Hello,
I have been doing system administration/LAN management for a long time and have always wanted to build my own system from motherboard up. I am at the brink of fulfilling my long time desire and want some input from folks that may have already walked down this road so I can avoid any pitts that others may have fallen into and lived to tell about. My wife has told me that this is probably the only time I will be able to allocate this much money to getting new computer hardware so build this thing big enough :-). Since I love my wife I will do what she says. What I am thinking about (as a base system extra goodies aside for the moment) is a dual processor AMD Athalon 64 (single or dual core), 4 Gig of memory, 3 or 4 SCSI disks of reasonable size with a hardware RAID controler for fault tollerance. I will be rolling my own LFS unless I run into too many headaches getting it to run on this platform. Does this sound doable so far? Has anybody run into anything that would cause them to say "no that won't work"? Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

Arnie

Yeap, that sounds like it's more than doable. You will have one heck of a system in my opinion. If you want to build the machine for a decent price then investigating newegg.com is a good option. Never had any problems from newegg what so ever.

Hi,

What will it be used for?

I currently have an AMD64 3200+ with 1 Gb of memory I'm running Suse 10.0 on it. I have various capacity ultra dma 100 and ultra dma 133 drives. In swappable racks. I use that machine mainly for video processing. I've thought about getting a X2 4400+ for it but I have a hopefully better solution for video processing. But it's a few months away.

As for the SCSI drives. I believe the IDE and SATA drives today are quite a bit faster than SCSI drives. I've been a SCSI fan a long time but I wouldn't go that route today.

Just a few thoughts.



Stan

Stan,
I guess the short answer to the question about usage is "everything". I want to do some video capture and burning CDs/DVDs and have a system that will be big enough to do whatever I may think of in the future. I guess I have been sleeping a lot because I have never heard of SATA drives. I'll have to check that out but if I want redundancy in my storage solution I was of the opinion that a hardware RAID controller would be better/faster than any sort of software solution. Will IDE/SATA drives work with a hardware RAID controller? If not wouldn't having to use a software RAID eat up any performance benefits IDE/SATA may have over SCSI? I guess I'll have to research that. Thanks for the thoughts.

Has anyone tried to compile LFS on one of the dual core AMD 64 bit CPUs yet? If not a complete LFS what about just recompiling a newer kernel for one of these? Before I go out and pay the big bucks for them I'd like to hear someone say "that works".

Arnie

Arnie,

Well doing video on Linux is an "adventure" so to speak. Especiall the DVD authoring aspect. A lot of the denoising tools are still in their infancy. Don't get me wrong. They work but doing things like color correction on aged tapes leaves MUCH to be desired. One really need to see what one is doing. Cinelerra is Ok, but it take A LOT of things to make it work and unless it's changed. It used to crash a lot.

SATA has been around a few years (3 or more). The older board I have (K8NSC-939) has RAID 0 and 1. I think it works with IDE and SATA. Although I've never tried it. Thus I have no idea about using it on Linux.

You might want to checkout the Ultra 320 SCSI performance and cost versus SATA/SATA2 and IDE if RAID is a must have.

I'd be interested in knowing about the performance of a X2 if you get one. Video processing (denoising in particular) sucks the life out of a processor. The more CPU's the better! To give you an idea. It take 13 to 16 hours, depending on the options used in the denoising tools, to processor a 1 hour video on the AMD64 3200+ I have running 32 bit Suse 10.0 I haven't really checked the time to process a clean source, but it's MUCH faster.


Stan

Things to confirm before putting down the plastic:

1. The socket type of the CPU matches the socket type on the mobo
2. The mobo's front side bus speed (FSB) matches the CPU's FSB
3. The mobo's memory speed matches the RAM you buy (eg, DDR400 or whatever)
4. The mobo has a sufficient number of expansion slots for your needs
5. The expansion slots are the correct type for your cards. (For example, your video card may be AGP, PCI, or PCI Express 16)
6. The power supply is sufficient
7. The case has enough drive bays
8. The case uses the same form factor as the mobo (eg, ATX, mini-ATX)

I'd say those are probably most of the basic compatibility points. Personally I'd recommend the fastest RAM and the the fastest FSB that your wallet can afford, and to buy a high end video card. While you're at it, and your wallet isn't sqealing yet, buy a big LCD monitor too.

Have fun.... that's a heck of a system

I suggest SATA hardware RAID controllers from 3ware or Areca. The hard drives I suggest using is Western Digital Raptor series.

I recommend using a maximum of 2 GB of memory for an x86 system because going as high as 4 GB will only give you 3.5 GB. I recommend using at least ECC memory for multi-processor system.

Gentoo is as close to LFS (Linux From Scratch) with out wasting about a mounth to set it up. Gentoo will take about 8 hours to compile on your new system. Probably it will take half that if programs are compiled in memory.

With any good system, you need the best power supply. I recommend that you do not go cheap on a power supply because putting togther the dream system with a cheap power supply will fall to pieces. I recommend power supplies with active power factor controlled and a wide voltage range (at least 100 volts to 240 volts AC). These features will make the power supply provide sufficient amount of power for the system with out a hiccup. I have a Seasonic S12-430 (430 watt) that has these features and it also is very quiet. It costs a little over 100 US dollars but it is worth it.

I recommend buying a system with two or more processors because Linux works better with multiple processors than one processor. AMD will be introducing their new socket in June or July. I suggest waiting until August to buy a new system. Between August and October prices are sometimes lower.

The best video editng program is avidemux. There is also LiVES but it uses PNG or JPG for editng video clips instead the video files. Cinnerla is worthless.

I disagree with J.W. on LCD because LCD have limited color. I recommend CRT monitor because it has unlimited shades for color unlike LCD which depends on LCD which can output 6 to 10 bit for red, green, and blue. CRT monitor are artist best choice. LCD are good for general tasks.

Hi Folks,
I'm back again and am continuing the same thread so i don't have to repeat background information. I have started building my new system. I bought an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe MB with an ADM 64 Athlon 4800+ X2 CPU and 4Gig of memory. The question of the day is ahs anyone out there installed Linux on this MB? The MB has 2 SATA-2 controllers on board. A Sillicon Image 2 port and a NIVIDA 4 port. The two port can RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 and has one internal and one external port. The NIVIDA has 4 internal ports and can do all the above plus RAID 5. My intent was to have a mirrored system disk on the 2 port and a data area made of 4 disks configured in RAID 5. I have tried to install a number of pre-built distributions as a platform to start building my LFS. Among them SuSE 10 x86_64, RHEL 4, SLES 9. I can get the SuSE 10 to install but it can't boot from the HD once it installs the files. When I go into rescue mode and try to hand install GRUB it complaines about the BIOS nat having a path/name (can't remember exactly the netxt time I see it I'll write it down). When the MB does it's init at power on if there is a drive plugged into the Sillicon Image controller the splash screen for the controller showes it is there. If you look at the boot screen in the BIOS it is there but when you try to install an OS it says there are no disks attached. The ASUS helpdesk tech (Windoze type) said there may be an issue with drivers. Could be so I tried to plug a disk into port 1 of the NIVIDA controller. The BIOS shows there is a disk there and the installation does well until the initial boot from disk after the OS is laid down. The disk won't boot. Any ideas? As I opened has anyone successfully installed Linux on a system with this MB and SATA-2 drives? As I tyope this I am downloading and burning FC5. When I booted disk 1 it said it was loading SATA drivers. Something I didn't see on the other installs. ??? Anyone?

Arnie

What error does it give when it tried to boot?

Seems like 4Gb is the limit for a lot (most) of the distrubuted kernels. Without having to reconfigure the kernel and recompiling it. It could be a BIOS/memory issue. Perhaps pulling some of the memory would make a difference?

Did FC5 work?


Stan

Sorry I'm having a hard time cleaning the exact problem from your last post.

I just wanted to say that I did get an asus mobo (P5N32-SLI DELUXE) and I have installed gentoo on it. Across the internet and internet forums, I've found that these boards (meaning, any fairly current asus board) can be a pain in the butt for linux installs. I only bought my board as a replacement for my dead intel board.

looking at your board here I can see that your board is practically the same as mine.
- don't expect to get the full functionality out of your ether card. Enable the reverse engineered nvidia 10/100 drivers in the kernel to give some functionality.
- make sure that OHCI usb support is enabled in the kernel for full usb functionality
- make sure DMA has support compiled with the kernel
- make sure you have support for sata
- you'll pretty much need to enable nvidia*, anything nvidia in the kernel

Stan,
I don't remember exactly what the message was but my paraphrase would be "I can't find an OS to boot". I did finally get FC5 x86_64 downloaded and burned. I have a working FC5 system up now. The original problem seems to be lack of support in the distros for the SATA controllers. The ASUS board has 2 SATA controllers. One is a 2 port Silicon Image and the other is a 4 port nVIDIA nforce4 (I think that's what they called it). I found drivers in the FC5 distro by booting 'linux noprobe'. It said it couldn't find the drives and asked if I wanted to load drivers. It did have drivers for the Silicon Image but not the nforce4. Right now I have SuSE 10 loaded on a second drive and I think I'll take the time to learn a bit about playing these games. The SuSE installation doesn't have the Silicon Image drivers in it so I can't boot it. I'm going to install the drivers on that disk and try to boot from it. Once I build my own LFS I will put all the support I need into it but what I need right now is a stable system to build the LFS on. At this point I have yet to be able to boot the disk from the nforce4 controller but I think that is also due to the lack of drivers. I'll post again once I see if I can fix the SuSE by installing drivers from FC5 or if I destroy what I have already have. ;-) I'm glad I'm not in a hurry to get this up.

Arnie

Fatblueduck,
Are you using SATA or IDE drives. The main problem I'm having is drivers for the onboard SATA controllers. See my last post for details.

Arnie

Hi, I have a bit of info for you ;

Gigabyte AMD ATHLON 64BIT (FRONT SIDE BUS 1600MHZ) MOTHERBOARD type GA-K8NSNXP ((NFORCE3,3DDR,SATA-raid+1934 AGP) price 125US$.;from www.gigabyte.com.//or www.asus.com for comparison.

PROCESSOR AMD ATHLON64 BIT ADA4000 800MHZ/2,4gHZ 754/ (SOCKECT 754/939 must match your mainboard socket) USD 375$.

About SCSI and SATA drives;SCSI is good at handling DATA traffic, but maybe less speed than SATA.

There's 8 Mega internal drive cache on SATA drives, you might wanna have a check with the vendor. WESTRN DIGITAL (WDC) 250GB 7200RPM SATA2 with 16 MB of cache is good for performance and space(US110$).
Again SCSI drives is suitable for handling large amount of data traffic at a time wich IDE/SATA can't do so.

For RAID controller www.promise.com gives enough item to meet your needs.

There's also 15000rpm SCSI avalable on market if I'm not misremebered.

I hope you'll get the best money spend for the perfect hardware.

Regards
Boby

Forget my previous post if you have build the system.
/it can be use for future reference/

Anyway have you update your MOBO Bios? I always update my MOBO bios even if I've just purchase one. This usually help sofware-hardware problem.

Regards

I had problems getting my sata to work, until I compiled support for it in the kernel. You have to enable the nvidia sata portion of the kernel. its in devices/character devices/nv chipset. Not sure if that was the nvidia thing that fixed my sata problem. Don't worry, you can get it to work though...