Hardware selection for comment.

Chris Hill chris at monochrome.org
Tue Oct 18 16:21:45 PDT 2005


On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Murray Taylor wrote:

> Comments requested from people who may have used / broken the
> following components.
> I'm looking for items like unwanted interactions, driver probs, etc.

I have a very, very similar setup running 5.4 and xorg, and it's 
generally been good. See comments below.

> From looking at the 5.4 hardware page 
> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/hardware-i386.html the general 
> selection seems to be supported, but I have mental question marks 
> against the graphics card and the response time of the monitor (I 
> intend to use KDE and Xorg, am not interested in flashy games / video, 
> but do want sharp, full colour resolution) There seem to be grumbles 
> from some linux forums re the 6600 locking up occasionally...?

I have an NVidia 6200 PCIe, which has been fine. Just be aware that the 
binary-only nvidia driver seems not to support resolutions above 1280 x 
1024. Also I *think* I might be getting some ghosting on text in xterms, 
but it's so slight that I'm not really positive it's there. OTOH my 
monitor is 10 years old. OTOOH I saw no such effect 6 months ago running 
an ATI card at 1600 x 1200. If I had to do it over, I'd get an ATI if I 
could find one without a fan. (The fan failed on the ATI, which is why I 
got the NVidia.)

> Case                       CoolerMaster Centurion ATX Tower Black/Silver
>                                380Watt TruPower
                                  ^^^^^^^
You might want a beefier power supply if there's any chance you might 
add another disk, especially with that tape drive already drawing power. 
It will probably be OK, but since you're building a new system anyway...

> Ram                       2.048GB (2x-1.024GB) CL3.0 DDR2 533

Good call. I only got two 512MB sticks when building mine, and now I
kinda wish I'd gone for the gusto.

> CPU                        Intel Pentium 4 640 3.2Ghz 2MB 775

P4s are power hogs.

HTH...

--
Chris Hill               chris at monochrome.org
**                     [ Busy Expunging <|> ]


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