The old faithful box is getting tired and I have aquired a new 939socket board that is sli compatible, along with a 64x2-3800 chip. A friend stated that it was a total waste as Linux didn't know what to do with any of that. After thinking a bit I think that he is correct. Are there any 64bit apps out there? even for Windoze? And about the dual cores, how it that gonna help me? Sli? its difficult to get the nvidia drivers installed for one card let alone two. I think that maybe I am gonna have to do a little trading and get something less state of the art. Tell me I'm wrong or is Linux (mandriva in my case) progressing along with all this hardware technology?
Thanks:

http://www.mandriva.com/en/individua...6powerpackplus - you are covered by Mandriva

Other distros also have 64 bit versions.

Any Linux flavor that I have ever seen comes in a 64-bit version. 64-bit applications may take longer.

What exactly did you friend say would and would not work?

His angel was that while there were a few 64 bit third party apps avaliable that it would take time to rewrite a substantial portion, and that now they would have the added burden of makeing them multi threaded to utilize the dual cores that are avaliable and in the near future there will be 4 core processors. He thought that I should have waited untill things calmed down with the hardware development and software caught up, like going with a more conservative hardware setup. Of course my reply was that I was in hope to see more than just a slight improvment in going from a PIII 939 with 1gig ram to the 64x2 3800 with 1 gig. I realize that it will be a while on some of the software but as long as progress is being made all is good.

All the distros that I have seen have 64bit versions and 99% of apps have 64bit versions out.
SLI is pointless on Linux, its not needed, I'v got a Nvida 6600GT and its hardly used in linux, thats the only thing I missed about windows, it pushed my hardware. Linux is too easy going. Its hard enuff getting drivers installed for single cards let alown SLI just stick with one card mate.

After doing more investigating I have found that I can run a dual core processor and yes Sli is supported, so I guess all my worries were for nothing, I should have had more confidence in both the Linux community and I didn't realize that Nvidia had stepped up to the plate and are working harder at providing quality drivers for Linux.
Thanks

as I understand, there are more linux apps which take advantage of 64 bit than Windows based apps (OS aside).


Hamish

Yes windows is still very slow on the 64bit frount.
Althought there are more 64bit windows drivers than linux ones.

Huh? Linux needs drivers?

I installed Windows on a media PC here a little while ago and was getting pretty frustrated when it didn't pick up any of my hardware. Kind of forgot about drivers, with linux I'm used to the kernel supplying drivers for everything except my Nvidia cards and when you compile a 64bit kernel then ta-da, 64bit drivers. Is there even any hardware that works in 32bit but not 64bit?

32 bit linux will install on 64 bit , wouldnt it? :-s

Sure will.

Let's not forget that 64-bit Linux is backwards compatible with 32-bit applications. You can run a 64-bit version of Linux and still use the 32-bit applications that haven't been "upgraded" yet. It won't work the other way. If you've got a 64-bit processor, why install a 32-bit Linux? Eventually you'll have to install a 64-bit version.

Well, in my case the reason is that my distro of choice doesn't have an official 64-bit version yet.

Well, there's always that. Maybe install the 32-bit version twice.

A little off topic for this thread, but I installed RHEL on a new dell 2950 with dual core processors just last week. The DB server we loaded the 64 bit OS, but for the app server we had to stay with the 32 bit OS. Even loading the 32 bit OS was noticibly faster with the dual core processors. Cool ehhh?