Trevor Cordes wrote:
On 2009-06-14 Mike Pfaiffer wrote:
I'm looking to pick up a quad core machine. I've been told some motherboards don't work too well with Linux and BSD. Apparently all other components work fine. The guys I was going to pick it up from said they were going to do some research on the matter and get back to me. This was early May. Looks like I'll have to walk in with a list. So the question is which motherboards work?
Any Intel-based chipset board should work fine all the time for me. The only issues might be with less well-supported ATI and Nvidia chipsets.
A number of people have said their AMD boards are fine. After much consultation, I've decided to go with Intel. On-board graphics are fine for the moment. I expect the machine to last quite a while and may eventually need a video card. By that time it will be necessary to do more research. Hopefully the drivers will be available by then.
My company can get in whatever motherboards you require at, probably, the best Wpg prices. So if you want a quote, send your model #'s to me and list your best local price.
Bad timing I'm afraid. I'm already talking with John D. from Brandon. Have been for a couple of weeks. We still have some details to work out, but he's going to get back to me about the possible configurations and their prices. At the moment Intel does seem the way to go. RAM prices are cheap. We're looking at a mini-ATX board with a 2.7 or 2.8 GHz (rounding up) chip with loads of cache. (a big improvement over my current 1.5GHz chip). We're aiming for $800 but expect it to be slightly more. Oddly enough this is what I paid for my current machine back in the day.
Although, a friend of mine decided to go cheap and bought discontinued/slower parts to put together himself and it ended up at less than half the price. Since this machine has to last I'm looking for something more robust. The thing is both you and John know what works in the *NIX world and will have something I can take home at the end of the day knowing it will work when I power it on. If I put it together myself and say, crack the chip while applying the cooling tower, I'm the one who's out of luck. To me the costs of labour for you guys as retailers to do it for me is worth it. After all you guys aren't going to come back and say the machine doesn't work and I'll have to buy a second or third chip. Besides, if it doesn't work there'll be someone to yell at other than myself. ;-)
Later Mike