[TriLUG] CPU Considerations/Recommendations

[Andrew Perrin]

I recently rebuilt my desktop machine after the motherboard caught on fire 
(!!), and have been happy with my choice. I went with an Athlon X2 64, 
which is a dual-core 64-bit processor. The performance is impressive, and 
the heat is not bad at all.  The dual-core is nice because I also run a 
vmware process pretty much continuously, so it's nice to have the 
firepower.

As of now I am running a 32-bit kernel, largely because I haven't got 
around to compiling a 64-bit one. The scuttlebutt seems to be that 
performance is pretty similar either way, but recently I've been bumping 
up against the 3G per-process memory limit so I may get to the point of 
moving to 64-bit.

My motherboard, bought at Intrex, is an MSI K9VGM-V.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl



On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Ed Alexander wrote:

> I need to purchase a new primary desktop for home use.  I'd like some 
> recommendations for what CPU to get.  Is Athlon 64 a good choice?  I know of 
> issues with getting Flash player to work (only 32-bit version available). 
> Are there other considerations, good or bad?
>
> I'll be running various Linux distros on it over time, one as the base system 
> and others in Qemu or VMware.  The system will be used for the usual (e-mail, 
> web, video, productivity, etc.) and general playing around with Linux 
> distros.
>
> Thanks for any constructive comments.
>
> Ed
>
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