[kwlug-disc] How to choose a new motherboard

[unsolicited]

I was going to reply to Khalid's with ... I was just going to ask that.

I agree, individual components was the question though, which is what I 
do myself.

To both situations, isn't the question these days - has anyone bought 
something recently to find out it DOESN'T work? i.e. Doesn't everything 
'just work' these days?

- mind you, my most recent experience belies that - hardware newer than 
the distro (Kubuntu 10.04 at the time). But within a year that 
self-corrected itself. [Along the way, KDE would lock up every 3 days or 
so, requiring a reboot. Which wouldn't apply to Khalid as he doesn't run 
a GUI on them.]

- during the journey, sure, ran into the whole Windows 8/8.1 and GPT 
thing, but that's 'progress' and would apply regardless of the hardware.


My current conclusion for next buy:
(New, 'cause most anything used is still back at P4, as anything later 
such as dual-core is still being used.)

- Intel, quad core, hyperthreaded. K series, so self-overclocks to 
whatever it can.
- buy the fastest it gets. Over the lifetime, the cost differential 
won't matter.
- SSD
- find the cheapest non-spiffed up with irrelevancies MB with the most 
Sata and USB 3 ports. e.g. 'Premium' brings nothing I care about to the 
party over 'Pro' or no adjective at all.

Check chipsets - e.g. Last I looked, I think it was, Broadcom vs Atheros 
was a choice, and one had FOSS drivers and one didn't.

And, IIRC, chipsets that used to be problematic started coming out with 
drivers along the way. ATI vs NVidia comes to mind.

Seems to me video and net chipsets had stopped being problems, but some 
wi-fi still were/are. (Not that I cared about wi-fi on a desktop.)


On 14-06-30 05:45 PM, William Park wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 04:25:44PM -0400, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
>> When a desktop (server) started acting up inconsistently, and it was
>> time to replace it, I just checked what is in the flyers and picked
>> one out from BestBuy for a reasonable price. I think it is an ASUS. It
>> replaced an Acer.  Both worked fine with Linux.
>
> You're buying pre-packaged brand-name tower.  OP is talking about buying
> components and assembling.
>
> Side question:
>      Did you have any problem installing Linux when the machine came with
>      Windows 8/8.1?
>