Friday, December 19, 2008

upgrade to my borkstation 64 @home

I went from an single core athlon 64 3000+ on am2 socket and asrock motherboard with nvidia 6100 gpu (on board) and 1G ddr2 (noname)
to an dual core athlon x2 5400+ with 1M cache level2 and an beautiful asus motherboard + kingstone 1G ddr2 @800 mhz


why i love this motherboard ? it comes with linux in bios + firefox and skype (just in case you drives are dead or you need to reinstall the thing) also the layout looks nice with solid state capacitors (they seems to last longer than the electrolytic ones)

The funny story about these caps is that my old motherboard and cpu will replace an barton 2500+ soltek nforce2 motherboard with caps blowed (leaking)

I replaced the motherboard and cpu , 
the bad: linux 2.6.22 doesn't boot with this new chipset (seem to be an s-ata  issue) so the tuner winfast tv200 global xp doesn't have sound with the 2.6.27 or 2.6.28 kernels even after i put the right firmware

the good : the second cpu really helps when there are cpu intensive tasks like bittorrent or linuxdcpp (flash)
the sound is really better than the old motherboard and i love it when i play music with xmms
the bad: video performance is not on pair with the old integrated gpu ! at least there are some issues with 
compiz , for now i disabled the advanced effects and all is ok but there are times where when scrolling in arrora the screen is not rendered si fast (painting lag)
I have an paralell port printer and there is only one socket on the motherboard , you need to buy the cables and the interface , So i was lucky to have an old computer (k6-2) and i took what i needed from there.
the very good: now i have accelerated kvm ! so it will be easier to play with it than with qemu + kqemu 
I have already remove kqemu so I will have an accelerated virt-manager
The Weird: I can hear the caps singing when i scroll the web pages , seems to be an interference issue with the motherboard ?

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