HW compatibility research: are intel i5 graphics and realtek net/audio hassle-free?

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 6:06 PM, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:

There are plenty of them around. No one wants them because you can buy a new
> computer with 1g of DDR2 or DDR3 RAM for less money than 1g alone of DDR(1)
> RAM.


Exactly.


> There are two different Intel Graphics chip sets. I don't know which is
> which, but a quick search should answer the question. The earlier ones are
> chips that Intel bought a license to manufacture. They are not very good in
> general and have closed source drivers. This makes them OK for Windows, a
> problem for Linux. The second are the newer ones Intel designed and builds.
>

Well, i5-650 is supposed to be a member of the Clarkdale family, and its
little brother (i3-530) was reviewed, e.g., here

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzkwOA

- driver problems reported, GPU hangs, etc. But the date is Jan 22, 2010 -
maybe there has been driver progress in the last 11 months?

Intel's support/download page does not say a word about Linux - there are
drivers for every Windows in the Galaxy, but there don't seem to be any
proprietary Intel HD Linux drivers.

Oron, can you comment? ;-)

As for buying an I5 processor, there are newer I3's with similar performance
> (for example 3gHz instead of 3.6gHz) for a lot less money.
>

Indeed, i3-540 3.06GHz is ILS505, while i5-650 3.20GHz is ILS815 at KSP.
>From what I see, the latter has VT-d that I may want to play with (or maybe
not) that comes with Intel TXT ("trusted execution technology"),
unfortunately, and Turbo Boost Frequency that sounds nice to have.

Various benchmarks that I saw (lies, damned lies, statistics, and
benchmarks) seem to indicate a difference in overall performance, but not
all that much.

Thanks for pointing this out.


>
> As for realtek, they tend to have cheap chips, which generallty work well.
> If you are concerend about support, check the exact model number of the chip
> as they keep changing them and the linux drivers do not always "keep up".
>
> When you buy a mobo make sure you are getting one that supports full 64 bit
> addressing.


The H55 chipset seems OK in this respect -
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/322169.pdf

Be warned that most of the current production really cheap (around 600 NIS)
> LCD screens only have VGA ports.


My LCD has a DVI port, but I never bothered to get a cable.


> There are not a lot of things that run on Linux that use the extra
> acceleration in expensive graphic cards, on the other hand if you are also
> going to run Windows on it


Not unless it is in a VM for some as yet unidentified specific purpose.


> (see my other comment below) and play high end games (Fallout New Vegas
> anyone?) you will need an extra "hot" graphics card.


No, I did say games were out of scope.

If you plan on running Windows on it, then IMHO you should buy a name brand
> such as HP, Packard Bell, etc. The difference in cost between them and a
> roll-your-own system is about the cost of a Windows license. If you do not
> plan on running Windows on it, it pays IMHO to buy a "local" company's
> product, e.g. Ivory or KSP and avoid the extra cost.
>

No Windows or Mac OSX, so I'll stick to KSP or Ivory who seem to have
competitive prices. Besides, I don't like HP for various reasons, and I
wouldn't touch PB (they still exist?!) with a ten foot pole. ;-)

Thanks, Geoff,

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org
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