[plug] Hardware compatibility

[Craig Ringer]

> Asus A7V266E motherboard (no raid, no onboard sound)
What CPU do you plan on putting in it? Everything is compatable, of 
course, but I'm curious...

Also, I've had less than ideal experiences with some VIA chipsets in the 
past, esp with ASUS biosen. Ideally (IMHO) get an AMD-761 based board, 
these are truly amazingly drool-worthy.

Oh and AMD is just better *grin*

> Asus V8170 GeForce 4 MX440 graphics card
NVidia drivers aren't fun. The built-in XFree86 ones don't support any 
functions above those of the TNT/TNT2 series, so you're card will run in 
crippled mode. The NVIDIA ones are binary-only doozies, and while they 
seem pretty good, I have had problems with them in the past, both system 
stability and app compatability with their GLX libs. Unless you really 
need truly revolting speed, consider Matrox.

> Soundblaster Live DE 5.1
The Live is a weird card. I've had problems with it in the past, solved 
by forcing the BIOS to allocate it an IRQ all to its-self. Seems to have 
very buggy irq sharing and pci-pnp info. Seriously nice card otherwise 
though.

> - the CDRW
They're all pretty standard. It'll probably support "mmc" whatever that 
means, and most stuff (cdrecord, etc) will happily work with it unless 
its _really_ weird. Don't know about any underrun protection etc but 
I've never needed that stuff anyway. Gotta love an OS that can actually 
mulit-task (diabloII under Wine while writing a CD being my coolest).

> I'm not an overclocker, nor am I a 31337 gamer;
In which case seriously consider a more basic 3d card with better 
support, say matrox or even a Radeon (?)


-- 
Craig Ringer                                IT Manager, POST Newspapers
http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/
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