# Did you design your computer with the right hardware balance

## sisob

Something I've noticed across the internet is that a lot of people

transfer their knowledge of building/designing a computer's 

hardware directly from Windows to Linux - and this results

in computers that are nowhere near as optimised for linux as

they could be for the same cost.

I'm wondering how many gentoo users build their computers 

with linux in mind and how many didn't know that you should

build a computer with linux in mind.

Windows OEM computers generally have the latest flashy

cpu but piss poor hard drives and ram - which is the opposite of

what linux needs. I've seen specs with 128mb ram and 1.2ghz

processors - on that machine linux crawl.

My pc is a 1ghz athlon with 640mb ram and ata100 harddrives.

In general if you precessor speed in megahertz is 2x your ram in

mbs than you've got the balance wrong.

</rant>

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## shadow

hmm... let's see if i get what your trying to say... 

it is not good to have a processor speed (in mhz) that is twice the amount of ram you have (in mb), is that right? can you explain why this is so? i'm not really a hardware guy but i'll promise to try and not get lost  :Wink: 

you're set-up is ok because 640mb x 2 is roughly 1.28g and your processor speed is only 1g. but i'm screwed because i have 192mb of memory and 450mhz of cpu speed  :Sad: 

is there any way to work around this?

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## sisob

Well the 2x thing isnt in any way scientific - it's more to make the point that

if your going to build a computer the ram/processor balance that is optimal

for linux is different to the balance that is optimal for windows.

Your setup sounds grand - maybe the sum needs tweaking - but if i were you i was

upgrading that box I wouldn't upgrade the processor until the ram was coming

closer to the 2x rule. It depends if you swap out much - a fast processor is 

useless if your swapping out all the time.

an example: in my experince if you get two machines:

A) 1ghz with 512mb ram

B) 1.5ghz with 256mb ram

A will out preform b in linux - my computer is like A - OEM computers are like B

and the cost of both is roughly equivelent

Am I making any sense yet?  :Wink: 

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## fuxored

Theres no reason you can't have a 2ghz processor and only 128m of ram. If your not ever using all 128m and swapping out alot, adding more ram will do nothing for you really. For most people 256-512 meg ram is plenty, no matter processor speed.

I recently had some bad luck with crucial ram, and am only running 256m of ram on my dual 1.4ghz athlon system while I wait for replacement. It didn't slow to a crawl from going from 768m to 256m, except for in heavy graphics/rendering work(to be expected). For everyday normal use though it's just as fast as ever really.

I agree you should try to keep a balanced system though, and try to eliminate bottlenecks holding you back. But haveing a faster processor in no way means you need an assload of ram. Thats more dependant on the applications your runnning.

Edit: Your A or B example would only be true in certain circumstances. A would only be faster than B IF whatever being used requires more than 256m of ram, causing B to swap out. If your doing things that only require 128m of ram, then B will outperform A.

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## shadow

coolness!  :Very Happy:  i'm glad i shifted to gentoo, i sure am learning a lot  :Smile: 

one quick question though, how do i know if i swap out a lot? is there some sort of utility? using the 'top' command though, i notice that i don't usually use up all my ram. i guess that's good news then  :Smile: 

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## Techie2000

I never used to. However I've always built my computers with the philosophy that the hardware should be doing the work, and not software that will utilize the CPU that does what the hardware should be doing (such as them dinky ethernet cards. The netgear FA310TX rules) Nowadays I do keep in mind linux compatibility with new hardware.

My specs.

Intel Pentium III 800MHz Coppermine (Still runs very well)

512MB of Kingston PC133 SDRAM

40GB WD 7200RPM ATA/100 HDD

Visiontek NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200 64MB DDR

Soundblaster PCI16 (Due to be replaced)

Netgear FA310TX Ethernet Card

Tyan Trinity 400 Motherboard

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## sisob

 *ShADoW wrote:*   

> coolness!  i'm glad i shifted to gentoo, i sure am learning a lot 

 

There will always be an un-ending line of "hackers" who will love to show off their(our  :Wink:  ) 

technical  prowess by teaching you cool stuffs

 *Quote:*   

> one quick question though, how do i know if i swap out a lot? is there some sort of utility? using the 'top' command though, i notice that i don't usually use up all my ram. i guess that's good news then 

 

```
  5:02pm  up  3:32,  1 user,  load average: 3.43, 3.42, 2.99

123 processes: 118 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped

CPU states: 92.5% user,  7.4% system,  0.0% nice,  0.0% idle

Mem:   645868K av,  625176K used,   20692K free,       0K shrd,   77776K buff

Swap:  120452K av,       0K used,  120452K free                  315048K cached
```

That's the first 5 lines of my top output.

You can see that I have roughly 625mb or ram used and no swap used.

In the windows world it is bad to have all ones ram used up (anyone remember ram 

defragmenters?) - but not in linux - if i want to load a new program the kernel will

release some ram. The last time i swaped out was when i was testing my system by

seeing how many galeon windows i would have to open before it crashed. I got to

150 before It swapped out - and it never crashed - i didnt even have to reboot afterwards.

The linux kernel keeps previously run programs in memory as long as there is memory 

free - this is why i think you can never have enough ram. At them moment i can load

galeon,  xchat, or nautilus in less that 2 second each because there all in ram. This is why

(as apposed to windows) linux gets faster the longer it's left running and takes "a while

to get warmed up" - the more ram you have the more accute this effect is.

And dont even get me stared on ramdisks - those babys are a lot of fun - ever tryed 

compiling software in a 500mb ramdisk?   :Twisted Evil: 

cant wait to get my next 512mb of ram ...

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## sisob

 *Techie2000 wrote:*   

> I never used to. However I've always built my computers with the philosophy that the hardware should be doing the work, and not software that will utilize the CPU that does what the hardware should be doing (such as them dinky ethernet cards. The netgear FA310TX rules) Nowadays I do keep in mind linux compatibility with new hardware.
> 
> 

 

Agreed - i replaced my software 56.6 modem with a hardware 33.6 one and i get a faster

connection  :Smile:  and i replaced my realtec network card with a 3com(not the best but a lot better).

IMHO the cpu is only another part of the computer - people put too much emphasis

on it - and end up with terrible performance.

As for your spec - I concider that to be a beast - very well balanced

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## rommel

i would have to disagree with that 2x theory....it would be impossible to keep up with that as processors increase in speed 

 the need for a gig of ram is not applicable for most users that arent running servers.

as a desktop single cpu system 512mb of ram would be plenty, linux or otherwise.

i think fast supported hardware is applicable in either operating system. myself i run an athlon 2200+ tbred on an epox 8kha+ with 512mbs or ocz pc2400 and 3 seagate cheetah x15 hard drives on a tekram dc-390u3w setup running linux software raid 0, sound card is a santa cruz and video is gf4 ti4600.

with the exeption of the mainboard there isnt any room to upgrade yet and its plenty fast in linux.

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## sisob

the rule doesnt apply to ppl with the best of all hardware  :Wink: 

Personally if i had a 2ghz id want a gig of ram - maybe im just crazy

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## rommel

well the 512mbs i have now is never fully used...i have a gig of swap...following the old rule for linux swap but it's never in use....so i think the money that ddr or rdr would cost (atleast this use to be the case before memory got so cheap) would serve possibly more beneficial if you were to say increase the processor speed.

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## sisob

A gig of swap? - I have 150mb

I agree that processor speed is better once you get to 500mb+ of ram - but my mobo can take more ram but not more processor. <shrug>

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## gsfgf

/me has 768mb RAM and 1.2ghz cpu.  I didn't build this box w/ linux in mind, but even in windoze more ram is important.  I left my windoze box on allthe time and needed the ram so it wouldnt slow down too much.  Now i only use about 128mb.

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## Steve-O

More RAM == Good, but only to a point. Many folks here have stated that 512MB is plenty and they are probably correct for the given state of software bloat... er features. 

The amount of ram needs to match what you're trying to run. I have a 200MHZ PPro here with 256MB of RAM, and it runs RH7.3 (blech) quite nicely.

The most important thing is to balance out the speed (and quality) of your hardware to avoid performance mis-matches. Why on earth would you run a fast cpu with anything less than top notch supporting hardware? Case in point: My Mom's computer is a Duron 800 on an older SiS integrated motherboard. Dog slow. She has 512MB of pc100, too. Feels slower than my celeron 550 (BX chipset) with 256MB. Why? The BX is a quality chipset, the SiS is not. And I have better supporting hardware than she does. My machine is full of good karma, and hers is... well, you get the point.

Quality is the name of the game. This used to be one of the main arguments of people like myself with SCSI hard drives (speed was another, but that's not as big of an argument anymore, unless you have a 128MB caching RAID controller   :Cool:  ). It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is if spend all day waiting for data from the HDD.

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## dmason

I build my box with mainly one thing in mind, with a limited budget to spend on computer parts, what will give me the greatest increase in performance for as little money as I can spend. and I am thinking for what I do, I would say memory would be within the top two things I would upgrade. As for linux optimization, I just was very lucky that all of the hardware I have is supported by linux at first, well, with the execption of the very large struggle I have had with my geForce 2mx and gl lately, but that was solved by throwing a millenium G400 in the machine, not quite as fast as the MX, but it will do just fine until there is a video compamy that creates a card with good linux drivers, that don't kill gl. I actually optimized my computer for NT first, then upgraded it for windows 2000, and my third round of major upgrades will be linux based, since windows 2000 runs just fine at this point.

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## toojays

You know what pisses me off about OEMs?

When you buy a machine with a fairly modern, fast hard drive, and they hook it up with a 40 conductor IDE cable, which can kill performance. An 80 conductor cable is only a few bucks more. If your system can't use DMA for the hard drives, the cable may be the reason.

I was getting transfer rates of 10MB/sec (according to hdparm) with a 40 conductor cable. I went and got an 80 conductor cable, and the rate went up to 25MB/sec.

Often you will find that a system has an 80 conductor cable for the primary hard drive on IDE0, but then for the CD drive on IDE1 then just use a 40 pin cable. Which is probably fine if it's just a CD drive, but when you want to put a second hard drive in, and put it on IDE1, you should probably get a new cable.

Of course if you've got a heap of RAM and aren't doing anything disk intensive you probably wont notice the difference (except with hdparm), but it's something to consider anyway.

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## slais-sysweb

I built this machine for Linux 5 years ago: two 166mhz PPro with 512K cache, 256MB ram (I would have more but 8x32MB SIMMS leave no room) Buslogic UW SCSI.

     I chose the Bulogic controller because 5 years ago they had the best Linux driver support, and SCSI in general was more reliable on Linux than IDE. UW scsi was top of the range at the time, the original Quantum 4.5GB drive (which failed last week) cost £450, the IBM 4.5 and 9.1 GB drives now installed cost £25 on ebay last year. I also have Plextor SCSI CDRW. I am not sure if building a computer today I would still specify SCSI unless I was intending to do a lot of data intensive processing.

    But I would alway go for maximum memory over processor speed, and the choice of a large L2 cache on the processor and SMP follows the same principle. Modern processors run too fast for the rest of the system, so anthing that can overcome i/o bandwidth constraints is a good thing.

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## how

 *ShADoW wrote:*   

> one quick question though, how do i know if i swap out a lot? is there some sort of utility? using the 'top' command though, i notice that i don't usually use up all my ram. i guess that's good news then :)

 

Try vmstat(8).

Note that Linux always keeps some unused RAM around so that it can allocate memory fairly quickly even though the system is loaded. When the amount of unused RAM is sufficiently low, Linux will try to free up some.

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## tdm

I've build my machine last summer, I wanted a fast but not to expensive machine and after a few weeks of searching I builded this one together:

MSI K7T 266 Pro RAID (IDE RAID)

AMD 1,33Ghz

256 DDR RAM

2x 40GB IBM 60GXP ATA100 (added a 120GB WD1200BB ATA100 a few month ago)

Creative TNT2 Ultra 32MB

Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

3Com 3c905x 10/100 (internet)

Cheap Realtek card (lan)

PleXtor 12/10/32A

AOpen DVD 12/40

It cost me about 1200 euro then, expensiver than I intended too.. but my dad helped me a little  :Smile: 

And it works awsome, with Windows XP Pro and Linux. Even RedHat 7.2 works fast  :Smile: 

I have a swap of 1,5GB, but most of the time the swap isn't used or not more then 4%  :Very Happy: 

Offcourse a little more RAM would always help, but I don't think a normal user would notice much about it if his machine has 512MB or more.

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## delta407

 *tdm wrote:*   

> Offcourse a little more RAM would always help, but I don't think a normal user would notice much about it if his machine has 512MB or more.

 

Perhaps I'm not a normal user, but my primary desktop box has 1 GB of RAM, and I find it swapping occasionally.  :Wink: 

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## syadnom

my desktop:

athlonxp 1600+ w/ 1gb ram, software raid 2x60GB wd SE 8mb cache drives.

gentoo linux

my 3d workstation:

dual xp mp 2000+ w/ 4Ggb ram, hardware SCSI RAID 4x seagate 15000 RPM @ 60Gb.

dualboot gentoo linux/win2kpro(3ds MAX..)

i have both machines hit swap on a regular basis, though the dually does so very much less, and only on very big compiles(kde, X) or  of coarse 3DS MAX in windows, but windows is a whore so we know why it sucks up RAM.

who cam e up with this RAMx2 ~= CPU MHz?? how about, as much RAM as you can get is better, and the CPU, well, if its reasonable new its cool, but a 1Ghz athlon can use up ram just as well as a 2.53Ghz P4.....cpu speed has nothing to do with how much ram you need(on a desktop machine)

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## Pigeon

 *Quote:*   

>  I've seen specs with 128mb ram and 1.2ghz
> 
> processors - on that machine linux crawl.

 

FYI- windows would crawl on that machine also.  That is, it would crawl compared to a similar windows machine with 2-4 times that amount of RAM.  Windows has more bloat/need for excessive amounts of RAM than linux does.

OEM's do the "add a really good cpu onto an otherwise crappy computer" because it's a *lot* cheaper.  You can get an Athlon XP 1800 for $80 on pricewatch.  Putting a good HDD, mobo, memory quality/quantity, vid/sound card, speakers, etc all cost 10 times that much.

When your average consumer looks at a catalog to buy a computer, they look at 2 numbers:  Price, and the CPU's MHz, in that order.  CPU's are dirt cheap, and getting one with a large MHz number associated with it means you sell more.  Making the price lower (by chopping down on RAM and the general quality of everything) means you sell more also.

Moral of the story: OEM computers are crap.

(For the record, I run a 1.4GHz tbird with 512 megs- I'd have 768, (extra 256meg stick of registered ECC PC2100 sitting on my desk atm...) but my motherboard has 2 broken RAM slots  :Crying or Very sad: )  RAID, too.

Side note: Click here for a 1.8GHz P4...

with 128 megs of RAM, integrated sound, ATI Rage Ultra, no DVD/CDRW, (just a standard CDROM) and a 20GB HD drive.  Oh, and btw- it doesn't have a monitor, NIC, modem, or speakers.

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## wildcard

your making sense but what should I do for my new dual 1.1 ghz cpus

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## ribcage

I just built a brand new machine this summer:

Athlon XP 1800 O/C 2000

512 Kingston Ram DDR 2100

60 GB ATA 100 Maxtor

20 GB ATA 100 Maxtor

20 GB ATA 66 Quantam Fireball

Muse XL Sound Card

Generic USB Mouse

NIC

Geforce2

In my experience I have always found myself using my swap over a long period of time. (2days +)  I would recommened 512 MB to anyone. For me personally I would only see having 1GB of Ram suitable for me on a in the long term. Unfortunately though I can wait on the other 512. But in the mean time my setup is extrememly fast (especially now that Gentoo is on here) and also quite stable. 

Now for XP I am always finding strange problems .. ie.. The network dies on me or my mouse stops working after 20 min (EVERYTIME) and who knows.. Some hardware does work better in Linux than in windows IMHO...

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