Quote from: ruler501 on November 19, 2013, 01:53:55 pm

Quote from: harold on November 19, 2013, 12:18:37 pm

How good "good enough" is depends on what you're doing with it, of course.
To play Skyrim dual-monitor, you're going to need a pretty nice GPU (or enjoy looking at pixels)

Skyrim also was not written to support multi-monitor and I've found multi-monitor hacks very unstable(especially when using mods)

How the heck can a game (other than online multiplayer games where more monitors gives an unfair advantage to the player, such as in Starcraft II) lack multiple screen support in 2013? Did the programmers take an arrow in the knee while implementing it?

Quote from: leafy on November 19, 2013, 01:35:04 pm

Quote from: pimathbrainiac on November 19, 2013, 12:08:52 pm

SSD: no, No, and NO. Here's why: SSDs are flash memory, which has a limited number of Read/Writes. After a few years (depends on usage), the drive will either a: slow down immensely or b: stop working. This can happen to anything with flash memory eventually, such as flash drives and calculators.

Just a quick note, this is not actually true any more. Early SSDs were prone to failure, but the tech has improved vastly since then. The average hard drive has a life of around 10-15 years; SSDs can now survive over 100 yrs. In addition, hard drives are prone to mechanical failure if you bump your case around a lot; my SSD's been dangling in my case (haha cable management) and has absolutely no problems. Since most OSes have support for TRIM nowadays, there's really no reason for write/read speeds to deteriorate over time as well.

Another note about RAID: I'd highly suggest not doing it, especially if it's your first time; for RAID0 (which pimathbraniac talks about), if any of the drives fail all your data is lost. Other RAID arrays provide redundancy, but decrease performance.

Isn't SSD lifetime reduced only during defragmenting anyway? For TI calculators, the Flash chip was apparently weared out only by garbage collecting and defragmenting, not by archiving/unarchiving/flash unlock, from what I remember.

Skyrim does actually support double monitors, it only does this really badly, and you need to do some
video setting tingeling to make it work properly.

Quote from: harold on November 19, 2013, 12:18:37 pm

How good "good enough" is depends on what you're doing with it, of course.
To play Skyrim dual-monitor, you're going to need a pretty nice GPU (or enjoy looking at pixels)

Skyrim also was not written to support multi-monitor and I've found multi-monitor hacks very unstable(especially when using mods)

Quote from: leafy on November 19, 2013, 01:35:04 pm

Another note about RAID: I'd highly suggest not doing it, especially if it's your first time; for RAID0 (which pimathbraniac talks about), if any of the drives fail all your data is lost. Other RAID arrays provide redundancy, but decrease performance.

RAID 5 supports drive loss and increases speed, but it requires three drives and you cannot use one of them for storage

I was talking about RAID 5, in fact. RAID 0 is stupid if you don't know what you're doing. That said, I was stupid about the triple no on SSDs. My dad has been spitting out garbage about them, and so I did the same. Then I read about how they only get bad when defragmenting, and I feel stupid about it.

^truth. since he's not going to be using NTFS, though, it's not a big issue either way.

as for advice. get a haswell processor and an amd graphics card. when looking for haswell, don't discount xeon in favour of i5s either. the biggest differences between the latter and the former are going to be a lack of new integrated graphics, which you won't need because of your discreet card, overclocking, which you won't need for your purposes either and will be better without because power consumption and lifespan, and 25% more L3 cache. as for the graphics card, you don't need screaming performance there either, so AMD will suit your needs much better because you can stick with the open-source drivers and not have to worry about nvidia removing support for things from their linux drivers to appease windows like they have been.

So yeah, I want to get a desktop.
But the thing is: i have like no idea what to look for. What I want to do with it is here:

• Linux
• at least two monitors
• programming
• finally be able to watch full hd videos without the acting up like i have atm on my lappy
• I guess USB 3.0 would be cool
• Run emulations without a problem or much lag (like virtualbox or a virtual androis device or something from that area (I hope it'll be able to run Wabbitemu ))
• A second monitor (already have one)
• Keyboard
• I guess a blu-ray drive would be cool but dvd is just fine (as long as i can burn dvds)
• SSD to boot quicker + start applications quicker
• At least 1TB hdd (or are SSDs so big and long-living by now that i could go full on ssd?)

Yep, no windows needed

So, I wouldn't get anything before christmas now as i'm putting some money for this on my wishlist.

Any ideas/what I whould look for/should i buil on my own?

Thanks for any help

thats a lot
if you have a heavy wallet then go for a mac
it is similar in context with linux---------------> both are based on unix
multi display and everything is there
except for dvd drive you have a separate one for that

Quote from: Sorunome on November 19, 2013, 08:44:53 am

So yeah, I want to get a desktop.
But the thing is: i have like no idea what to look for. What I want to do with it is here:

• Linux
• at least two monitors
• programming
• finally be able to watch full hd videos without the acting up like i have atm on my lappy
• I guess USB 3.0 would be cool
• Run emulations without a problem or much lag (like virtualbox or a virtual androis device or something from that area (I hope it'll be able to run Wabbitemu ))
• A second monitor (already have one)
• Keyboard
• I guess a blu-ray drive would be cool but dvd is just fine (as long as i can burn dvds)
• SSD to boot quicker + start applications quicker
• At least 1TB hdd (or are SSDs so big and long-living by now that i could go full on ssd?)

Yep, no windows needed

So, I wouldn't get anything before christmas now as i'm putting some money for this on my wishlist.

Any ideas/what I whould look for/should i buil on my own?

Thanks for any help

Definitely build your own. MUCH cheaper.
depending on how much money you have you can get certain parts for certain things.

You will need/want/what I suggest for the core components.

PSU - atleast 600w. but 700w+ is pretty good to have too.
Graphics Card (you want a good one) - GeForce GTX Series's I prefer the GTX 760 (getting that soon, brother has it)
Processor - INTEL (NOT AMD, because AMD is good for cheap processors and if you are going cheap they are fine, but intel is sturdy it will last and there is a slight difference between them that make me like intel better, cant remember what though) Quad-Core processor of atleast 3.00 GHz
Motherboard - anything that is compatible with all your parts, doesn't need to be too great.
RAM - If you don't really care or it doesn't matter than do 4 gb if you need a little extra then 6 is good. you probably wont need 8 or 16 for a couple years so don't bother.

I'm not a hardware or even software for that matter genius so don't credit me for my likes and dislikes. I'm just trying to help out .
If your price range is smaller than this that's fine. You can always get lesser parts but remember your GPU and CPU REALLY matter on the computers performance.

And don't forget you can always download more RAM.

AMD has just been cranking up their clock speeds and stacking on more cores to increase their speeds. Intel, on the other hand, has been optimising the crap out of everything, meaning that they are *much* better in terms of power consumption, lifespan, and overall performance (from 8 to 16 flops per cycle with the move to haswell =D). also, like i said above, one should stay away from nvidia when using linux. they're under the sway of wondows to a much greater degree, and nouveau is not very usable.

Facepalm.
I always forget to consider shipping. >_<

While you can't do much when problems arise since nvidia drivers are binary blobs they still work pretty good. If you are planning to run any 3d games at all go with nvidia.

That's the problem though. ATIs performance last I checked was horrible. And since AMD opened up their GPU documentation their non-free driver got to the point were it's not worth trying.

ATI/AMD performance compared to intel graphics better than to nvidia graphics.

I'm a Linux user since more than 15 years and have been using nvidia most of the time but went through matrox, s3, intel, via, and ati, too. I really wanted to switch to a more free option several times and I did try. It just was never worth the performance loss.

So what from a user perspective are the problems with nvidia graphics day to day? Of course the drivers are non-free, unless you use nouveau but then you are better off with AMD. So let's say you are fine with running nvidias non-free drivers - what problems will arise?

There is no kms and it doesn't work to use framebuffer drivers together with the nvidia driver. So no high resolution text mode.
Switching between X and Text virtual consoles is flakey. Sometimes you loose text virtual console visibility. On a Desktop however 99.9% of the time you stay in X. On very rare occasions This switching left me with no graphics whatsoever and only a reboot helped.
RANDR support is there. Since this happened multi-monitor support is decent using the distributions own configuration tools. no need to change your Xorg.conf file.

Sometimes after a kernel update or a graphics driver update there is a mismatch of driver versions and X won't start. DKMS and other infrastructure by the distributions mostly takes care of that.

On the other hand when it works, and it usually does, the experience is unmatched. You get reliable and fast graphics with opengl just working. There are apis and api support for video playback acceleration and cuda. And there is infrastructure to actually use it.

In my opinion not using nvidia graphics for a Linux desktop is a very bad idea. Unless you value the freedom of your systems software over it working.

Edit: I did some more reading about the non-free amd/ati drivers. Apparantly the situation improved a lot. So non-free AMD/ATI can now actually be compared to non-free NVIDIA. That being said I'd have to try myself to actually see wether installing the ATI drivers has become something that can be done without hours of cursing nowadays. The ratio of nvidia/fglrx problems I've seen strongly suggests prefering nvidia.