[geeks] Good low-end AMD 64bit system?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2004 at 04:24:38PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> I'm going to possibly build a low-end 64-bit AMD system in the next
> couple of weeks.  The only real experience I've had with building 'semi-recent'
> x86 hardware in the past 2-3 years is my VIA EPIA C3-based mini-ITX stuff;
> I've not touched any of the AMD offerings since the Athlon Thunderbird.

I don't think it is available yet, but VIA is working on a chips that
offer dual cores and AMD64/EMT64 instruction sets.  I'm hoping that they
will put both features in one chip personally.  I don't think they plan
to be selling them until late next year at the earliest though (which is
thus no help to you).

A dual core, AMD64 mini-ITX machine would be extremely cool to have.
Give it some modest graphics (nothing fancy, just something that can do
1600x1200 and modest OpenGL[0] comfortably), onboard SATA, FW800 (dual
channel please), and USB2.0, and that would be extremely nice.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/

[0] Hey, OpenGL isn't just for high end 3D.  I think it is reasonable to
    desire the screensavers to work reasonably, as well as minor games,
    etc.  If a Rage128 could play Quake2 nicely and make Blender or
    Wings3D usable on a Pentium, then why can't we have newer stuff work
    well without requiring binary only drivers?