On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 05:31:56PM -0500, Stephen P. Molnar wrote: > I am planning on upgrading my Debian Linux tower and am soliciting comments > on the following CPU/Motherboard: > > > > AMD FX 8320, 8-core 3.5 GHz, 16.0MB Cache CPU > > ASUS M5 A97 R2.0 Motherboard
Last year I upgraded to an AMD FX-8350 with an ASUS SABERTOOTH R2.0 motherboard. Other than an initial annoyance disabling insecure boot, and getting Debian to install on EFI/GPT, it's all worked perfectly well. To be fair, the EFI/GPT stuff works fine, but booting in EFI mode was initially a challenge because the EFI BIOS kept silently re-enabling the "secure" boot behind my back which broke the installer. Once it was disabled properly, it worked without trouble. I don't think you'll have any trouble at all with either the processor or the mainboard. Once of the nice things with the AMD systems is that you can load them up with ECC RAM unlike their Intel counterparts (that is, unless you spend lots of money on expensive Xeons). Definitely recommended if you don't mind paying for an extra bit. These 8-core processors are great for parallel building of stuff; I got one so I could build C++ code faster. Co-incidentally, I'm just doing a whole-archive rebuild of Debian with 8 concurrent job slots; taking about 24h to rebuild every arch-any package with sbuild. That's 7527 builds, working out at just 90 seconds (mean) per package! Not too shabby! The machine is still perfectly usable and responsive--you wouldn't realise it was heavily loaded at all unless you saw the disc light on solidly. (Maybe I'll bump the parallel count up to 12 for the next run.) In synthetic benchmarks, they often don't fare well in comparison with e.g. i7 processors on various counts, but for this type of workload they are great. One thing I did get caught out by is that I thought it would be fun to try out one of the closed-loop coolers (Corsair H60) where there's a heatsink with impeller on the CPU and a radiator you put on the air intake. It kept the CPU really cool (30-40°C). However, the mosfets around the CPU had no airflow around them and were getting to over 80°C! I ended up replacing it with a big Noctua NH-C14 fan which blows air down over a heatsink but also removed that dead airspace which was causing the mainboard to try cooking itself, by blowing air directly down onto the area surrounding the CPU. None of the hardware was faulty here--just the combination of case, mainboard and cooler not working out due to the poor airflow; just thought it worth mentioning if it helped anyone else avoid the same mistake. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools `- GPG Public Key F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20140213231254.gv11...@codelibre.net
