# hardware for gentoo [SOLVED]

## while true

oi,

I am everlasting newbie, and I am about to buy me a new computer (box this time).

This comes a great news to me, but before I buy I would like you to 

help me pick right hardware on which I can install gentoo.

Are there pieces of hardware that should be avoided when buying?

I am asking this because I have a 5 year old laptop and there is now 

a graphic (driver) issue and it is practically useless 

(I know, it can be fixed, but I could not figure it out)

so are there recommended pieces of hardware on which gentoo would last longer?

again, I am noob and I might misused some terms,

but I would not like to buy a box and find out that 

I have hard time installing and maintaining gentoo.

thank you

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## roravun

Regarding graphics card:

NVidia v AMD/ATI

If you are into gaming, then you should go NVidia, and be prepared that you will probably lost support for your card in a few years.

If games are not that important for you, you could buy radeon, which AFAIK has slightly less optimized binary drivers.

But on the other hand, they actively support radeon opes source driver development, so you won't be screwed over 

when they drop support for your card, as you would be while using nvidia card (Last time I checked nouveau was total garbage campared to radeon open source driver.

I was even unable to boot one of my machines with NVidia on board. Needed fallback to VESA)

I can not tell anything about INTEL, since I have never owned any of their GPUs.

Regarding everything else:

When buying new hardware component I just go to kernel directory and check if the hardware is supported, then

look around the web for issues specific to linux. This process turned out to be pretty reliable.Last edited by roravun on Thu Jan 03, 2013 1:33 pm; edited 2 times in total

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## Hypnos

Hardware compatibility has almost nothing to do with Gentoo -- if it works on Linux, it works on Gentoo.

Hardware that is both widely used and having open source drivers are good bets for future compatibility.  Most Intel networking and GPU chipsets are in this category.

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## while true

hello guys,

aha, I should probably say what I am aiming for:

-as angry cpu as I can get

-8gb ram

-gpu minimum (no games)

-like 120 gb ssd

So Radeon cards have good support,

as well as Intel, I gather.

Hypnos: "Hardware that is both widely used and having open source drivers are good bets for future compatibility."

how or where can I get such info? For having open source driver support?

"if it works on Linux, it works on Gentoo."

ok, mea culpa, culpa maxima

I guess I should start picking pieces up, and I will get back here for oppinion on specific hardware,

but so far you helped me to rule out nvidia gpu, thank you.

also, any tip on putting box together is most welcomed!

Thank you

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## The Doctor

I few words for intel. I have an intel chip in all the computers I use. I have never had any issue with intel, and some of these boxes came with XP when it was new. I can't speak to the modern chips since my newest computer is about an 09. I doubt you should not have a problem with chips out living the driver.

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## Hypnos

 *while true wrote:*   

> Hypnos: "Hardware that is both widely used and having open source drivers are good bets for future compatibility."
> 
> how or where can I get such info? For having open source driver support?

 

This is a good question, and I don't know a good answer.

The closest might be the Debian Hardware Compatibility List, which matches devices to kernel drivers (which are obviously open source).

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## mattst88

Disclaimer: I work for Intel on the Mesa driver.

You won't find a better free software driver than Intel's.

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## bammbamm808

I have never had any trouble with nvidia cards in linux. I don't care that the driver is closed-source, since I want it to drive my monitor, not give me something to tinker with. I seem to have heard of many more problems with ati video devices than nvidia. However, since you don't game, viable 3d accelleration hardly matters. As far as linux drivers being unavailable in a few years, that's rank, no, wild specualation, and any non-gaming-capable video card can be had for practically nothing today, let alone in in the dreaded "few years". I have never used a Radeon card, but get the impression that there are more issues, which may be worth dealing with if using a closed-source driver bothers you for some reason. Get a cheap old Geforce, use the legacy driver in portage.

There seem to be more issues with pci devices than any of the popular motherboard chipsets these days. Soundcards, NICs and some other bits can be problematic. Select some target hardware and google the names of the particular devices and chipsets with regard to their linux compatablilty. There is enough well-supported hardware out there so that you should be able to avoid purchasing any flaky or questionable parts, if you do your homework ahead of time. All of this information is just a few well-chosen Google keywords away.

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## Hypnos

AMD and NVIDIA have deprecated video drivers, moving them into "legacy" branches.  In the case of NVIDIA, some of these drivers will then be dropped altogether; the situation is less clear with AMD.

In these cases, you will be relying on open source drivers eventually anyway.

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## msst

 *Quote:*   

> -as angry cpu as I can get
> 
> -8gb ram 

 

Recently looked into this as well. I went for 32 Gb ram (16GB should do as well, I would'nt use only 8, its not that expansive any more) and an i7-3770K on asrock z77 board. That seems to be a good compromise in speed / price. You just mount /var/tmp/portage and /tmp into ram then and compile is fast.

As it was an upgrade, I kept my old grafix card.

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## _______0

mobo with IOMMU support, radeon card. I'd say a AMD cpu since they support 32GB RAM unlike intels.

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## krinn

I wouldn't buy an ati again for any reasons.

The nvidia binaries never failed me, with any cards yet.

The best open video drivers and long term usage is certainly made by intel (warning: i don't work for intel)

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## while true

oi,

ok, so basicly the battle is over gpu,

and I need (for my purposes) integrated video at best,

so cheapest gpu, which in term means cheap replacement,

as driver support fades.

that said, I have my new box (YEAH!!!), 

up and running gentoo,

well not quite, i have some xorg problem,

I will probably need to post a question.

my new box:

thermaltake v3

be quiet 430w 80plus

MB asus m5a97 r2.0

amd fx 8 core 4.0 ghz unlocked

16g ram kingston hyperx performance (4x4g)

240g ssd sandisk extreme

ssd mounting kit

ati radeon hd 5450 (cheapest I could find)

total euro 740

I would like to thank you all for your time and your input,

you seattled several things for me, thank you.

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## BradN

Some of the AMD's with integrated graphics (that is, integrated into the CPU, or "APU" as they call it) aren't too bad.

If you get one with a "northern islands" GPU core, it's among the best supported in the open source "radeon" driver, and has been working flawlessly for me with basic compositing (tested kwin and e17).  If you go this route, make sure you install the firmware files it needs before loading the kernel module for the open source driver or your display will become unusable!

Despite the wikipedia pages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Islands_%28GPU_family%29 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Islands_%28GPU_family%29 ), the AMD A8-5600K I have has a northern islands GPU (code name "ARUBA") and works well with the open source driver.  The CPU models, GPU "models", code names, and such are all pretty confusing, so good luck...

Cross reference the "HD" model number the APU comes with and the radeon driver page at http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature if you want to use the open source driver in the near future - it seems to have better information about which type of core each GPU has, but it isn't very well cross-referenced with the APU model names, so you have to do a little work.

Anyway, I just thought I'd put that out there as it's a fairly cheap option and if you feel like doing a little gaming, you can always try the proprietary driver if the open source one doesn't cut it.

I'll also add that the stock AMD heatsink+fan is adequate, but if you really want to push a 100W part in any way (maybe even undervolting to reduce power consumption), you might want to invest in a better cooling device to give you some more... uh... degrees of freedom.  But on this topic, the APU design is good because probably the GPU will have the same reliability as the CPU in this setup.  For those of you that work with lots of machines, how many graphics cards have you seen go bad?  Now, how many CPUs?

Expect varying motherboard support for advanced clocking options.  For instance my CPU supports 3.9GHz turbo when the thermal profile allows, but my motherboard (BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85W FM2) leaves no option for doing this, at least in linux (not sure of the situation for windows).  It does support frequency scaling through ACPI but turbo speeds are unavailable.  This motherboard seems pretty solid hardware wise, but BIOS implementation has some rough edges, and they skimped out a little on the fan control/monitoring end of things.  Also, undervolting anything besides memory isn't supported.

My latest setup (I took the cheap motherboard, tolerable CPU+GPU, slow but redundant hard drives, and massive RAM approach):

BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85W FM2

AMD A8-5600K Trinity 3.6GHz (3.9 GHz turbo) quad core with HD7560D GPU

32GB RAM in 4x8GB (PC3 12800)

3x1TB in RAID-5 (Seagate Barracuda Green ST1000DL002 1TB 5900 RPM)

All inside a Lian Li PC-60 case with a corsair 520W PSU, both reused from a 2005ish machine.  By reusing the old case and PSU (which I originally got because I knew they'd last), and in combination with some newegg promos, I got the upgrade costs down to about 510$.  Not bad in my opinion, and I can put up with some BIOS crappiness and fans maybe a little louder than ideal as long as the thing runs reliably!

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## _______0

newer amd APUs have IOMMU2 as well.

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