Re: [gentoo-user] New box

[Dale]

J. Roeleveld wrote:
> On Thursday, December 29, 2016 9:36:43 PM CET thelma@×××××××××××.com wrote:
>> On 12/29/2016 08:06 PM, Dale wrote:
>>> thelma@×××××××××××.com wrote:
>>>> I'm putting a new system, it will be running mainly, VirtualBox,
>>>> Asterisk, Hylafax etc. (nothing graphic intensive).
>>>>
>>>> - IN WIN BL631 Low Profile Micro ATX Case w/ 300W Power Supply,
>>>> - AMD FX-8350 Processor 4.0GHz w/ 16MB Cache
>>>> - Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 w/ DDR3, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan
>>>> - Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB DDR3-1866MHz CL10 Dual Channel Kit
>>>> - Samsung 850 EVO Series mSATA Solid State Drive, 1TB
>>>> - Asus GeForce GT 720 Silent CSM, 2GB, PCI-E w/ D-Sub VGA, DVI, HDMI
>>>>
>>>> Will I have any problems installing Gentoo on this configuration, eg.
>>>> with Video Card etc.?
>>>> Do I need more RAM?
>>> I built a rig a while back and have 16GBs of memory.  I also have
>>> portage's work directory on tmpfs.  There are times when I wish I had
>>> more memory.  I'm planning to upgrade to 24GBs and eventually, 32GBs.
>>> I'm not sure what your board can hold but may want to think about future
>>> upgrades.  I run KDE here, there are times where I use a lot of memory.
>>> I'm using ~8GBs as I type.
>>>
>>> I've been using a Gigabyte board for a long while.  I'm happy with it.
>>> I actually still have a 2nd board that I upgraded from.  It was a first
>>> step to upgrade memory and such.  I think I had to change the IOMMU
>>> setting in the BIOS.  I think that was the name of it.  It's something
>>> like that.  I think I had to add something to the kernel boot line too
>>> on that.  Let me know if you need it, I'll go dig.
>>>
>>> One other thing, I have a UPS that shows what amount of power my system
>>> is using.  It shows ~150 watts.  It will jump to ~190 when compiling
>>> heavily.  You may want to make sure that P/S is well made.  I've never
>>> used a P/S that came with a case.  Generally, they are cheaply made.
>>> May want to make sure of that before you use it.  Nothing worse than a
>>> crappy P/S.
>>>
>>> Dale
>>>
>>> :-)  :-)
>> Thank you for the input Dale.
>> Yes, Power Supply is a good point.  I think I'll change the case and
>> select different PS.  Any hints as to which brand is good?
>>
>> I think they are all made in China :-/
>>
>> Thelma
> I agree with Dale.
>
> Make sure you have a good P/S. As for which are good, check reviews online, I
> am sure Dale and others know which sites are reliable.
>
> "Made in China" <> "Made in China", I know of Chinese manufacturers that make
> really good and reliable products. I also know some that simply don't care.
> In this case, replace Chinese with American, Dutch, German,.... and you end up
> with the same statement which will also be true.

The site I just posted a link to used to take points away for Chinese
made caps and even some USA made ones I think.  They really liked
Japanese made caps in P/Ss.  About a year or so ago, they started
allowing some Chinese made caps.  Some of them make some really good
long life caps.  What you say is so true.  It's just like hard drives. 
If you ask, there will always be a few that will say brand X is junk
because I had one that failed and I lost data, and it killed my kids etc
etc.  I've lost a couple Western Digital drives myself but I'd still buy
one.  Both of them warned me using the S.M.A.R.T. utils that they were
failing.  Hey, if it's going to fail, at least let me have some warning
so that I can save my stuff.  I can be forgiving on the rest.  Same with
Samsung.  I got a 3TB Samsung that is a nifty door stop.  :/

One thing about that site I linked to, if it has caps in it that are
questionable, they say so.  They also disassemble the units so that you
can see how they are built.  You don't have to take the sites word for
what is in there.  You can look for yourself. 


>
> As for the specs:
>
> - 8 core CPU: nice

Makes me drool a bit here.  I want a 8 core CPU.  The only downside,
gkrellm won't have enough screen to show each core separately.  That's a
problem there.  lol  It already takes up the whole right side on one
desktop.  I guess I could make the thing shorter to fit them all in. 


>
> - mSATA SSD: Make sure it fits your mainboard. NVMe is faster, but also more
> expensive.
> The Samsung EVO series are good for normal work-loads. The performance does
> tend to drop when the write-cache starts to fill up. With multiple VMs using
> disk and swap, that can happen quicker then you think. Check your
> requirements.
>
> - memory: Personally, I would increase this to 32GB with the fastest spec that
> matches the CPU and mainboard. It helps a lot, especially with Virtualbox.
> What isn't used by applications/VMs will be available for disk-cache.

Same here.  Putting portage's work directory on tmpfs does make it
measurably faster.  Bad thing is, if Firefox and LibreO needs to update
at the same time, I have to go back to spinning rust or do them by
themselves.  It runs out of memory pretty fast. 


>
> - Graphics: Can't really comment, for normal desktop effects, this will be
> more than enough. For average games, the same. For high-end games, you'd be
> speccing your computer differently anyway :)
>
> I also would consider, if you're using VMs, a large (size) spinning disk to
> store VM templates and ISO-images. These are not used often, but this way you
> can keep the SSD available for VMs, installed software and your documents.
> Laptop harddrives are generally quite power efficient.
>
> --
> Joost
>

Dale

:-)  :-)