Hi there, I'd love to hear from users that have what they consider to be a High End System, running Linux.

I'm interested in all hardware details and obviously Linux version.

I've tried a few different distrobutions and hardware setups, but don't seem to be able to find anywhere near the performance of my Win2K machine, which is VERY slow compared to 9*/NT

I've had a RH7 server running now for a couple of years, it does what I aks, but as a workstation, for surfing, watching movie clips, and dare I say it, playing a game or two, forget it.

I've posted similar posts to this before, but right now, I feel as though all that is really prevening me from dumping Win, is to find a Linux setup that meets my desktop performance requirements.

All comments are appreciated...

Every version works fast, if you know how to configure.

Try gentoo.org, edit your make.conf for all cflags, emerge gaming-sources (make menuconfig for low-latency, preemtitive etc), edit include/asm-i386/param.h, change the line "#define HZ 100" to "#define HZ 1000", make your hdparm-settings.

Hardware: Nvidia-drivers are very fast. ATI-drivers-performance suck. don't forget to patch the kernel for your chipset...

I got w2k and Linux on the same box and w2k puts me to sleep performance wise.Just easy stuff like opening large directories takes much longer with w2k.Gaming is another thing - Linux games work fine with my card but I stay away from winex.
Unfortunately I don't have a high end system.Only got a AMD 2600 and a FX 5600 card.

Right, well I am currently playing with a dual PIII 1GHz for my win2K machine, and thinking about upgrading to some form of dual xeon, thus my current setup would replace my existing Linux setup.

A 2.6GHz processor, is what I would consider very fast, considering that a few years ago, I was delighted with the performance of my 200mmx and Win95 (excluding reliability), I just don't see why I would need to increase the processing speed that much in order to see the same level of performance etc

I receintly done a buld with RH7 linux on a small system (for my brother), running an AMD K6III 450MHz, Linux was really, really slow, and I am talking just the basic Gnome enviroment, installed Win98 and it flew, XP even performs on this setup, so there must be something really wrong with the config "out of the box".

Recomendations for a system that works and works well, spec and hardware.

Wait a couple of weeks and see whats happening with the AMD 64 bit CPU's if you are ready to fork over some money.

If someone looking for high performace Linux box, Gentoo would be the right choice, from my personal experience. What Gentoo does best is create a box that really fits your hardware. I have a P3 866 with 512MB SDRAM and 80GB 7200PRM hard drive. Well I'm proud to say that I can do TV recording using Nuppelvideo (328x288 @ 40fps) and (720x576@19FPS). Video production guys should know how to imagine the perforamce from this. Of course I run mplayer to watch my recording live, else it wouldn't make good sense for me to record the TV program. I've been running gentoo-sources-r6 kernel and it works fine so far. CD Burning is always good. Since I've run gentoo I've never experience audio jerking or audio drop when I do multiple at once. X and Open Office run smooth too

-regards
laikos

I got a significant performance boost when I switched from Mandrake 9.1 using EXT3 file system to Slackware 9.1 using reiserfs. I have an AMD 1800+ with a Gforce 3. Performance in Slack is much, much better than in Winbloze 2000 or XP.

I would have to say your problem is that you keep mentioning RedHat 7.0.

That's a very old distro, and red hat has always been known as a very "bloated" distro -- it's a hog.

Perhaps a lighter / more efficient distro is what you're looking for, as a dual P3 @ 1.0 ghz shouldbe ample to run a blazing fast Slackware desktop implementation.

My Athlon 2200 XP+ flies with Slackware.

Much faster than the 98 SE that was on here before...

-Shade

I am currently running an Athlon 1.4GHz w/ 512 (now 256). RH9 and Fedora Pre-3 run much smoother with 512MB than Win2000 ever did and I didn't have any complaints. When I ran the same config with only 256 MB, it was fine until the box starte to swap like crazy (~250MB physical used and ~100MB swap used) the performance really suffered after that. Still better than Win2000 but not what I would expect.

I have run Fedora Core 1 and Slack 9.? on my laptop which runs 1.1GHz w/512MB. Slack put Fedora and RH9 to shame. It was blazing fast and as soon as I get the gumption to learn, I'll be switching from FC1 to Slack based on speed alone.

I still haven't tried linux on my 2.8ghz w/512... I'm wasting all that power on XP instead. *sigh*

as soon as I get the gumption to learn,
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If you're familiar with Linux at all, the best way to learn is just dive in! lol
You won't regret it. Slack is Awesome!

That's my philosophy too. I've never been risk-adverse or challenge-adverse, I just dive right in and get my hands dirty. The issue is really more of the "spare-time" and "spare-effort" variety... between the GF, work, clients and commuting there isn't much left of me left over at the end of each day.

Anyone have some spare time they want to give me? Either that or I have a GF to sell...