I've got to say, I'm confused by this statement. Why would backing up be required, just for the switch to EFI boot? It's not like you'd have to reinstall.

I installed Debian on my PC before it had good EFI support, and ran in Legacy BIOS mode. Once Debian had good support, I simply installed grub-efi, removed grub-pc and disabled Legacy mode. I now boot the kernel directly from EFI (only OS on the machine), having copied the kernel and initrd to ESB and added an etry using efibootmgr. Never did I have to touch the OS itself.

With UEFI, what's calling what?

This is my wild guess... a EFI motherboard will, by default, look at the EFI partition for boot loader. Since, during install of Linux, grub is installed and puts a hook on the EFI partition that calls grub. Grub is located on the Linux partition and can pretty much forget about EFI and can do a "grub" boot from either Linux or Windows (or perhaps any) partition.

Am I close?

Bank interleave is dependent on the number of modules and chips on the modules, not their size, AFAIK. Also, how does bank interleave influence access rates of storage devices. Please explain, I can't imagine how that works.

As per here the maximum safe temperature of the FX-8120 is 61 deg. Celsius.

I don't think the OP really needs to buy any more RAM. Depending on the use case, the 16G that came in the combo is more than enough.

Have to reformat disk. If I'm going to switch to UEFI, I'm certainly not going to stay with MBR formatted hard drive.

Depends on how you set it. EFI can be set to allow hybrid (capable of booting efi files or MBR), legacy only (MBR only), or EFI only. If using EFI, there is a ~200 MB fat32 partition as the first partition on the drive, that is where all bootloaders are stored as seperate efi files. So even if another os takes over booting, you are still able to go in and boot the efi file manually in most non-oem UEFI as they offer an additional boot option "boot efi file".

Ah, gotcha, hadn't thought of that. When I installed, even though I used Legacy, I was still able to partition using GPT and everything worked fine. Guess that was board dependent, maybe.

No, GPT has been around a while, but I couldn't get my at release Windows 7 disk (actually went to the M$ show when 7 was released to get the free Win7 Ultimate disk) to work with GPT when I installed (I've hated MBR limitations for a while, so love GPT), so had to use MBR.

Yes, but which of the three and wildly different and varying temperatures which can be read is that? With mine only one of the temperatures wiull stay below that when in moderately heavy use and it's not the one which I had set the beep alert for in BIOS. Perhaps I have a bad chip but according to AMD under any decent workload my CPU is destroting itself. So, as I say, I don't trust them.

As to RAM, I have 32GB installed as I had to change to low-profile to fit my cooloer so decided to double-up. I don't thing I've ever used it all even with my /tmp and /var/tmp mounted to tmpfs, a few VMs running and Google Earth and/or Second Life fired up -- and by that I mean that not even by buffers and cache. I've a 64GB swap file on my spinning rust just because I can but unless I get hibernate working I doubt I'll ever use that.
I can conceive of situatuons where 32GB would be used but most applications won't grab more than a couple of GB (Google Earth being a good example) no matter how much is going begging.

I think the 16GB I ordered are going to be more than enough. My current machine has 8GB and I really don't think I use that. I can only think of two things that might make my PC work even a little. Those being Linux from Scratch or some old games, neither of which I do much. I do see activity go up when I do a compile for LFS (such as GCC.) Actually, the most notable thing I see is a rise of 2 or 3 degrees when compiling. I do plan on building LFS again but it is not critical. I do it mostly because its a great learning tool. Last I tried it was having trouble finding things when trying to build from Ubuntu. Again, it'll be fun to try and figure out how to make it work. Even building LFS inside virtualbox doesn't seem to really work my current PC too hard.

The only other thing that might be even mildly demanding is gaming, which I do very little. I am lifetime addicted to MS Combat Flight Simulator and I really liked Half Life. Still, neither really seems to put much demand on the system I already have.

I do occasionally think of adding a Haughppauge TV card. I'm pretty sure the FX-6300 with 16GB will handle that well if I ever do decide to get one.

I think the FX-6300 is going to be more than enough. Still, I have enjoyed your posts and welcome anything more that I might need think about.

Thanks,
Dale

You should buy RAM modules with two banks.
And buy 32GB RAM (not too expensive), so the RAM controller works with bank interleave.

As you mentioned above, my RAM actually works slower because I have all 4 sockets filled -- if I had only two filled with 16GB instead of 4 filled with 32GB I would have a marginally faster machine and still probably not use all my RAM. I really don't see why you are recommending installing 32GB of RAM?

Then inform yourself about bank interleave.
And the theoretical background.

I've read my motherboard manual thank you very much and I know that my RAM is running slower because I can see the figure when I boot. The system runs faster with two matched DIMMs and adding any more slows the RAM speed.
Edit:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...encyguide.aspx
Not extremely clear but certainly shows that 4 DIMMs are slower than 2.

The memory frequency should not be reduced, when 4 DIMMs are installed.

I have a modern Intel core I7-5820K, Asus X99-Deluxe, 8*8GB DDR4-2133 RAM.
With this configuration the RAM tuns at 2133MHz with bank interleave.

Read the AMD web page I linked to. The RAM quite clearly runs at 1600MHz with two DIMMs installed and at 1333MHz with 4.
Intel, no doubt, have different specifications but we're talking AMD here and the RAM quite clearly runs at a slower speed when 4 DIMMs are installed.
I didn't post this off the top of my head I've actually read the specifications and I can clearly see the RAM speed is 1333MHz when I boot my PC.