Building A Fast Linux Box
 

Hi,

I'm thinking of building a new linux box to play games on, use openoffice and tinker with some java coding (hopefully using the 3d apis).

I'd like to hear opinions on hardware that people think I should consider. The categories are - CPU, Mobo, Ram and Video card. Everything else is taken care of. The system will only run linux, probably gnome mainly, and must be fast. The processor and video card are probably the most important, I'm thinking about prehaps an athalon 64 and probably an nvidea vid card.

So what would you use when building a new system? Cost can't be too high, but it certainly doesn't have to be cheapest components available.

Regards,

Grim.

100% nVidia or bust on the graphics card. AMD are a fav. too :)

Athlons are excellent, nVidia has much better Linux support than ATI, and for RAM, I'd say you cannot go wrong with Kingston. It may run a bit more expensive than others, but it's worth it. Just my 2 cents -- J.W.

motherboard, go with an aopen. corsair memory, nvidia geforce fx 5500 (cheap! only $60 from newegg)

For motherboards I would recommend a Gigabyte one as I have one in my main machine and it works great, other motherboard makes that I would recommend you to consider are MSI, Asus and AOpen. There are other makes but I can't remember their names.

I would recommend you get a Athlon 64 if you can afford one as they are really good and you can run both 32 and 64 bit software. I know that there are different variations of the Athlon 64 that go into different sockets such as socket 939 and socket 940 but I don't know what the differences are between them so have a look around.

For graphics I would have to say nVidia as their graphics cards work really good and I have them in all of the machines I've built, don't get an ATI card as the Linux support for them is terrible as you can see if you look throughout the various threads on the forum.

For memory you have a quite a few good makes to pick from such as Crucial, Kingston and Corsair. There are other makes you can choose but these are the ones that I know of that make very high quality memory.

Hope this helps you.

Thanks everyone, I've done a fair bit of research and am going to go for the following (so far):

Athlon 64 3500+ (Winchester - 90nm) Socket 939
1gb OCZ Memory
Asus A8N-SLI mb
Nvidea geforce 6600gt / 6800 (gt?)
Raidmax Cobra Case
Seagate Barracuda 200gb SATA drive.

This will give me the speed I want now plus the ability to add another graphics card at a later date. I'm also planning to overclock, hence the high quality memory and the 90nm cpu.

Let me know what you think.

G.

i still think you should go with an aopen mb, but your other choices rock. what kind of price r u looking at, where you ordering from? i would say go newegg, but their site is so slow.

Purchased!

I'm in the UK so I had bought from a few places (chose what I wanted then found the best price). I bought -

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Winchester)
Asus A8N-Sli Deluxe (2xGb Ether!)
1gb OCZ Performance Ram
Gigabyte Nvidea 6600GT 128mb
Raidmax Cobra Case (Blue)
2x SATA Seagate Barracudas (200gb)

And -

Zalman Cu 7700 HSF
Blue Cold Cathodes
Zalman Northbridge Cooler
Antec 430 Truepower PSU

I'm looking forward to getting everything up and running. I'm planning to overclock and decided the 3200+ (90nm) was a better choice for price / performance than the 3500+ for me.

G.

Now I need to think about some sort of dual boot system (I've decided to use windows for games - sorry guys :) using raid 0 (if this is possible).

stay away from the dual boot raid 0. The majority of built-in and cheap raid cards are FAKE raid. All of the raid functionality takes place in the driver. Since linux doesn't have the same driver for most raid cards, a raid 0 partition created by windows will most likely no be readable by linux. This isn't always the case, but can be very frustrating. I would experiment with this first. Do a basic windows install on the raid 0. Don't bother installing anything else (software, etc). Then try to create the dual boot linux setup. If this proves to be too much than just go with standard drive setup (no raid).

Another big issue is going to be sharing files between the operating systems. You could try to use the captive ntfs driver or use a shared fat32 parition. I don't have any experience with captive ntfs so I can't vouch for it's stability. fat32 is going to limit you to both parition size and file size. Personally I'm fond of network storage on another machine which both linux and windows would have multiple means of r/w data.

Hope that helped.

Sweet! Keep us up to date on progress and have fun with it -- J.W.