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Old 4th November 2008
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mdh mdh is offline
Real Name: Matt D. Harris
FreeBSD 2.2.6 User
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: West Virginia
Posts: 139
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Broodjegehaktmetmayo View Post
1. Mainboard (including what chipsets to look for, etcetera. I am not technical, so I am actually just typing what I have read elsewhere )
I like Biostar if you go for the AthlonX2 or Phenom setup. Probably Tyan if you go for the Opteron or dual-Opteron setup. Asus is usually good, as well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Broodjegehaktmetmayo View Post
2. Videocard. I have understood the safest bet will be Nvidia, and since I've always had Nvidia to my complete satisfaction Nvidia would be fine. But then: which one? Which components on it determine what to choose?
I'd say avoid nvidia right now. Between the "black windows bug" and the fact that you'll be locked into using FreeBSD/i386 if you actually want to use 3D acceleration on your GPU, it isn't a good bet at the moment. If you do go nvidia, you'll want to use FreeBSD/i386 even if you get an AMD64 CPU. Otherwise the nvidia binary drivers won't work, and hence you won't be really using the GPU for 3D acceleration at all, and you'd be just as well off using a cheapo video card or on-board video or whatever.

Of course, there's still the black windows bug to contend with, making nvidia still annoying - you'll have to turn off OpenGL "effects" in KDE4 or some of your windows will appear all black at times.

I'm not sure how things are on the ATI side. My next video controller will be ATI though, unless nvidia fixes the problems before then.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Broodjegehaktmetmayo View Post
3. Processor. Intel, then, but: Dual core, or Quad core? 32 bits or 64 bits? (Are quad cores 64 bits? I've looked and looked but the one site says it is, the other site says it isn't, and the third site (Intel) says nothing at all about it ()).
If you have a *whole* lot of money, get a quad-core Opteron or even two.

If you have a lot of money, get an AMD Phenom (quad-core).

If you don't have a lot of money, get an AMD AthlonX2. You can get a 5400+ black edition cheap right ($77!) on newegg.

Note: all of these CPUs are AMD64 and will run FreeBSD AMD64, but will also run FreeBSD i386.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Broodjegehaktmetmayo View Post
4. RAM (type, amount)
Keep in mind that if you run FreeBSD AMD64, you can use over 4gigs of ram. Running FreeBSD i386, you won't be able to without using PXE, but I'm not familiar with PXE. Generally speaking, this comes down to money. Memory speed probably won't be your bottleneck. Memory is fairly cheap nowadays, too. Go for 4-8 gigs if you can. Kingston's "ValueRam" line is actually very good and inexpensive. Get the highest speed that your motherboard will support. Keep in mind that if you buy an ECC motherboard (this is common if you go for the Opteron layout, not at all common for AthlonX2 or Phenom) you'll want to buy ECC ram as well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Broodjegehaktmetmayo View Post
5. Harddisk (type)
Get two identical drives and mirror them for redundancy. SATA300 is what you'll likely want, given what most motherboards support on-board. It's common, too, so it won't be tremendously overpriced.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Broodjegehaktmetmayo View Post
6. PowerSupplyUnit
Not really a strong opinion here. I've never bought a power supply that failed prematurely (only one failed at all, and it was pushing 10 years old), and I've gone for some "bargain brand" power supplies as well as name-brand ones.
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