Motherboard Upgrade, December 2009

My home-office Windows machine, last upgraded in 2005 (see §15.8 below), suffered a power-supply failure that also took out either the graphics card or motherboard or both. I suspect the graphics card since the LEDs show me that the BIOS is checking the two CD-ROM drives for a bootable disk. Since Windows is working fine inside a VMware Fusion virtual machine (see §5.4 below), I decided to convert this machine to a Linux box.¹³

For this upgrade, I found an ASUS-Gigabyte top-of-the-line board comparison that was informative. I decided to get the ``premium'' ASUS board, since it has 2 PCI slots while the more-reviewed ``deluxe'' ($30 less) board does not (all PCIe).

For the CPU, I chose the i7-860 -- only 95 Watts! I considered the i7-870, which is also 95W, but it costs almost twice as much and is only slightly faster (2.93 GHz vs. 2.80 GHz). In a few months the 's' versions should be out at only 82W. On the Web, I found a nice comparison of the main i7 alternatives. I also considered the i7-920 (130W), because I like the idea of triple-channel DDR memory, but the benchmarks did not seem sufficiently better to me. It also has the older, hotter, north-bridge/south-bridge design, while the i7-8xx have the more unified P55 glue chip. The P55 chip (called a ``chipset'' for some reason) and the i7-800 Lynnfield CPU appear to have been introduced only a few months ago (September 2009).

It looks like DDR3-1333 is the top of the line memory-wise (said to easily crank up to 1600 or even 1866 MHz). I chose initially 4GB and perhaps later 8GB of 1600MHz memory.

For the graphics card, I decided on a relatively low-end Sapphire Radeon 4650 card (said to be cool and quiet). I don't want to tax my 500W power supply, and I don't plan to do much in the way of 3D graphics.

In summary, the upgrade components are as follows (adapted from my Newegg shopping cart on December 9, 2009--the Antec green 500W power supply was around $60 from Best Buy, as I recall):

• $54.99 - SAPPHIRE 100253HDMI Radeon HD 4650 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Low Profile Video ... - Retail Item #: N82E16814102829

• $149.99 - CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMD4GX3M2B1600C8 - Retail Item #: N82E16820145264

• $279.99 - ASUS P7P55D-E Premium LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Intel Motherboard - Retail Item #: N82E16813131606
  • http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1156/P7P55DE_Premium/
  • (2) PCIe x 1 slots (small and medium blue, serial)
  • (2) PCI slots (light blue, legacy PCI)
  • (2) PCIe 2.0 x 16 slots (dark blue, x 16 or dual x 8 link)
  • (1) PCIe 2.0 x 8 slot (white, at x 8 link)
  • (2) Gigabit LAN controllers: Realtek 8112L / 8110SC
  A PCIe 2.0 x 16 slot is good with a PCI Express x16 graphics card, and the two can be SLI-connected.

• $289.99 - Intel Core i7-860 Lynnfield 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80605I7860 - Retail Item #: N82E16819115214

• FREE - Transcend JetFlash V30 4GB Flash Drive (USB2.0 Portable) Model TS4GJFV30 - Retail Item #: N82E16820208060 -$12.99 Saving on $12.99
  (tossed in with the CPU)

The free 4GB flash drive is a nice touch. Since the Linux DVD image is 3.3GB, I tried to install Fedora 12 x86_64 from it. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to make the ASUS motherboard boot from a USB drive. So, I had to burn a DVD-R and boot from it as usual.

So far I am quite happy with this system. It is very fast, yet relatively low-power and cool-running.

I hit two small snags building this machine:

• The CPU fan was hitting its power cable, making a lot of noise. I had to pull the cable out of its plastic guide channel in order to keep it away from the blades.

• I completely forgot about the second smaller power connection to the motherboard (a small 4-pin connector arranged in a square, said to carry 12 volts). When this power is not present, the board powers up and everything looks fine, but there is no POST sequence.

Fedora 12 installed perfectly with no issues. I will say, however, that the distribution was confusing. It appeared to include a sha1sum for the .iso image, but it was instead for the gpg signature. I downloaded the .iso image twice thinking I had a bad one the first time. The checksum for the distribution is in the .iso image itself, and it gets checked when you click the ``Test'' button at the media-check stage after booting from the .iso image.

Another odd thing was that I can't plug my USB keyboard into just any USB port. I have to remember to use the top right connector when viewing the back of the computer. Similarly, I have to remember to use the bottom-right ethernet connector (which is reasonable since the two connectors should be separate devices eth0 and eth1).

I haven't figured out how to print to a networked Brother 2170 laster printer yet...

Things done after a standard F12 install with ``desk-top publishing'' checked (which seems mainly to load OpenOffice) are listed in §6.3.11.