Any suggestions?

I belive Edi has nice words to say about ASUS intel motherboards, while I'd advise you to pick up the E6300 Core 2 Duo CPU.

On graphics card, a 7600 should be fine for you and not break the bank.

RAM, Look for DDR2 800.

You'd be right, Ace. I'm running an Asus P5B Deluxe Wifi/AP version and it hasn't given me any trouble at all. Has one standard IDE controller and a load of SATA controllers, two built-in LAN cards and is overall a very nice mobo. It also gives good possibilities for overclocking if you'reinto that, but I've not done it. I like keeping my warranties intact.

Haven't tried running Linux on this machine yet, but it shouldn't be a problem.

Edi

Linux has minor issues on the P5B Deluxe since it's bleeding edge and is unsupported by the stable versions of most distros. I'd recommend this board anyway, since the issues will be ironed out. Right now

Issues-

IDE support nonfunctional in older distros, hence I'm using Edgy Beta. Be sure to pass irqpoll in grub so it actually boots and sees the SATA drives.

One of the gigE connectors is nonfunctional (there are two controllers, one PCI-e, one PCI- use the top PCI one).

/proc/cpuinfo doesn't show the overclocked speed, shows 2.13 when it's really 3.0. lm-sensors doesn't work, have to wait until next release.

Crappy builtin wifi support- open source use ndiswrapper- you lose the ability to use monitor/master mode though.


Again, these are minor, just slightly annoying, and many of the other core 2 motherboards have them as well, or lack the nonfunctional features entirely anyway. Most should be fixed in 6 months, except the wireless drivers which haven't been updated in a year. I'd still recommend this motherboard, esp when overclocking.

I'm compiling the 2.6.19 ubuntu kernel from GIT to see if it solves some of the problems.

I'm not really going to need Wi-fi or gigabit ethernet in this computer anyway, and if I got them I'd prefer to do it through add-on cards, but I'll take a look at what boards Asus offers that suit my needs a bit better. I take it I shouldn't bother looking into AMD chipsets/CPUs at this point in time, then?

ETA: I feel I should point out that I am still on a budget for this system, and would prefer a motherboard with a focus on doing motherboard-y stuff well than one with a million and one bells and whistles crammed in. Also, I've been looking through the product listings for one of the computer stores I buy from reasonably often, and there seems to be quite a variety of boards from any given company for the same socket type (I've been looking at socket LGA775.) Are there any particular features I should keep my eye out for?

Just because it's a LGA775 socket doesn't mean it supports Core 2 processors. Core 2s require a more advanced VRM, so make sure it explicitly supports it.

I third the suggestion of the P5B Deluxe. It's a very nice board. it happens to have the nice feature of being able to flash the BIOS from the BIOS. I'll admit I'm not running Linux though.

What exactly is your budget, DI? That would help a lot. And what do you already have? Monitor? Mouse? Keyboard? Hard drive(s)? Case? And do you plan on overclocking?

In general, you want a fairly powerful GPU for those games. The best graphics card for the money right now is the GeForce 7900 GTO, which for all intents and purposes is a GTX in disguise for about $250.

Processor should probably be a Core 2 Duo E6400, which I believe runs about $230.

The P5B is a great mobo from what I hear, but very expensive. I'm pretty sure you can get perfectly good ones for a lot less.

For RAM, there's no performance advantage on DDR2-800 over 667 unless you plan on overclocking, and overclocking is frankly a fool's game. For the extra money you spend on RAM and memory, you could have just gotten a much more powerful GPU that would be a much better real world gain. RAM prices have gone up recently for reasons that are unknown to me, so 2 GB of DDR2-667 is about $215 right now.

If you need a hard drive, the Seagate 7200.10 320 GB is less than $100.

For cases, there's a Coolermaster with good reviews for $45.

The best PSU's for the money, near as I can tell, are Fortrons. Avoid any brand other than Antec, Fortron, PC Power and Cooling, Seasonic, and a few others. Most PSU's are terrible, even if their manufacturers make other products that are reputable. If you get a good brand, you don't need to worry as much about wattage, since the recommended wattage ratings are vastly overconservative to account for crappy PSU's that don't put out nearly as much power as they claim to. 400-450 watts should give plenty of overhead, and I believe there's a Fortron in this range for under $50.

All told, you're looking at about $950 including tax and shipping if you don't need a hard drive, monitor, keyboard, or mouse. For a system that's very close to top of the line, that's extremely good.

Ace Pace wrote:I belive Edi has nice words to say about ASUS intel motherboards, while I'd advise you to pick up the E6300 Core 2 Duo CPU.

On graphics card, a 7600 should be fine for you and not break the bank.

RAM, Look for DDR2 800.

Is DDR 800 really that much of an improvement over DDR 667?

I've already got a case (although I need a new PSU), a monitor (although I've been thinking of replacing it with an LCD) and a mouse/keyboard/etc. I'm not planning on overclocking, and my planned budget it looking absurdly low after seeing how much some of this stuff is going to cost me. I've got a fair bit of money available, but I was hoping I wouldn't have to spend all of it. I was hoping to spend about CAN$400 all told, but I think I can manage about double that.

I've also got an AGP GeForce FX5200, but everything seems to have moved on to PCIe now, and an 80GB HD, which is really all I need, especially since I'm planning on putting a dual-layer DVD burner in the new computer, so it'll be fairly easy to clean house from time to time.

EDIT: This one looks like it'd be well within my price range and at a quick glance at the feature set it looks like it'd suit my needs. Are there any glaring defiencies here that I should know about?

Jaepheth wrote:

Ace Pace wrote:I belive Edi has nice words to say about ASUS intel motherboards, while I'd advise you to pick up the E6300 Core 2 Duo CPU.

On graphics card, a 7600 should be fine for you and not break the bank.

RAM, Look for DDR2 800.

Is DDR 800 really that much of an improvement over DDR 667?

The increase in memory bandwith apparently makes up for the disadvantage of the RAM not operating synchronously. It's apparently more advantageous to run RAM at 533 than at 667, due to the asynchronous penalty. *shrug* I've got it running synchro, but then, I've got my 2.4GHz CPU running at 3.06 GHz.

Drooling Iguana wrote:EDIT: This one looks like it'd be well within my price range and at a quick glance at the feature set it looks like it'd suit my needs. Are there any glaring defiencies here that I should know about?

That one may or may not support Core 2 Duo depending on board revision. It needs to be a R2.0 or higher board.

Why not go w/ the vanilla P5B-E?

Note that you'll still have issues w/ a nonfunctional IDE controller if you're using something w/ a P965 chipset (which are pretty much all mid-range Core 2 chipsets), so get a SATA optical drive if you can. I believe Gentoo and Fedora Core 6 can take special parameters as a workaround- for Ubuntu you'll have to use the Edgy beta if you want to install over an optical drive.


Nowadays just getting more hard drives is almost as cost effective as burning DVDs (and w/o the opportunity costs of swapping disks, running out to buy them, etc). DVDs are just useful for backups of important data (since HDDs die), and putting stuff in a form that's convenient to distribute.

Also, note that that board you posted has the problematic Marvell PCIe gigabyte ethernet controller that plagues my P5B-D, and doesn't seem to have an additional PCI one to fall back on (sure, they'll fix it in a few months, but do you really want to wait till then for internet?)

I'd suggest the P5B-E, but that also doesn't have ethernet working out of the box (at least you can compile them in afterwards).


Regular P5B has support, but again has the CDROM issue, and is cheaper too (few bugs like an internal RAID port paired w/ an external, but motherboard RAID sucks anyway). I guess this is the better choice, since the improvements of the P5B-E are minimal anyway.

Beowulf wrote: The increase in memory bandwith apparently makes up for the disadvantage of the RAM not operating synchronously. It's apparently more advantageous to run RAM at 533 than at 667, due to the asynchronous penalty. *shrug* I've got it running synchro, but then, I've got my 2.4GHz CPU running at 3.06 GHz.

How hot are you letting your CPU go? My 6400 is capable of going over 3.2, but at that point when the CPU is pegged using the thermal analysis tool, temperatures exceed 61C which I don't consider safe (obviously this isn't realistic usage but still (Prime alone only kicks it up to 53-55C)).

If all of Asus's Core 2 Duo boards seem to have such trouble with Linux support then maybe I should start looking into another brand. Anyone have any other recommendations for something of half-decent quality?

Pu-239 wrote:How hot are you letting your CPU go? My 6400 is capable of going over 3.2, but at that point when the CPU is pegged using the thermal analysis tool, temperatures exceed 61C which I don't consider safe (obviously this isn't realistic usage but still (Prime alone only kicks it up to 53-55C)).

TAT only gets it up to 55C. Dual folding maintains it at 44-46C.

Drooling Iguana wrote:If all of Asus's Core 2 Duo boards seem to have such trouble with Linux support then maybe I should start looking into another brand. Anyone have any other recommendations for something of half-decent quality?

It's not Asus Core 2 Duo boards, but P965 boards, because the IDE controller isn't in the chipset, but is rather another part. The P975 boards don't have this problem, but they are more expensive.

Then I'm thinking that maybe I shouldn't bother with the Core 2 Duo and get myself an Athlon 64 instead and use the money I save on a nice GPU.

I'd still get a core 2 duo system- the IDE can be worked around w/ by using SATA optical drives, or using more bleeding edge distros (Edgy's out in less than a month anyway). Besides, a SATA cdrom drive will save a PATA port, of which there are only two anyway. Out of the Asus boards I'd pick the P5b vanilla if I were you, since it has a decently supported ethernet.

I've had problems accessing the SATA HDD on my P5B Deluxe (w/ an ICH8R southbridge)- passing irqpoll as a boot option helps.

An alternative which is rather cheap *and* supports SLI is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131032 . Very poor overclocking, but you're not doing that anyway. Seems to have the supported non-PCI-E gigE controller

I'm mostl likely going to be running Gentoo as my Linux distribution (stable, though, not ~x86) so I'll have a fairly recent version of the kernel installed. However, I'd like to salvage at least the DVD-ROM drive from my existing computer, and it's IDE. Will that be a problem?

I've also been looking at some dual-layer DVD burners, but a lot of the ones I'm seeing are just ATA, not SATA. Will that still work?

Gentoo will work, though I don't consider any version of it stable. It'll all work, you'll just need a very recent kernel. Make sure it supports the Jmicron PATA controller if you're going w/ the P5B's. Also, w/ the install CD which doesn't support that, pass all-generic-ide as a boot option. Same parameter applies to Fedora (not sure if it's only 6, or 5 too). Ubuntu stable doesn't work at all.


Keep in mind you'll only have a max of two ATA drives anyway, and your current HDD is probably ATA, so you won't have room for another ATA drive, should you decide to continue using your DVD-ROM. SATA burners seem to be rare though, so you might be better off getting an ATA one w/ an adapter.