recommendation(s) for new computer

[krad]

On 20 April 2012 16:19, Christian Baer <christian.baer at uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
> Mellow greetings, y'all! :-)
>
> After several years, I think it's about time for a new computer, since
> my current one is slowly aging to a meltdown. Well, that and I currently
> have the dough for a new one. So before I spend it uselessly on women,
> I'll see to it that I get my new machine ASAP. ;-)
>
> Usage:
> I want to select the components to make them FreeBSD-friendly. Just
> about anything will run under Windows, so I won't make a fuss there.
> Windows will run on this machine (too), because from time to time I do
> enjoy a little gaming. I am not a hardcore-gamer though. About 80% of my
> time at the computer is spent "in non-gaming-mode". And I certainly will
> not spend extra money to play Crisis in full detail beyond 1080p. I do a
> lot of writing, reading, some programming, lots of photo-work and watch
> a movie from time to time. Nearly all of these 80% will bei done running
> FreeBSD (or PCBSD).
>
> Most of these components aren't all that thrilling (because they will
> run with just about anything), but you are welcome to comment on them if
> you think I could/should rethink an aspect. Remember that I live in
> Germany and my choice fell on things that I can easily get on the German
> market. I took a look at the costs and the prices that Intel wants for
> their CPUs and mainboards just blew my socks off! Therefore, I decided
> that this will be an AMD-computer (again).
>
> - Asus Sabertooth 990FX
> - AMD FX-8150
> - Corsair Vengeance 16GB Kit
> [Note: This combination is known to work because a friend has exactly
> those components.]
> - Enermax Platimax 600W
> - LG CH10LS28
>
> I'll leave the case and the fans out of this discussion. :-) And SSD
> (probably 256GB) is planned too. I just don't know which one yet.
>
> You might have noticed that there is no graphics board. That is the
> actually problem I am having: Should I go with AMD or nVidia? I remember
> a while back that I had trouble getting an AMD graphics board to work
> properly under X. The board was too old for the official driver from AMD
> and the open source driver gave me the feeling that I was back at my old
> 80386.
>
> I doubt that I will be doing any gaming under FreeBSD (although I once
> did get Warcraft 3 to run using Wine). However, I do want to be able to
> use 3D effects on the desktop. What I am asking basicly is, what vendor
> has better support? As an indication, should I buy an AMD-board, it will
> be something like a 7950 or 7970.
>
> Thanks for your time, thoughts and suggestions!
>
> Cheers!
> Chris
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One thing you may not have thought about is how you use your SSD. You
could use it as a primary storage device or you may want to use it as
an accelerator under windows, and l2arc under freebsd. If you decide
on the accelerator route it may alter which motherboard you buy,
and/or the number of SSD's.

SSD's as primary storage will be quicker, but will generally be more
expensive and hassle to use (wait before flaming). You will generally
need to buy a bigger one (eg 256 gb like you mentioned), and even then
you will have to juggle what to and not to put on it. Not necessarily
a difficult task, but a task all the same, which may or may not need
to be tweaked in the future.

SSD as an accelerator means no management in terms of what to put on
and not put on. You can get away with a much smaller drive (assuming
you dont have masses of apps you want caching), making it much
cheaper. I believe the performance isnt as good as pure SSD (mainly
due to cache misses), but unless you are dealing with large data sets
I have not found this a great issue. On my htpc setup I have a 60GB
drive and have manually over provisioned it to 40GB. The whole windows
installation minus pagefile is ~ 27 GB so i dont really see any cache
misses. It also does write caching.

Under windows there are two routes for acceleration. either us a z68
based board and the intel SRT drivers and a straight SSD drive or use
one of the accelerator drives that use the dataplex software. It
doesnt really matter which, but there are a few gotchyas. On the intel
solution make sure the SATA is in raid mode before you install, not
ahci, this will save you a lot of hassle and poking around in the
registry. The dataplex solution at present will not work on GPT layout
drives. This is rubbish in my opinion, they claim to be working on it
but as yet have no date for fixing it.

Both of this acceleration techniques from my experience tend to use
the whole drive, not just a partition on it. Therefore is you wanted
ssd l2arc if you are using zfs, it may be safer to get x2 ssd drives.
40-60 GB drives seem to be more than adequate for windows caching with
diminishing returns after that, but for zfs only you can really answer
that, but from the sounds of it a similar or smaller drive might do
you fine there.