[kkubasik]

Hey, I'm tired of dealing with irritating drivers for obscure devices on my box's that i own. While i have had the dubious joy of working on several IBM servers (all are linux compatable 2xwoot for IBM) My linux machines were hell and back getting all my hardware working (luckly 2 of them are servers and need no video/audio support) I am planning to build a new 100% linux compatable box. Im looking to keep it in the 3 digit (US$) range. Ive started to look around and prefer nvidia to radeon for graphics, but for the time being the rest of my inital plan shall stay hidden so i dont throw any input i get. But what are your opinions? some things may never be resolved, such as amd v pentium, but if yall were to build a linux box for under 1000 what would you throw in it? (peripherials and modems are unimportant)

--Note--
If you have no clue, please dont post to say that.

[Kaiserollofdoom]

Whats your use for it.
If its a media center pc give it nice big 10K SATA HDD. And if you can Make it
64 bit. Oh and a really good sound card from Creative Labs(or someother sound card thats linux compatiable)

Other than That use the cheapest stuff you can find except Cpu and Ram which is what linux really needs in terms of a blissful linux experence

[fomhoire]

i concur if you can defantly go 64, im currently buiding a new box my self but being a poor student i got a amd opteron cpu and then when prices are down and ive got money ill upgrade to a amd 64 fx-54 .
scsi or ide for a new hd

[sarumont]

I would definately go with SATA, AMD64 and PCI Express. I'm more of a fan of the Opteron (2x ), but getting a dually opteron board will run you about $500, so that's kinda out of the question. By staying with SATA and PCIX, you "future-proof" your box, as those are baby (not so much SATA anymore) technologies that will be the standard in a year or two. nVidia is a good choice. My 3D accel is shite with my ATI card (compared to nVidia). There's my $0.02.

[kkubasik]

im liking i, Im currenty making the decision between a dual and single processer, as a complete geek, ive decided I might end up jumping WAY past the 1000 mark. Nice to hear such support for the AMD class, im generaly alone on that, defending against all my windows pentium userse, but then again, they have only 32-bit OS' Regaurdelss, i had more or less planned on SATA and PCI Express, but anyone who has uses multiprocesser machines, is the performace boost considerable beyond the total GHz avilable (I know its not a very good mesurment of a computers speed, but say i have 2 1.5ghz processers, I would think the lesser traffic on the FSB would increase performace past that of a lone 3ghz processer) What are you opinons on this?

[Muser]

i've heard that if you don't have them exactly configured to work in parallel, then it will be like having only one processor, most of the time, but if you get them to work perfectly together than you'll see a good performance boost.

[justwes]

While I agree with you guys on a lot of the hardware that you are sugesting, I do have one questions.

With PCI express being such a new tech, is there much if any Linux support for it?

As sarumont put, staying future proof is a good thing, but if you have to wait for the OS to catch up, is it worth it?

Back on topic though, other than choosing AMD as the cpu do you have a mobo in mind? I've always gone ASUS for my AMD systems and have never had an issue with them.

[Muser]

from what i've heard, PCI Express will act as regular PCI if it has too. Similar to how USB 1.1 devices can be connected to USB 2.0 ports and vis-versa.

[sarumont]

Originally Posted by qub333

but anyone who has uses multiprocesser machines, is the performace boost considerable beyond the total GHz avilable (I know its not a very good mesurment of a computers speed, but say i have 2 1.5ghz processers, I would think the lesser traffic on the FSB would increase performace past that of a lone 3ghz processer) What are you opinons on this?

I know someone that has just built a dual 244 (1.8 GHz) Opteron machine, running with 1G (I think) of RAM. From make clean, he compiles a kernel in 37 seconds (make && make modules_install)!

[fomhoire]

With PCI express being such a new tech, is there much if any Linux support for it?

[/quote]

suport for it's included in the 2.6 kernel but i don't know about support for the things that use it.