When it comes to building a new box, these are my rules:
1) CPU = AMD, period. I have my current 4 core box, and the next one will soon be a 8.
I am cheap, I purchase the cheapest CPU which the motherboard will take that has the cores I want.
I don't overclock etc..
2) Graphics = nVidia, period. When I purchase I confirm that the board I am looking at accepts the OEM drivers from nVidia. I will purhcase a more current and more than I need board to do that, but I still am cheap on it. I don't do lamer gamer. Dual monitor support is another requirement.
3) Motherboards - Well I've had them from all over the place. I don't know that I am particularly lined up to one specifically. One which has on board LAN, audio, supports the CPU I am after, tons of SATA ports, tons of USB ports. The last is from ASRock which is some splinter off Asus or something or some one of the other TW companies. Again this is cheapest board for the CPU, and ports and features I want.
4) UEFI - I am currently finding my next board which does not have this specifically to avoid:
a) Issues
b) Stupid wasteful BIOS stuff I won't use, don't want to pay for regardless of how neligible the cost to me is, and that I will likely set a few options, and NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN.
5) Build/Purchase - BUILD 100% of any desktop or server. I guess if I had access to the parts I would build laptops too. But considering the headaches to cram all that stuff in, maybe not. For the want of $2 chinese fan, I have a laptop which requires the TOTAL DISMANTLING to get to that side and replace it. Oh well.
6) Where to purchase? Well unless your lucky, it is online only. I had a local store which basically imported the stuff you see on Newegg etc.. They mysteriously just closed one day. So it really is Newegg, eBay, Buy.com, there may be more... but for most of my parts I go to newegg. And with the $50/year Premier getting me free shipping, I can eat them alive on that for parts, quick.
7) When it comes to printers, AIO's = HP, period. Crazy stupid easy to get this stuff to run, print, fax, scan over a network (I don't have a direct connected printer to save my soul!) Now if you want to spend about $20K+ I can suggest some nice Sharp units too! They are slick! They can ftp to local servers, store to local shares, ftp to remotes and they just happen to print stuff too!
8) OVERBUILD! - I don't need a new box.. but in order to have more years with what I want, and avoid all the nonsense with UEFI etc. (really hoping it implodes on itself by the time I have to upgrade again). I'll put in a 8 core 64GB system. And use it to well not do anything that requires that! At a minumum make sure you get the RAM you need, 16GB min., 32GB would be my comfort zone, probably 4 core minimum, 2TB minimum drive.
9) Lastly, check out items with your distro of choice. Just plop your motherboard and ubuntu for example into google and see what comes up. You can also check the newegg reviews. There is a good contingent of users who report Linux issues there. Unless you got some really bleeding edge motherboard or device, I doubt you have issues. The biggest headaches can be LAN and audio, but even then in 2014, it has gotten 10000% better than it was just even a few short years ago.
If you have somethings picked out, post and maybe some one here is using it. Then maybe they will post their success or their failures with it.
I have Linux running on a range of hardware, including a 2013 MSI laptop. Here are my suggestions.
1) Distro dependency and Motherboards: I have had the best success with Debian (or Debian based) and Fedora on newer hardware. YYMV. For motherboards, ASUS and MSI are great. However, I lean more toward ASUS as their implementation of UEFI is better and gives more control to the user.
2) If you want something to work and do not care about gaming, either Intel or AMD will work just fine. I am not sure what TuxRaider's problem is with Intel, but either works in Linux. Personally, I like Intel CPUs because they run cooler and tend to be more energy efficient. However, AMD recently came out with the AM1 socket CPUs, a few of which are quad core. In my opinion, if you want quad-core, go the new AM1 AMD route (cheaper and more energy efficient). If you want more than that, go Intel (more expensive but more energy efficient).
3) Graphics: Nvidia is definitely the way to go here, especially on newer hardware. AMD is lagging behind in UEFI support (which most newer hardware will have on it). Save yourself the headache.
4) A lot of people have very little clue what they are even talking about when it comes to UEFI. The most features I have seen (and I am using $300+ motherboards) is RAMdisk and SecureSSD erase. I think these are good features. There is also a web browser in a few of them, which is nice should anything go belly up and you can't get into the OS. *see note
5) Build your own and buy where ever is cheapest. A lot of local stores price match (Fry's/Microcenter/similar). I personally prefer to buy directly from the distributor (such as EVGA) when I can. Otherwise, Newegg, Amazon, and Tigerdirect are great places to buy. Tigerdirect often has kits that they sell for decent prices.
6) For other peripherals: Printers - HP and even Epson are great. I have an Epson hooked up to my file server that also works as a print server for my entire home network. Keyboards and etc - Most things work, but be careful of some Logitech products. A few of their wireless keyboard/mouse combos are a PITA to get to work with *nix, in general.
*Note: UEFI/GPT issues usually only crop up in dual boot scenarios (Windows 8.1). If you are using the hardware specifically in Linux, you can turn off Secure Boot and Fast Boot. You can leave UEFI on at this point. Boot times are faster and you can have more than 4 partitions without dealing with LVM.
Well the processor doesn't quite matter that much, but intel or nvidia for graphics. The intel gpus are well supported, and fine for somebody who doesn't really need the advanced gpu performance. So buying a system with an intel processor, which will have an onboard intel gpu will work for most people.
I have an Intel i5 on a Gigabyte motherboard, 8 GB RAM, ATI HD 6770 card, two Seagate SATA-III disk drives, an off brand DVD-RW drive that is supposed to be made by Sony, Samsung 24" monitor, and a jillion other little parts and components. I'm running the latest Debian Sid with kernel 3.14.1.
My biggest complaint is that none of my N wireless cards actually run at N speed. That is even with a new AC router. My son's Macbook Pro blazes at as much as 62 mbps.
1) CPU = AMD, period. I have my current 4 core box, and the next one will soon be a 8.
Meh, depends on what it's for. AMD is fine for desktops, but for servers it's Intel all the way. Why? Four letters: IPMI. Well, that plus iKVM. I can do a bare metal install from my living room to a server on the other side of the country.
I recently purchased a Lenovo TS140 ThinkServer. It came with no disk drive, and no software. I also purchased disks and installed opensuse. I currently also have ubuntu 14.04 in a test partition. The price was reasonable for what was there. The DVD was a reader/only, so I won't be able to burn DVDs on that box -- that's not a problem for me, since I have mainly switched to using USBs. Okay, this is a fully built computer, rather than a MoBo, so might not be what you want. I thought it worth a mention.
This worked pretty well. It has UEFI support, but defaults to supporting both UEFI and legacy booting. You can switch it to legacy-only if you prefer. I have it running in UEFI only.
The UEFI support is imperfect, but pretty good. The secure-boot support is so-so, but I don't care about that. I currently have secure-boot enabled to test ubuntu 14.04 support for secure-boot, but I expect to mostly have it disabled.
GPT is a better partitioning scheme, though you will need UEFI to get the maximum benefit from it. I do have an external drive partitioned with GPT, and booting successfully on an older non-UEFI box. So GPT is still usable without UEFI.
In my opinion, you are better off going with UEFI and GPT. They are the direction for the future. There are currently some growing pains, so you'll probably want a MoBo with a record of working reasonably well with UEFI.
I didn't want to bias anything but it's good to see my dislike of ATI/AMD graphics (which goes back to the 1990s) lives on.
15+ years ago I'd have gone AMD all the way, just to put a check on Intel which I had hardware design experience with (remember when they did DRAM?). They were just plain arrogant to work with and horribly needed competition. But that was ages ago.
I've been digging down into specs. Looks like anything has 6mbps SATA to make good use of a small boot SSD. Any thoughts on this idea?
A lot of people I know like Asus. Then, for any maker someone always has horror stories.
Research makes me think UEFI isn't the problem it could have been. There are isolated problems and since it's totally new to me I'm still leery like many others.
SSD are nice for read/write speed, but not necessary. While my example is not linux, it just shows you that you don't need an ssd for everything, a wd black works quite well for everything unless you need insane read/write speeds. I have Win 8.1 on my system also, and with fast startup enabled on my 7200 hdd I can reach the desktop in just over 10 seconds, call it 25 seconds on reboot. People with ssd drives aim for those times honestly, however an ssd will not make your processor any faster, but if you need to process large files quickly an ssd can be useful. At least to me it's unnecessary. Maybe if I somehow get google fiber in the future I should get one to support that 1Gb ~ 123MB per second connection.
For about 13 years, I was running AMD processors and, following popular Linux lore, nvidia graphics. About a year and a half ago, I got an ASUS P8Z68 DELUXE/GEN3 and Intel 2600K. Initially, I used nvidia graphics, topping out at a GTX-470.
This is the highest-end machine I've built. I enjoy the mult-core multi-thread performance of the i7, especially with all the HandBrakeCLI transcoding I do.
If you aren't looking to game just get an A10-7850K based APU system w/ 16Gb of DDR3 2133. You can even run this setup fanless in the right case.
On the current crop of distros the OSS GCN drivers are pretty good. You get solid all around performance and power efficiency, an onboard GPU that can power multiple screens and double as an OpenCL co-processor as well as offload playback and transcoding with the OSS driver. All and all should last you nearly a decade, or basically till the hardware features are finally too far out of date for what you want/need to be able to do in basic web browsing.
---
I've had great experience with AMD hardware for both CPU and GPU. I usually go with Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock or the occasional MSI or Biostar mobo.
I've had no end of headaches with Nvidia kit.
Newegg mostly, only because their store is still the eaisiest to search whe you are looking for specific features. However I buy parts from any shop with a decent rating and often part from specialist shops like Sidewinder and FrozenCPU.
I overclock and underclock/volt depending on what I'm doing with said kit. I've yet to kill anything via oveclocking as I follow best practices instead of seeing what some proclockers have done and try to match them.
If you are looking for prebuilt systems or laptops try Ohava, Think Penguin, Zareason and System76 as they build only Linux comps, they don't even offer Windows as a BTO option.
Use an SSD for your " / " volume and for a Steam/Desura drive is where they shine, for everything else like swap, /tmp and /home use a standard HDD. Theres a few models of HDD that now have sustained large file reads ad writes that are in SSD territory for throughput, SSDs are better for lots of smaller files then they are for say a 4Gb video file.
The SSD helps with the overall snappyness and sense of speed in your system, having things just instantly load.
Agreed. We use Supermicro servers with AMD processors and IPMI at work. On the older systems IPMI was an option (a plugin board with the Raritan KIRA 100 BMC) while on the newer systems IPMI (including KVM over IP) is integrated on the motherboard itself.
My son's Macbook Pro blazes at as much as 62 mbps.
Which is still not N speed.
Also, just to show the type of hardware you can run Linux on, this is my file/web server (file server side is encrypted, kernel hardened, no sudo, and etc).
It's not the space, it's when it gets used unnecessarily. A few years ago it was driving me nuts when I had 8 gigs of ram with about 1.5 actually used and yet the kernel kept swapping _everything_ out causing constant lagging and HDD thrashing. After several hours of searching and tweaking I finally found the tweaks to make it less aggressive in swapping, but nowadays I just avoid the issue completely by not setting up swap at all. I have yet to have a installer complain about not giving it swap space. With 24 GB of RAM, setting aside "a few GB" of HDD space feels backwards esp with the performance hit unnecessary swapping will cause.
A few years ago it was driving me nuts when I had 8 gigs of ram with about 1.5 actually used and yet the kernel kept swapping _everything_ out causing constant lagging and HDD thrashing
i've seen that this actually behaves in a sane way. i've got 16gig of ram -- and i've set up an 8gig swap. i don't ever plan on having to use it -- but i virtualise quite a bit on my machine -- and i'd rather have a few burned gigs than have my system lock up in a customer demo.
if i wasn't performing that work -- i'd probably not have a swap file at all.
Here is another perspective. When I wanted a build a new machine I spent some time with Toms Hardware and read a ton of bench test results and his opinions. Then I bought Asus, Intel, added Crucial and paired it with a Seagate or Western Digital drive. Those were sturdy and reliable machines for family and schoolwork.
The of the worst machines I had was a Tiger kit. It was DOA and I had to call Canada for the RMA. But to get the phone number in Canada I had to call the corporate office in Florida first.
The second worst was an AMD - a gamer friend insisted I just had to build. It ran too hot even with monster fans. The RAM failed three times. The fourth time I bought Crucial.
Six months later I started buying parts for a new machine.
I am not anti-AMD or anti-gaming. I am anti-building the wrong machine for the wrong reason. it was an expensive lesson for me. I never looked back.
said by Wily_One:Eh? If the GPU is nVidia (either integrated or discrete) it will take the nVidia drivers. When would it not?
I inherit tons of hardware which has older nVidia cards which will no longer take the OEM drivers in current releases of the driver and/or distro.
Additionally if the box is rehab'd and I go looking for PCI, or even AGP nVidia cards, and put 14.04 or something in it the OEM drivers in the curent release are not supported. If you want to put older versions of distro(s) and drivers on.
It all depends on what I need out of them. If I don't need X for that box, and it runs headless then I don't care. I may not swap out the video card. All depends.
But BOTH nVidia, and crApTI both have the idiocy to remove support for cards which are 1-2 years old in the drivers that are current. It is stupid. And that is for another topic for which e won't agree on this.
said by Tirael:2). I am not sure what TuxRaider's problem is with Intel, but either works in Linux.
It is not a factor if they work in Linux.
said by Tirael: Personally,emphasis added I like Intel CPUs because they run cooler and tend to be more energy efficient.
I don't like intel, personally. Price for features, etc.. AMD wins.
This is my choice. I've found that I can save $$$ with AMD, get more, and every one is happy. If I spec stuff it has AMD in it.
said by Tirael:4) A lot of people have very little clue what they are even talking about when it comes to UEFI.
I know all I need to know..
Solution looking for a problem.
I don't need all those cute glitzy stuff to setup a BIOS. Maybe I have to go in and change the boot order, or enable stuff like VT, NX, that were not on or disabled by some one who had no clue.. I do NOT need a GUI to do that.
In re other issues that have crept in ie: Secureboot etc. Any Linux user who doesn't see and accept this for what it is, well.... This has a clear goal. That this forum just refuses to accept. We won't agree here.
I am all for an IMPROVED UPDATED BIOS to deal with the current state of TECH in 2014. That doesn't mean I need a GUI with all that useless graphics, a browser, a media player, or anything else. Support for more partitions, hardware etc. GREAT BRING IT ON! Anything else, meh, meh. I look at this as an Michael Bay of BIOS creation. Lots of explosions of grpahics for something that doesn't need it....
A solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
In re UEFI and the glitz and feature creep, PASS, We won't agree.
In re UEFI and updating the BIOS, the CORE BIOS to better support hardware and tech of 2014+, BRING IT!
said by mackey:Why? Four letters: IPMI. Well, that plus iKVM. I can do a bare metal install from my living room to a server on the other side of the country.
Theres AMD servers with IPMI and have been for a while. For those that don'k know what we're on about:
said by leibold:Agreed. We use Supermicro servers with AMD processors and IPMI at work. On the older systems IPMI was an option (a plugin board with the Raritan KIRA 100 BMC) while on the newer systems IPMI (including KVM over IP) is integrated on the motherboard itself.
That says it better, more politely than I would have.
While nice, we are internalizing most of our servers, and any server which is not sitting within a short distance of me, first comes to me for install. Then it is flown, hand delivered and installed into our colo space. We are trying to remove all of these, except for a few core items.
Why? Exactly to avoid issues where in I or my staff can not get their hands on hardware to fix! It is my/our job to do this, and that it what we are paid to do. Paying some one else to do it, just grates on me. Along with the issues in that getting persons at a DC who don't give a damn about you to fix something. Been there, done that, won't occur again. Me and my staff have an on call system for emergencies, and failure to respond in a timely matter will get your F I R E D. Mid emergency if it comes to that. Again, been there, done that. I take no prisoners!
said by linicx:The second worst was an AMD - a gamer friend insisted I just had to build. It ran too hot even with monster fans. The RAM failed three times. The fourth time I bought Crucial.
I am not anti-AMD or anti-gaming. I am anti-building the wrong machine for the wrong reason. it was an expensive lesson for me. I never looked back.
If I build it, AMD,nVidia period. If MY $$$ is paying for it, then MY $$$ is going to AMD and nVidia. If my company is spending $$$ then AMD/nVidia.When it comes to FREE hardware I will take what ever I get. If a client insists on x motherboard with intel and wants crApTI put in it, that is their choice, they can pay for it with their $$$. I will charge slightly more in the mark up for anything non AMD, nVidia.
I've inherited a ton of junky intel from P4 to Atoms, they get stuck doing varios duties LAMP server, LAMP test beds, LXC's, VMWare Player, OpenVPN stuff.
I cherry pick out the good AMD stuff for myself, extra rehab to the max on them. Do some rehab to have a good server or basic X desktop on the intel, and if some one come along looking for something cheapo for web browser/email machine, the intel stuff I send packing! You will be hard pressed to pry the AMD stuff out of my cold dead hands!
I've never had issues with AMD CPU's back to the K6 or earlier. I am so anti intel I used those NEC V20/30/40's in stuff before the AMD stuff. I had a V40 or something NEC board that had some memory tricks back in the DOS days that intel couldn't do. That sold me.
Along with some very arrogogant attitudes at intel about things, lawsuits over stuff, plus I think they peform better for my $$$, see ya losers!
I admit I am cheap when it comes to me personally. I purchase all kinds of no name hardware from memory to other stuff. I've had ONE issue in the last 10-15 years in regards to memory that it arrived faulty, and it came from Newegg. I've never had an issue with the generic RAM of all sorts from eBay, even the stuff that was shoved in a ziploc bag, put in an Pri. Mail bag and sent. Nothing more. Plopped it in, and have not looked back for years.
Same with my main box I built, it has some non name brand Gskill or something memory. Works great. Not one issue.
Same with Asus, ASRock, eVGA, and more. I think I've used every Asian hardware maker out there.
I will admit to being an LG snob when it comes to DVD/CD drives. For what ever reason at one point they seemed to have a lock on being the feature "richest" with their "super multi drive" line. If I could find some newer SATA versions of those old NEC multi CD changer drives I would be in heaven!
I've seen issues with some "name brand" stuff like Creative, maybe they improved things, but at the time having a "Creative" sound card was the be all end all to things. Now the MB include all the sound I need. (Your right I don't do much with sound so, 9999999999.9999999 DTS, BTD, STD, yadda yadda means nothing to me! )
Logitech too can be cranky, especially the stuff with that unifiying receiver, although I think I say some software module that would get back the control and allow it to function as intended one receiver multiple devices.
To each his own. I generally used recommended products as it caused me less headaches in the long run. My mistake was listening to someone who spent most of his time over clocking and tweaking, and reloading AMD computers that had Red Hat installed.