Hello good folks. I've recently become obsessed with building a new AMD64 machine and with tax returns coming soon it may be feasible. I've consulted with a bunch of people that I know who are hardware junkies and they've told me what they think is good hardware to use. The problem is they are all Windows heads and don't have a clue about linux. I just wanted to post the hardware that I'm planning on getting and hope to get a sanity check from the good people at linuxquestions. Here is the plan:

Motherboard-ASUS K8T800
Processor-AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Ram-Kingston HyperX
Power Supply-VANTEC VAN-520A (520W)

Now I already have a DVD/CD drive so I don't need to buy another one. I'd like to get one of the Western Digital Raptor serial ATA drives. I know that 36.7Gb is not going to be enough space for everything. I've never setup a serial ATA drive and am a little confused. How will the raptor drive be represented in fdisk? Will it be a scsi device? How would you suggest partitioning if I had one of these raptor drives and say another 80Gb ide drive?

The next thing is the video card. I'm probably going to have to stick with some sort of Nvidia card since ATI has not yet released 64bit support for their cards. No biggy. I use Nvidia now and I'm pretty happy with it.

Finally the big question: What distro? I really have my heart set on Gentoo but according to this many packages are still masked for 64 bit. I would hate to get everything setup and find out that I can't install a lot of applications. Their is also the Suse 64 package available which seems to be the most stable.

Just want to hear any comments or suggestions you may have. Any personal experiences with setting up an AMD64 machine? Thanks folks.

Just a few comments and thoughts:

• The SK8V uses the VIA K8T800 and 8237 chipsets. The 8237 is well supported (a.k.a. VIA82xx in kernel configuration) but I don't know about the K8T800. I believe it is supported but don't quote me on that.
• What SATA controller do you have on that board? You will probably not get SATA support from any of the common distributions right out of the box, but rather you would have to build your own kernel and boot disk to be able to install Linux on the SATA drive. With Gentoo that's not much of a problem since you build your own kernel during installation anyway, but you would need to get an experimental CD image and build from stage 1 (which means building the gcc compiler, glibc, gettext etc and then use that to build the other components). There are plenty of discussions here at LinuxQuestions about SATA support so a search would probably do you good and don't miss this brief article.
• The other components are run of the mill. I'd get Corsair instead of Kingston HX RAM but that's a matter of budget and personal preference. Nice power supply. It would probably blow the fuse in my apartment if you used one of those to the max at my place.

Håkan

I can't dechiper which SATA controller it uses. Here are the specs. South Bridge? I don't know. I am really terrible when it comes to hardware.

Anyway, how can I find out if that chipset is supported?

I appreciate your input.

Please don't laugh at me because I have no hardware knowledge.

By the way, the reason I wanted to go AMD64 is because I was chatting with one of the Gentoo developers who was using an AMD64 machine. The bootstrap process took 44 minutes! That is amazing. I installed Gentoo on an old 500mhz machine and the bootstrap process took 15 hours.

My setup is pretty close to what you are looking for. When i first bought the board and chip (Nov 2003), it was hard to find any support on it. Even on these forums! Eventually i learned a couple of things.....

1. Use the 2.6 series kernel.
2. If using a 32 bit kernel, compile agpgart and amd64-agp as modules. And just modprobe amd64-agp at boot and not agpgart. I find that works for me.
3. use the sk98lin module for the network card.
4. the onboard ieee1394 works great with kino and my camcorder
5. The cd that comes in the Asus box actually has linux drivers on it.
6. Extremely FAST even when using 32 bit. Savage and Unreal are literally....Unreal!

Only installed Mandrake AMD64 9.2 and SUSE 8.2 AMD64 once or twice. Realized i couldn't play any games and figured i would give it a go in 32 bit anyways. Now i know UT2004 will INCLUDE A Linux AMD64 bit build in the BOX!! Freak'n UNREAL! Can't wait.

All-and-All, this computer rules!
"./configure;make;make install " seems like seconds where it use to feel like hours :-)

Thanks for all the input. So what distrobution did you decide on anyway?

Slackware 9.1 - kernel 2.6.1 and running it at 32 bit

In about 2 weeks, UT2004 demo is coming out...don't know if it'll include the amd64 linux build but at as soon as the game comes out, i'm going back to a 64 bit distro.

I've heard that some people are dual booting between 64bit mode and 32bit mode. I may try it this way.

I just recently read that UT2004 " IS " going to have an AMD64 linux client in the box! So i think i'm going to stick to 64 bit when the game comes out. Can't wait.

Hey Guys,
I've just bought my AMD64 3500+ Venice with a board which uses the nForce chipset. I have not installed linux on it so far, but I am planning to use Fedora Core x86_64. What I have installed on the box is FreeBSD-6.1-RELEASE-AMD64. It's stable as rock, performance is quite good so far. It is quite fresh, so I can't say too much about it. I only have my problems around building MPlayer, which seems not to support 64 bit architecture .
Anyway, I like FreeBSD, but am come from the Linux world, so if someone knows about some really 64bit linux project, pls let me know.Thanks!

What's your budget? For just a tad over £500, I got the list in this post: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=486583

Basically I replaced everything but the case. Works excellently, once the BIOS was updated.