My son (15) is really interested in computer hardware & wants to learn Linux & programming. I am a little out of my element on hardware but we have both spent the last couple of weeks learning & researching. Is this system sufficient & compatible? He also has an interest in gaming & I wanted him to at least have the potential to upgrade. He is writing to a couple user groups in our area but I wanted to double-check as well.
Thanks for your help. I want this to be a good experience for him such that he will continue moving in the Linux direction.
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-E SLI (chipset nForce 650i)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 7200
Memory: Corsair 2GB DDR2 800 MHz
Hard drive: Western Digital 160GB SATA-300 (or Seagate)
Optical drive: 20x DVD RW
Video card: EVGA GeForce 8500 GT
Audio card: N/A, Integrated
Network card: N/A, Integrated
Wireless card: Upgrade later, Linksys usually compatible???
Does he need greater than 500W power supply and / or memory cooler as well?
The specs are very similar to mine and only had a slight problem with the nforce drivers for the network card otherwise things work really well.
A 500W power supply should be sufficient unless he’s plans to use SLI
As for the wireless not sure as i don’t use one but linksys tend have good linux support
I note the audio is an ALC883. There is openSUSE support for that, although it “may” need some custom “hand edits” to some files to get it functioning.
The ALC883 on this motherboard purportedly offers 6-channel output, and while getting basic sound running should (hopefully) be no problem, getting 6-channel output might be challenging (at least for me it might be) , … and you may need to get help from some of the sound guru’s on IRC channel freenode #alsa.