# Intel Core 2 Duo system  - Conroe E6700 - Hardware

## quag7

I was looking for a post a few weeks ago that provides the kind of information I'm providing below; I hope it will be of use to someone who is looking to build a new system.   

I spent probably near 30 hours in total researching parts to build a brand new Linux system from scratch.  It's hard to find all of the information in one place.  First of all, reviews often contradict - cnet.com is famous for this where the editors will give something a high rating and users will rate it low.  Or you find something that everyone loves but it isn't supported in Linux.  Or it is but it doesn't work right with another part that you want to buy.  And so on.   When you consider all of these things, it can be a headache trying to find the right combination of parts.  My principal concern is with stability and compatibility rather than necessarily having the very top performance; that being said, what I bought here smokes.

In that spirit, then, I wanted to write down a list and discussion about hardware which thus far has worked incredibly well for me, on my new Gentoo desktop system (named Endurance after Shackleton's ship.  Let's hope it, like Sir Ernest's ship, is not doomed to a watery grave.)

The new machine with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (Conroe).  I hadn't built a machine in 5 years, and I was nervous about it, especially because of the number of parts involved - I always expect something to be DOA and then not have parts to swap in and out to figure out where the problem is. 

Oddly, though things were fairly unfamiliar to me (the number of fans and power connectors has gotten ridiculous since last I built a system), the system booted, loaded the liveCD without any complaints the first time I turned it on, much to my shock and surprise, but that's basically lack of confidence over not having done this in a long time.

I am coming from a 1 GHz Celeron machine with a FIC motherboard that REALLY seems slow nowadays.

The following combination of hardware worked great for me.  The system has been flawlessly stable for me so far (no flakiness, no spontaneous reboots, no hard lockups).  You might get some faster RAM than I used (I used this specific RAM because people reported that it worked well and stably with the motherboard I got.  Picky RAM seems to be an issue with some motherboards so pay some extra attention when selecting a motherboard).  I would also note that everything works in Gentoo Linux.  I've had no issues even with all this new stuff, so I recommend them from that perspective as well:

[CPU]: Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) E6700

[Motherboard]: Intel D975XBX "Bad Axe"

[Video Card]....eVGA 256-P2-N584-AR Geforce 7900GT/256MB/GDDR3 (e-GeForce 7900 GT KO)

[RAM]...........Corsair XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 675 (PC2 5400) Unbuffered

[Hard Drive]....WD Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA150 HD

[Power Supply]..FSP (Fortron Source) FX600-GLN 600W (Epsilon 600)

[Case]..........Cooler Master Praetorian 730 RC-730-SSN1 Silver ATX

[Sound Card]....Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2 Value Edition

[TV Card]........Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350

I figured I'd list all of the prime parts of the system in case anyone else is searching and wants to just know what works (or at least what worked for me).

I bought all of these parts at NewEgg and TigerDirect. 

Things to watch out for:

CPU - These are backordered in a lot of places.  Many vendors have a 30 day return policy and what I was facing was having all of the parts but the stupid CPU, and then, with the backorder delay, getting the CPU after the 30 return period for everything else had run out (including the motherboard and PSU, my two main concerns).  Tiger Direct - Tiger Direct gets the Gas Face - sold these on their site without marking them as backordered, so they promptly charged my card and then I waited two weeks before it shipped.  I don't mind ordering backordered stock if it is MARKED as backordered, but selling something you don't have in stock and pretending otherwise is sleazy.  TD seemed to used to be the default place to go for computer stuff at one point but I'm not the only one who is getting some bad vibes from this company of late.  NewEgg was, predictably, prompt and professional though at the time I was looking to order, they couldn't tell me about the BIOS version on the motherboard, which I'll get to in a minute.

In addition, I bought the CPU as a combo deal with the motherboard -  they sent me the CPU with no fan/heatsink at all in bubble/plastic wrap, so if you buy OEM, you might not get a fan.  Plan for that.  Get some Arctic Silver thermal paste (or whatever you like) as well.  I used a cheap "stock-ish" Cooler Master fan that I bought locally for $15.00 - it's a little loud but the temperature is at 36 degrees C as I type this, which I guess isn't too bad.  The highest this has gone was 44 so far.  There are probably some better choices but after waiting all this time, I just didn't have the heart to order through the mail again.

After installing via Stage 3, I recompiled everything twice - in less than a day I was up running with X and the full suite of applications I use.  The Gnome system monitor happily plots two CPU histograms, and both are clearly and easily recognized by the system.  For the record, I installed with the following values, which people are still arguing over.  I am not a CPU guru, but I can report that the system runs stable and fast with:

```

CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"

CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

MAKEOPTS="-j3"

```

I used the amd64 minimal install CD to do the initial installation.  Processor Family in the kernel is set to EM64T.  And obviously SMP.

This is subject to change as per the presumable addition of an Intel Core 2 Duo -march setting in future versions of gcc or if people smarter than me about GCC and hardware come to a consensus on the issue.

Oh, and tweaking the kernel configuration is far more pleasant now that it takes me two minutes or less to recompile it  :Smile: 

Motherboard - Not the favorite among hardcore overclockers (settings are there in the BIOS but if your system won't boot from an experiment with settings, you'll have to hit a BIOS reset jumper on the motherboard.  The comments I've heard is that it has decent overclocking/setting options for those who like that sort of thing, but the BIOS jumper thing is a nuisance.  I don't overclock so I don't care.)  The Intel D975XBX *must* have a rev. 304 BIOS or it will not boot Intel Core 2 Duos (therefore you can't flash the BIOS unless you can drop a P4 in temporarily).  If you are considering this board, make sure you verify this with the vendor.  If they won't tell you (NewEgg apparently couldn't provide this information according to the discussions on their website), wait or go elsewhere. I see some sites are selling this as "Conroe ready" or "Core 2 Duo ready" to indicate the newer BIOS version - hopefully the old boards are starting to clear off of warehouse shelves so this won't be an issue much longer.

On the plus side, all of the drivers you'll need for onboard USB, Firewire, sound, and your drive controllers are part of the kernel.  I didn't have to download anything extra and the Gentoo CD was able to see my SATA Western Digital Raptor with no problems or intervention from me.  I just selected the right stuff in menuconfig, and it just worked, sensors and all (fans, voltages, temperatures).  There's something to be said for a motherboard that is so thoroughly supported out of the box in Linux.  What I can't tell you about is RAID, which I don't use.  Everything else on the board though works with no hassles, speaking in terms of Linux compatibility.  Do an lsmod when the Gentoo CD boots and you'll have most of what you need to build your kernel later in the install process.

I mostly like to buy Asus boards (good past experiences) but the memory compatibility issues which some people were reporting in combination with the generally happy reviews about the Intel board made me break ranks and just buy Intel.

Video Card - If you're considering buying this fairly well-regarded video card, you want the so-called "Reload" version which is a revision of a card that had some artifacting in some instances.  Vendors do not always indicate whether the card you are buying is the old one that (for a small amount of users) has the problem, or the new Reload one.  (Newegg does indicate that in their product description.)  I had to track the SKUs.  If you go to the eVGA website, there is a new article about the new SKU for the revision "reload" cards - most vendor sites will list the SKU, which is an inventory number of sorts - make sure you get the new one.  The right SKU for the Reload cards are: 256-P2-N584-AR.  More here: http://www.evga.com/articles/317.asp

RAM - You could probably go for 800 if you want; I bought this specific memory because it was specifically reported by other users to be rock stable on the Intel D975XBX.  Some motherboards are picky about memory (especially some Asus ones) - I wanted to know that what I got would not be a problem because flaky memory is infuriating.  This Corsair RAM was affordable, looked cool with its red heat spreaders, and so far has presented no problems whatsoever, so add my name to the list of reporting this as "stable and recommended" even if it's not the fastest RAM out there.

Hard Drive - I have had enormous luck with Western Digital drives, though not everyone shares my opinion.  Considering I run ten of them in this room right now, and have owned many more in the past, I think my opinion is based on a fair sample.  I don't care too much about the speed of my archive drives but I wanted to spend a little more for the Raptor (10K RPM) because it's my OS drive.  So far, it works great and runs surprisingly cool.  And as I say, detected and supported out of the box without fiddling around with drivers; it's all kernel-supported (can't verify RAID), hddtemp can read its temperature and so on.

Power Supply - I had never heard of FSP (Fortron Source) but they got some great reviews from hardware and gamer sites, and the PSU is pretty solid - the cabling is great, more than enough connectors (and long enough wires), and no adapters/converters necessary to use that PSU with the Intel motherboard - everything I needed was included.  So far, no instability at all so I guess that says something.  Several of the connectors are "split" to accomodate older boards with different connectors.  Presumably 600W is all anyone would need, and possibly a little overkill but I'd rather have the power and not need it...yadda yadda yadda.  The PSU has a very large fan whch blows downward into the case where the rear exhaust case fans blow it out.  I do not know if this is normal today; it may be.  All of my other PSUs blow out the back.  Nevertheless it works well if my case temps are any indication.  In the past, even before people were as conscious as they are now about common power supply deficits, I would buy Antecs.  I was going to buy another Antec but in the few reviews and ratings I could find, the Fortron Source PSU beat it, so that's why I bought it.  No regrets so far and all of my voltages are in the sweet zone.

Case - The case is fantastic; it has a large PSU bay so if you go with a larger PSU, it will probably still fit.  I know from researching it that some people have had problems with this, with PSUs that break the ATX spec.  The Praetorian has a whole buffer zone of extra room around the PSU I bought.  All of the cables reach and the case has thumbscrews for the outer case and the card slots, which is nice.  The front sound/firewire/USB module provided with the motherboard fits nicely in the case, matching the case color, and the easy to plug-in compound cable reaches easily.  The blue LEDs on the included fans were probably a bad idea by Cooler Master - the aesthetic of the case is metallic industrial, not gamer bling, but whatever.  The hinge on the front door is unusually sturdy (almost self consciously so, as if the designer was thinking, wow, most cases have flimsy front doors) and the door itself is thick and heavy and makes a pleasant "kachink" sound when closed.  There is a compartment on the top of the case with an included plug module for sound, USB, etc.  This can be removed and you can stick a fan in there instead, blowing out of the top of the case.  Cooler Master even provides a nice little fan grate for this.  Tons of extra screws and several extra mounting struts are included.  I have no complaints at all about this case.  It's a little pricey, perhaps, but no sharp edges, nice craftsmanship (filters on all of the front vents, no metal tabs to have to twist and break off in the drive bays, etc.)    Nicest one I ever owned and my first Cooler Master; if this is any indication of their workmanship, they may have a brand-loyal customer.  A friend got the Cooler Master Centurion case and he was quite pleased with that one as well.

Sound Card - Not the best choice for hardcore musicians (I assume), but you can't beat it for simple Linux compatibility.  Probably I could have just used the on board one on my motherboard.  I've had bad luck with bad shielding and a "hum" sound from on-board sound on motherboards I've bought in the past (such as the FIC board I'm coming from), but the on board one on the Intel board actually sounds decent.  So now I have two sound cards in my system and both work and are supported and simple to configure in the kernel using the Gentoo ALSA configuration guide.

TV Card - TV cards have a weird config process involving firmware and suchlike, but it works in Gentoo, at least in mplayer (can't get xawtv to work with it for some reason but I don't particularly care).  This card has onboard encoding and decoding - the upshot of this is that you can capture ready-to-use mpeg video using no more CPU than mplayer consumes showing the picture and writing to the disk.  What I don't like about this is it's a little noisy (faint diagonal banding from some kind of RF interference).  I've tried disconnecting some fans inside the case individually and moving cards around to isolate the source but there's some noise in my picture which is apparent when I run it fullscreen.  It may be coming from my cable box so I can't blame Hauppauge for it yet.  This card requires the ivtv package and a little install time to get everything loaded properly.  I've watched and saved video to my hard drive, but I have as yet been unable to get the FM radio working in Linux yet but haven't spent too much time on this so far.

Anyway I hope this post will be of use to someone.  I was looking for a post like this to save me some time a few weeks ago, and since I've had what can only be considered fairly dramatic success with this combination of hardware and Gentoo, I wanted to pass it on.

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## cato`

Nicely writen  :Exclamation: 

Maybe it's something for gentoo-wiki.com?

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## unkn0wn

Thank you for you're detailed post.  This has helped me greatly in building a new Gentoo box.

I'm curious about your overall noise, is the tower pretty quiet overall?  In an effort to reduce noise, I selected a passively cooled power supply and a sound dampened case.  I do not plan on overclocking, but nothing annoys me more than a noisy computer.

My planned configuration is identical to yours with the following substitutions:

[CPU] Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) E6600

[Case] Antec Performance P180B Computer Case

[Power Supply] Antec Phantom 500 500W Power Supply

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## quag7

My computer sounds like an industrial wind tunnel.

There is no getting around the fact that it generates a lot of white noise.  But I have 7 computers in this room anyway, so adding to that chorus is something I can live with.  Some of the noise is a result of the "vortex" shaped hole on the side of the case, where the CPU fan blows out.  A normal case would probably swallow a lot of noise.

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