[LAU] OT: New i7 rig, Gfx card recomendations and more.

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Sun Oct 28 21:22:07 UTC 2012


On Sun, October 28, 2012 11:37 pm, Paul Coccoli wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 6:36 PM, Patrick Shirkey
> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, October 28, 2012 9:18 am, Len Ovens wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, October 27, 2012 1:50 pm, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>>>
>>>>> PCI is dead,
>>>>
>>>> Alot of people would love to upgrade their older pci cards to new
>>>> mobos.
>>>> It's becoming a real hassle to find boards that allow that.
>>>
>>> As an owner of an older PCI audio interface... I have been putting some
>>> thought to this. I remember that there was a time not too long ago when
>>> people were using old DX100s as routers. Boot from a floppy and run in
>>> memory (not much either), no drive, no fan in the PSU or on the CPU.
>>>
>>> Maybe instead of getting rid of the old MB... pull the graphics card
>>> (first thing to go anyway) Run a minimal linux (terminal only) that
>>> runs
>>> netjack. Now you have an ethernet sound interface. Plug into the new
>>> box
>>> (maybe on it's own NIC) and run netjack instead of jackd.
>>>
>>
>> This is a proven method for building out a relatively cheap high
>> performance netjack cluster.
>>
>> Taking it a step further it can also be used for rendering with blender
>> and cinelerra. In that case having the graphics card is also useful.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Patrick Shirkey
>> Boost Hardware Ltd
>> _______________________________________________
>> Linux-audio-user mailing list
>> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
>> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>
> Surprisingly, the place I buy parts from has 22 Core i? motherboards
> that range from 1-4 PCI slots and 20 new AMD A-Series (socket FM2).  I
> was happy to see that, as I have to build a new system and I'd like to
> use my old PCI Delta 66.
>
> On a related note, does anyone have any experience with AMD A-series?
> While I would like to support Intel, AMD seems a lot more
> cost-effective, and the built-in graphics are better.
>

I am running a fusion chipset for the past year. It can handle 1080p and
is a pretty powerful solution for Linux multimedia and gaming.

At the time I installed the OS I had to use the AMD catalyst drivers
provided by AMD to get acceleration working because they were not
available for squeeze. It was a bit of a hassle to get debian installed
but I managed to do it in the end.

The driver management tool has a couple of minor bugs but those might have
been fixed by now.

One thing to note is that AMD have recently decided to drop support for
<5000 series chipsets in their catalyst drivers. My notebook which is only
2 years old has a 4200 series gpu and the open source radeon drivers in
Debian Wheezy do not support acceleration. Debian team has recently made
the transition to the newer version of X which is not supported by the
older catalyst drivers IIUC. So to install a version of  the "older"
catalyst drivers on debian that would run on wheezy I had to enable the
experimental repos. However with Fedora 17 that is not a problem and the
acceleration is enabled by default when installing the OS.

Overall, my experience with AMD drivers is that it is a pita with Debian.
With older versions of Fedora it was also a pita because I had to enable
the rawhide repos to install the catalyst drivers to get acceleration
which was not obvious unless you knew here to look for the info. In
addition the driver package provided by AMD would not install correctly on
f16. I haven't tried the AMD package with f17 as everything is working
ootb.




--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd


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