[Westwales] Athlon 64

[John Bailey]

> Has anyone tried out the new Athlon 64 processors yet, with a suitable
> Linux distro (I know Mandrake 10 exists for it)? Is it worth the effort
> - and price?

Funny you should mention that!  I just spent the morning installing Debian
on an Athlon 64 (3200+ in a Shuttle SK83G SSF case).  Install wasn't very
smooth - I had to to a manual hack to one of the installer scripts to get
it to run through OK.

Other than that, first impressions are pretty good - all the packages I've
installed and used so far seem fine.

WRT to performance/price, not really sure.  I got my CPU on special offer
and while I can tell it's a lot faster than my old Celeron server it's too
soon to offer any objective comparison.  A 'make bzImage' of the 2.6.8
kernel with many of the modules enabled tool 2 minutes 37 seconds (user
time), which seems pretty respectable.

I know someone who I believe has installed SuSE's 64bit effort without any
problems.

BTW, I can thoroughly recomend the SK83G.  Very nice looking box,
reasonable chipset and pretty darn quiet (it uses heat-pipes from the CPU
heatsink to the vent at the back and has a configurable 'smart fan').  1
AGP & 1 PCI give you a bit of space for expansion, too.

Cheers,

John