[wellylug] Hardware compatibility

[Bruce Hoult]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Peter Lynch <Peter.Lynch at fineos.com> wrote:
> I’m thinking of buying the “High-end business” spec pc from Ascent
> (http://www.ascent.co.nz/PCBuild.aspx), without the OS, of course.  Does
> anyone have any comments on the compatibility of the hardware components
> with Linux in general, and Debian in particular?  I’m also happy for
> recommendations of other suppliers, although I do like Ascent and have dealt
> with them several times in the past.

If you're running software that uses a lot of threads then change to
an i7 860, which has hyperthreading (which actually works this time).
If you're not running things with lots of threads then change to a
Core 2 Duo with a much higher clock rate :-)

The RAM is very expensive.  I built a similar machine recently (also
using 1600 MHz CL7 memory) and experimented and there is so much L3
cache that I can't detect any performance difference at all (on e.g.
building Firefox with -j16) running the RAM at 1600, 1333 or 1066.