Hi.
I’m starting to spec out a new GNU/Linux boxen. I’m considering the ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard. Has anyone had any experience with this board in terms of compatibility with openSUSE 11.2/11.3?
I’m mainly concerned about:
on-board sound: Realtek ALC889
ethernet: Marvell 88E8056
new interfaces: SATA3, USB3.0
being able to use: AHCI (which I had to turn off on a netbook, Acer Aspire 1410, for hard drive stability), 64-bit kernel
I’m planning to use an i7-930 or i7-950 (should the price drop in August as rumored) with 6 GB DDR3 1333 RAM (not planning to overclock, as yet). The graphics card will probably be an NVidia GT240 or so (budgeting about $100 for the graphics card).
Also, I’m hoping to move some old IDE drives over using IDE->SATA 1 bridge cards. Any advice on this? Or should I just get a new SATA 3 drive? For the optical drives (DVD RW/CD RW), I’d like to use bridge cards since there’s no benefit for the higher speed SATA interface, or is there?
Thanks!
P.S. For the naive question: As I haven’t dealt with 64-bit installs before… I would need the 64-bit kernel for full access to all the extra address space, correct? After that, I can still run 32-bit apps, with a slight speed penalty?