Hardware review I

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Hardware review I

30. March 2011 by overbenny

This month I built two systems with identical hardware component (except for the case). Here’s the list of components:

Case 1: Silverstone Sugo SG02-F white
Case 2: Arctic Cooling Silentium T11 white
Motherboard: ASRock 880GMH/USB3 R2.0
Processor: AMD Phenom X4 840 boxed
Memory: Corsair XMS3 2x 2 GiB DDR3-1333
Hard drive: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1 TB
Power supply: be quiet! Pure Power 430W

Cases often don’t meet my high requirements. Many cases are sharp-edged, bad designed (inside and outside), use cheep plastic, and/or vibrate, because the hard drives confer their vibration to the case. The Sugo SG02-F case is not perfect, but I will recommend it. The Silentium T11 case has no shard edges, but I won’t recommend it. Too much plastic and optical not appealing.

You probably have to replace the boxed CPU heat sink and use a better power supply if you want a silent system.

How well do these components work with Ubuntu 10.10 (and probably other recent GNU/Linux distributions)? Perfectly. Everything that I tested worked:

The USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports work with everything plugged in (mouse, keyboard, flash drives).
Audio works (only stereo output tested; 5.1 sound was available in Pulseaudio)
2D and 3D graphics work with the free (libre) radeon driver (Compiz runs)
LAN works

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Posted in Planet Debian, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu | Tagged hardware, review | 10 Comments

10 Responses

on 30. March 2011 at 23:21 | Reply Diego Kobylkin

I can recommend Antec Titan 650-EC. I bought it primarily to build a 5-disk RAID but it turned out to be very well made. The only issue is with the front-door that is hard to fix back at times but it does not bother much.
- on 30. March 2011 at 23:25 | Reply overbenny
  
  That case is very expensive (164 Euro).
on 30. March 2011 at 23:29 | Reply javabean

can you tell me if it runs debian squeeze?….. i have been looking at that asrock mother board for a “new” computer and haven’t had much luck finding out if it works….out of the box,,,as it were……i.e. if it requires $R%#$@$# non-free “DFSG” software
- on 30. March 2011 at 23:38 | Reply overbenny
  
  Sorry, I don’t have access to the hardware anymore. I built the computers for someone else.
  
  I didn’t have to install non-free “DFSG” stuff to get the hardware working. I assume that Debian squeeze runs on it. You may have to install firmware-linux-nonfree and upgrade the kernel. Ubuntu 10.10 uses linux 2.6.35. Debian squeeze uses linux 2.6.32.
on 31. March 2011 at 16:23 | Reply Onkar

Which graphics card(chipset) was used?
- on 31. March 2011 at 16:26 | Reply overbenny
  
  The onboard graphics card was used: AMD 880G/SB710 which contains a Radeon HD 4250.
  - on 4. April 2011 at 7:35 BanaSp
    
    Whats about MultiMonitoring? Have you tried a extended Desktop-Setup?
  - on 4. April 2011 at 10:24 overbenny
    
    No, because I have only one monitor.
on 1. April 2011 at 9:30 | Reply Bart

Nice, next time put the memory in two channel mode by installing in memory-slot 1 and 3 and replace the standard cpu cooler for a quiet one
- on 1. April 2011 at 10:55 | Reply overbenny
  
  The memory is in two channel mode. The blue slots belong together and the white slots belong together.