After seven good years my desktop, an AMD dual processor Athlon 3800 CPU with an ASUS motherboard, has finally died . It was used as a home computer but also for documents (Latex/OpenOffice), for running small models (Fortran, even OpenMP) and graphics (OpenGL, C, C++, X11). I have a small portable as a backup but I am looking for a full replacement within the next few weeks.
Googling around I understand that AMD are a bit out of the market at the moment - their current CPUs are power hungry and instead they seem to be concentrating on other markets. So I think I will have to finally use an Intel CPU. For this a suitable combination seems to be:
1. CPU: intel i5-6600 (Socket 1151) (Passmark shows this as 8x my old CPU - Amdahl's law tailing off?)
2. ASUS Z170A (ATX). But I am tempted to try a microATX equivalent as it should contain enough ports and the case would be smaller. My essentials are ethernet, 4 (pref 6) sata, 4 (pref 6) usb and sound.
3. 8+GB of DDR4
4. Use my old power supply, radeon graphics card, sata disks (inc SSD) and DVD reader/writer.
5. A new case with 'modern' disk slots (without disk screw points located behind bits of case).
But I have number of questions:
1. Should I be thinking about earlier Intel chips (i.e. cheaper but with similar power)?
2. Should I be thinking about other motherboard manufacturers. For example are their others which are significantly more robust, have significantly better standard features, have significantly better Linux support or a better range of micro ATX cards.
3. Has anyone experience of using the 1151 sockets. Is it really so easy to ruin a £200 CPU chip when plugging them in?
4. How noisy are the Intel fans? Should I be thinking of a quieter alternative - in which case what would you recommend? I used a specialist quiet fan before but I won't be able to use my old fan with a modern socket.
5. Has anyone had the experience of installing Linux in such a system. I understand for example that the following may be needed on the command line:
i915.preliminary_hw_support=1
Are there other Linux or Bios features I should be aware of?
Any good advice will be very welcome.
Regards,
David Webb.
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