On 12/27/2013 04:16 PM, Fred Smith wrote:
On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 12:44:02PM -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On 12/27/2013 07:11 AM, Fred Smith wrote:
On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 03:40:43AM -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On 12/25/2013 09:51 PM, Fred Smith wrote:
Hi all!
I'm toying with the idea of spending some Christmas money on a new MB and CPU to upgrade my desktop.
Although I've always been partial to AMD chips, I'm tempted this time to find something Intel-ish, I5, quad core, or so.
In looking at mommyboards at New Egg and Amazon, I find so many I am unable to make reasonable determinations regarding suitability, so am hoping some of you who have new(ish) intel-compatible boards could offer some hints.
Also, I'd like to keep the cost of MB, CPU and RAM to no more (or little more) than $300-350. (seeing as how apparently mid-range I5 chips cost over 200 each, that may be a vain hope.)
I expect that the newest ones may work with something bleeding edge like Fedora (et al), but I like centos for my desktop since it doesn't have the ridiculous churn rate of the more aggressive distros. I can't bring myself to relish the thought of rebuilding my main desktop twice a year (or even once a year).
So, any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
I personally have recently built 2 different systems with with the Asus M5A99X Evo R2.0 motherboard. This one does not have a graphics card ... everything does work with CentOS-6.5 and RHEL7B1.
It uses AMD CPUs and I have used several AM3+ CPUs, including Sempron 100, FX-6150, and FX-8150.
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5A99X_EVO_R20/
One of the nicest features is it will detect and set a working BIOS memory timing with a press of a button on the board ... if you try something manually that is incompatible, a simple press of the button and reboot will get you back to a working config.
Johnny:
I assume it has UEFI and "secure boot"? did you disable the secure boot feature before installing? (AFAIK Centos doesn't yet support UEFI/secure boot????)
I have an existing pair of drives holding Centos in a software Raid-1 configuration, and I'm assuming I can simply move them to the new board, boot and be off to the races. Can you comment on that assumption?
The software raid-1 should work fine ... plenty of room for drives on that board. As long as you have a normal file system on sata dirves, it should boot. You may need to reconfigure the hardware (obviously, different network cards, audio, video, etc.)
The version of the BIOS that I currently have does have a secure boot turn off feature. (1302 x64 is my BIOS version) Looks like there are 5 newer versions of the BIOS than the one I have installed now.
Johnny:
Thanks once more for the info.
one other thing I thought to ask about: my current gigabyte board, with Phenom II X2, somehow doesn't expost the Virtual extensions in the CPU in a way that VirtualBox can recognize it (I'm sure it's a VB bug, but I'd like to be rid of it), preventing installation of 64-bit VMs. Have you by any chance tried VB on that motherboard (with Centos) and noted whether it lets you install 64-bit VMs ?
Thanks once more.
I use those boxes to run 64 bit VMs ... BUT ... I do not use virtualbox
I do know that with the Sempron 150, FX-6150, and FX-6350 CPUs on both Xen-4.2.x (in Xen4CentOS) and KVM I can install 64bit VMs and it sees the smx extension.
Whether or not it works with VirtualBox, I do not know.