[geeks] linux box upgrade

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:21:37AM -0400, Andrew Jones wrote:

> AMD has cheaper ECC memory options, because it's supported on a lot of  
> Asus consumer boards with consumer chips.
>
> Intel is massively faster per dollar.
>
> nVidia is still the only consistently good option for Linux graphics.  
> Almost all nVidia chips do x264 offload now, so watching videos etc  
> isn't an issue, no matter how slow your PC is.

That is not my experience with Nvidia graphics playing video at all.
Getting XBMC and gstreamer based players going nicely took a bit of
fiddling.  And still some web video services use flash players (meaning
the video player written in flash, not the flash plugin itself) that
can't use hardware acceleration, so playing video from such a web site
still requires a rather beefy machine.

I would say that if you want games and cad, go nvidia, but if you want
the least amount of fuss in general, go with Intel graphics.

In my experience, AMD graphics under Linux can work very well, and
sometimes it just works without fiddling, but it often seems that
upgrades bring regressions.