Re: [trinity-devel] New motherboard advice

On 16/12/2013 22:23, Darrell Anderson wrote: Hi Darrell, I've had great pain lately with two new systems I built. Obviously, newer MBs are UEFI based which introduces complexities, especially if multibooting and booting from legacy devices can be problematic. Installing linux (debian in my case) also proved problematic with these UEFI boards and graphics cards. Windows seems to install fine, maybe as that is the OS everything is taylored to. The two MBs in question are both AMD based (I will not use AMD in the future) as are the CPUs (obviously), both FX series, an AMD FX-8350 & AMD FX-6300. The boards are Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 and an ASUS M5A99X Evo R2. The bigget issue besides UEFI bios is RAM. It's critical these days to ensure support prior to purchase, especially with AMD systems. AMD memory conroller is in the CPU so tools like memtest86 aren't as much use as they used to be. Both my systems (every combination of MB/CPU) fail memtest86 with more than one core enabled. Be careful with RAM qty and speed with AMD CPU/MB. 32GB RAM is not supported at certain higher speeds of RAM, a fact not well advertised by AMD. If you go AMD route, the first thing to install therefore is the latest chipset/raid drivers from the AMD site (rather than the MB cdrom). The next big issue is the PSU. Unfortunately, with these newer systems, bigger is better. If possible, buy RAM/CPU/MB from same place (not easy I know) as resolving compatibilities when bought seperately is a nightmare. Best solution of all (if Windows is not wanted), buy yourself a number of ARM devices and farm them :). I will be going Intel in future, more expensive but I'm not willing to face the trouble I've had with this AMD kit ever again. Cheers, -- Mike Howard