Hello folks,

Somewhere by the end of next month, I'll be getting hold of a used desktop hardware at a cheap price from a friend. The details of the cpu and motherboard are:-

Processor : AMD Phenom 2x4 965 processor Rev c2
Supports DDR RAM 2
Supports AMD 45 NM
Speed : 3400 mhz

Board : M4A78-EM-1394 VER2101
Make : Asus

As far as I understand both the hardware are discontinued but I'm on a tight budget and not a hardcore gamer per say. I'll only be using the desktop for Linux kernel and device driver programming which I'm learning at this time and for virtualization. Watching movies and heavy browsing is by default there.
My main OS is going to be Slackware 14.1, if its released by then.

My main concern is the Integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics. Could somebody please confirm that this integrated graphics is well supported by the newer kernels and I won't regret buying this almost obsolete piece of hardware.

Any other points or caveats are highly appreciated.

Regards.

The ATI graphics should work, and drivers are available on the ATI website. At the very least, you'll be able to get up and going using the VGA/VESA drivers, and if you have to buy another graphics card in the future for $30 or so, you can at least use what you've got until then.

Thanks for replying. Advice taken.

But hasn't AMD dropped the support for Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 graphics cards from their proprietary catalyst driver? I searched the web and found out that this graphic card will need the Legacy driver and for the time being there is no AMD Legacy support with X-Server 1.13, so I'll need to downgrade if required. Any comments on that please?

I'm not a fan of 3D bling-bling but I won't mind a smooth 2D and normal 3D operation with their open source Radeon drivers. Am I expecting too much?

Regards.

Well, I found a driver for the Radeon 3000 series on their website...certainly worth a try, and as said, the base VESA drivers will at least work. You SHOULD get fairly smooth operation, unless you're really driving the 3d parts hard.

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Thanks much, TB0ne. I don't need much of the 3D stuff. Just some Kde bling will do good, if works.

I have couple of other doubts. One, the Asus website mentions that this mobo only supports O.C. DDR2 1200. On the other hand that cpu specification mentions "Memory Type Supported : DDR2-1066, DDR3-1333". Does that mean I won't be able to use the DDR3-1333 memory sticks as the mobo doesn't support DDR3.
And how much I will lose on performance using only DDR2 RAM?

I wanted to build a new rig with FX-8350 but things aren't going well with budget these days.

Regards.

I agree with the above about vesa.

I did have a laptop with an Integrated ATI Radeon and it worked fine on linux. Might have some small issues with vlc and flash since the ram on that is so small.

I'd run memtest on it for a few days for sure.

The HD3200 is supported by AMD's legacy drivers. Those drivers will run on Slackware 14.0, but not on Slackware 14.1 (unless they get an update until then). With kernel 3.11 you will get dynamic power management for those chip, if you use the free driver, but hardware video decoding is still not supported for the HD3200/4200 chips. Other than that, if you can get a good price for that just add a cheap videocard to it and you will be fine.

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Thanks for the confirmation guys. Guess I'll go ahead and grab the hardware. I'm getting the complete box with 8GB DDR2 and 360GB(5400) HD with a decent cabinet in ~230$ (15K INR), which is 2 years old.

I checked the web and found out I won't be losing too much on performance using 8GB DDR2 compared to DDR3. I'll go ahead and upgrade the motherboard and a get a decent video card in couple of months.

Will the Nvidia GPUs work well in combination with AMD cpus?

Any other recommendation is welcome.

Regards.

Hmmm..not that great a deal, depending on what else you're getting. But I'm not sure about computer prices in india, and you might not have the same access to 2nd hard parts as I do (

If you do get a new motherboard I'd suggest a AM3+ 970/990X/990FX chipset board.

If you arent a gamer, a 'decent' video card is cheap. Spending too much is counterproductive, the 'gamers' video cards just eat more power and create more heat for zero gain (you can multipule monitor desktop in high resoution just as easily with cheaper cards as with gamers cards, and they all the cardsin any given series tend to have the same hardware video decoding features)

Works just fine.

Thank you.

I know the deal doesn't sound cheap but I'm trying to get hold of some extras like the LCD monitor within it. Also I've been thinking for waiting a couple of more months and configure a better and more powerful AMD FX-8350 rig in around ~300$ which is quite possible last I checked.
I'm marking this thread solved. Any further updates I'll be posting here.

Again thanks all the guys for replying.

Regards.

Ahh. If you can get an LCD as well for the same price, its a better deal.

Good luck