Best possible Hardware

[Ivan Voras]

Maginnity, Simon (Contractor) wrote:

>> What I want to hear is what new hardware other people are running that
>> does not require too much work in getting setup, i.e. plug n play ==
>> good... I like brand name stuff, cause mostly it breaks down less and
>> is easier to get some help for and usually someone else has worked out
>> the drivers etc for it.

Obviously you won't get much answers for such a broad question because
people have different problems even with slight variations of hardware
(e.g. hardware that appears to have a minor revision number different
might behave totally different in practice).

Here are some broad pointers (might work for you, might not):

- Stay away from motherboards/chipsets that are less than a year to 6
months old. In particular, stay away from nVidia motherboards because
nVidia doesn't give out specs needed to make drivers and drivers are
reverse engineered, with varying quality.
- But, nVidia has reasonably good closed source binary drivers for their
graphics cards available for FreeBSD (only for i386 architecture)
- Any RAM and CPU will work
- Stay away from "high definition audio" sound cards (including those
embedded on motherboards) unless you want to run -CURRENT
- don't know much about the quality of wireless cards; Intel Centrino
chipsets seem to be ok.