[LAU] New Computer - Wooo!

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2012-11-18 at 19:45 -0600, Charles Henry wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Folderol <folderol at ukfsn.org> wrote:
>         Someone asked about A series AMD machines a while ago. I kept
>         quiet because I
>         was in the process of getting one. Here is the spec:
>         
>         MBO     ASUS® F2A55-M LE
>         CPU     AMD A8-5600K Quad Core APU (3.6GHz) & Radeon™ HD 7560D
>         Graphics
>         MEM     4GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz
>         SDA     120GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s        '/'
>         & /home'
>         SDB     180GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s
>          '/audio' & '/source'
> 
> The AMD APU's make a pretty interesting platform,  for you CPU
> watchers out there :)  Up til now, you weren't probably buying one of
> these for graphics performance, but they're interesting as a high
> performance platform too.  The Kaveri line (Finnish word for friend)
> due out in 2013 looks very promising for its performance/power ratio
> (up to one TFLOP on CPU+GPU with shared memory on a single chip).
> You probably won't be sorry with the A8-5600K either.  Clock speed
> isn't everything, but for some DSP applications, you just can't
> improve on a single/dual core with a high clock, and that looks pretty
> nice.
> 
> You don't mention the other components like PSU, fans, case,
> peripherals, or monitor.  I assume those weren't that significant, but
> you could easily spend a few hundred dollars just to reduce the noise
> by 20 dB.  I'd appreciate to know how well it works for your setup, in
> addition to how it performs.  Oh, and does it keep the place warm in
> winter?
> 
> Chuck

ATI doesn't maintain Linux drivers for "older" graphics. After a while
the proprietary driver for ATI graphics will only run with outdated
versions of X. IMO the open source drivers is ok for 3D too, but for
some usages this might be a show-stopper.