Considering an AMD64 system...

[Adriaan de Groot]

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Hej Hendrik,

On Saturday 28 February 2004 15:47, Henrik W Lund wrote:
> I'm considering investing in an AMD64-system, mainly for home/desktop
> use (gaming, programming for fun and just generally goofing around,
> trying stuff out), and as such do not need any high-end dual Opteron

This matches my usage pattern fairly well (though I had a specific goal in 
mind: making sure the KDE ports work on amd64). I ended up with an asus k8v 
deluxe (mind you the wifi slot seems totally useless) and an amd64 3200+ (the 
only thing available back in november).

> Now, since I want to run my favourite OS on the system, I want to know
> if  the amd64 architecture is well supported. I know it says on the
> website that amd64 is a Tier 1 architecture, but from reading this
> list and checking out docs, it seems as if it's just a teensy bit
> unstable. Or is this due to fragility of the hardware (with memory
> lockups, freezing and such)? It should be stated that I am not exactly

For regular desktop usage it can be rather spotty. I've not tried to run any 
32-bit FBSD apps on it yet. This is said to work fairly well, and might 
provide a workaround for those apps that don't work in native amd64 mode. The 
ones I've run across in daily use recently are:
* xpdf (though kpdf works fine)
* xfig (weird crash in libxpm, which I've got a workaround for)

As far as getting my regular work done (writing a thesis), using KDE as 
desktop, it's fine.


> Now, if the amd64 is indeed fully supported, this leads me to another
> question: what hardware is supported? I'm mainly thinking of
> mainboards and their chipsets here, as I reckon most of the regular
> hardware (graphics cards, sound cards, etc) are compatible with both

There were issues with X not supporting anything but Matrox cards, but that 
era has passed :)

> the amd64 and the i386 platform (if I got the wrong idea here, please
> tell me!). What chipsets would you recommend? I kinda have my eye on
> the nForce chipset, as I understand this is good for multimedia (and
> gaming), but I'm open to suggestions.

nForce has issues - at least, that's what I'm led to believe by posts on this 
list. Quoting a message from David from feb. 16th:

	nVidia nForce3 [for AMD64] chipsets are very problematic for
	Unix(BSD)/Linux.  I would avoid them if you want to run a non-MS-Windows
	operating system.

So there's your platform recommendation.

As for the kind of panics I've had, the only one in the past month was while 
mounting a USB pendrive. Generally, the system seems to become a little 
unstable after running for a while and then suddenly changing usage patterns 
(like it used to panic when ripping a CD after it'd been up for several days 
doing other things). 

- -- 
pub  1024D/FEA2A3FE 2002-06-18 Adriaan de Groot <groot at kde.org>
                     Would you like a freem?
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