[H-GEN] New Machine

[Paul Gearon]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and ]
[ Unix-related topics.  Please observe the list's charter.          ]

>I am looking at the Matrox G400 Max and would also be interested to here
>opinions on this and other cards.


I agree with Rob here.  Splendid 2D performance.  3D is coming, but 3D isn't
really supported too well for anything except Voodoo yet anyway.  If the
machine has, or will have, a DVD drive, then the LiViD project is
specialising in Matrox cards (though other cards will also be included as
they progress).  If you're looking at the dual head option, then you will
find it very nice and useful.... in the long run (unfortuantely it won't be
supported until XFree86 4)

BTW, Alan Cox started posting to the LiViD mailing list late last week, and
has been posting prolifically since.  I get the feeling that we are going to
see fully supported DVD under Linux VERY soon now!  8^)

(having someone of that calibre post to a list makes my feeble attempts at
contributing look very humble indeed...)

>Also, whilst Conor is asking, I need help deciding between an Athlon system
or a
>dual Celeron (using ABIT BP6).
>
>The Athlon would probably be better suited to what I am doing (python and
perl
>development, XML/ SGML, GIMP, running NT with VMware -- that sort of thing)
but
>there is a certain coolness factor about having my own SMP machine that is
very
>tempting.


I agree with the coolness factor of the SMP, but I'd advise against it.  My
dual PIII-500 is VERY fast... but extraordinarily unreliable.  It hangs
regularly.  Most of the bugs have been due to spin lock contention issues
which were introduced in 2.2.7 (IIRC) and many have since been eliminated,
but there are still a few there.  I know some of them have been fixed in the
2.3.x series, so I'm tempted to go there.  It somehow seems ironic that I
would consider using a development kernel for reliability reasons  ;-)

>Any opinions/ suggestions?


Do the Athlon.  That has a coolness factor of its own.  :-)  Besides, unless
you're doing a lot of compiling you probably won't get full use out of an
SMP system.  The sort of work you mention above is mostly only going to use
1 CPU at a time.

Regards,
Paul


--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.