Hello,

I'm building a new PC only for Linux and I want to get to know better the environment. It's not that I'm noob, but I haven't used Linux as main OS.
These are my picks, so please tell me Your opinion/experience:

-AMD Athlon 7750 X2 Black Edition
-ECS A780GM-A (AMD 780G chipset with HD 3200 on-board graphics)
-Connect 3D 4350 or Radeon HD 4350 (they are pretty much same)
-WD 320GB SATA2
-I don't know what RAM. I guess 2GB or 4GB on 800Mhz.


Tell me what You think.

Thanks You,
Marco

Getting an ATI graphics card is not a good idea IMO. The drivers are rather crappy.

http://www.phoronix.com does hardware reviews for Linux. A good place to look at motherboards.

Alternately you can search the forums here, this question is asked rather frequently so there are lots of current responses you can read through.

The HCL here also has some boards listed. Really the components on the board are more important than the brand.

Are you intending to buy straight away? Lynnfield will available soon (guess: around September) and, if nothing else, that is likely to produce a round of price cutting in the rest of the market. And that's if you don't want an i5 system itself; the i7s have been good, but expensive, particularly the mobos have been expensive, the i5s will be less expensive with a slightly reduced performance (generally) at any particular clock speed.

In principle, the AMD 780G chipsets are good; under linux, the first question is what you want 3d performance for? If you aren't playing 3d games, then any graphics chipset is good, or thereabouts, and you don't need to get involved with flaky proprietary drivers.

If you only do gaming under windows, then you only have to worry about 3d performance under windows.

It gets more difficult if you are actually want 3d gaming under linux, and even there AMD/ATIs drivers have imprioved recently (but how committed are they? will it continue?). And most people don't do this, anyway, but for those who do, nvidia probably represents a more secure bet. (But, given that, the difference in cost between a board with onboard graphics and one without is close to zero, provided that you have the ability to add a graphics card later, you haven't lost out.)

So, why do you need the 4350? Gaming? Are you dual-booting to do that?

I'd consider the Intel option, particularly if you can wait a while before buying.

I'd consider a bigger hard disk. I don't have a use for that much disk space, either (yet), but newer disks tend to be bigger and faster, and they aren't that much more expensive these days.

Thank You very much guy for the suggestions. As farslayer suggested,
I searched for reviews over the net. The MoBo turned out to be good
for Linux, and regarding the graphic card, I don't intend to do gaming
on Linux at all. I'm not a fan of games.
I'm building this PC only for testing purposes, with dual-booting,
trying different linux distros, unix system etc. And I'm going to use it
for the summer only, after that leaving it to my father.

@salasi
Thanks. I'm going to take your suggesting in account when I'm building
system dedicated for my needs. But this was too good deal to miss.
I know it's not the best pick, but it's not going to stay useless for
sure.

So here it what I bought for 207Euros(290usd) which is rather good price for Greece.

AMD Athlon 7750 X2
ECS A780GM-A
Radeon HD 4350
2GB A-DATA Extreme Edition 1066Mhz
WD 320GB Sata2
Samsung DVD-RW Sata2
Power Supply 450W

I haven't assembled it yet, I'm going to do it on Saturday.
And as soon as I boot my first Linux, I'm gonna let You know
about the hardware.