19 Nov
2012
19 Nov
'12
8:34 a.m.
On Sun, 2012-11-18 at 19:45 -0600, Charles Henry wrote:
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Folderol
<folderol(a)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the proprietary driver for ATI graphics will only run with outdated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.