Mageia forum

Hi All
After lots of help from Mageia, I finally found my PC hardware has been causing all my problems . Mother board is dying - move the power supply lead and it reboots. So after 7 years its time for another new PC for my Mageia. I want to to build a PC middle of the road that fits in with Mageia 5, KDE and soon Mageia 6. No Gaming. Should I go Intel or AMD for processing , amd or nvida for graphics. I will do word processing, low end graphics, email etc. Is there any thing I should not go for? I would put these bits into a large tower with backups drive and an hdmi screen. Any suggestion welcomed. Thank you Roy

RoyD wrote:After lots of help from Mageia, I finally found my PC hardware has been causing all my problems . Mother board is dying - move the power supply lead and it reboots.

Sounds like a capacitors issue on your current MB. They can be replaced by the skilled person. It's also possible that your power supply is faulty. That can easily be checked if you connected another one.

RoyD wrote:I want to to build a PC middle of the road that fits in with Mageia 5, KDE and soon Mageia 6. No Gaming. Should I go Intel or AMD for processing , amd or nvida for graphics. I will do word processing, low end graphics, email etc. Is there any thing I should not go for? I would put these bits into a large tower with backups drive and an hdmi screen. Any suggestion welcomed.

Your use case sounds similar to mine if I don't count web development. I bought Asus B85 which offered a lot for that money almost three years ago. It has an Intel Celeron G1840T 2,5 GHz (Haswell) processor as I hate noisy fans and built-in graphic which works fine on 2560 x 1440 monitor with DP and 2x4GB of RAM.

I'm happy with the current setup tough many times during web development I do miss some screen space so I might add another monitor somewhere in the future .

I mounted that in an old case I had together with 180GB SSD from previous PC. When I first powered it up I just turned off UEFI and it just booted fine despite very severe HW change . Yeah, Mageia is that flexible. I always upgraded inline without any serious issues from Mandriva 2008 times IIRC on the previous PC. I did a fresh install when I decided to go 64 bit tough. Sometimes in the future I'll convert to UEFI too.

I've got mageia on several PC's:
Acer Aspire One netbook, one of the real early atom cpu's
Desktop Intel E2200, nvidia 9800gt card (that box is like a room heater though, so hot!)
Desktop Intel G2020 cheap nvidia card
Desktop Intel G3258 (overclockable pentium,,,this should replace the E2200 box for daily work)
Dell Xps13 i5.
All run without hiccup.

My advice, is really on RAM and Video card.

If you're messing around with virtual machines, more ram is great! And as for video card, I usually see what it's like without one, or lately I just buy a $30 nvidia fanless card, and it works great. CPU raw power is upto you. I've got a awesome AMD setup purely as a business webserver/fileserver/backup box, that's virtualized, but that's running CENTOS as I trust a mate keep that under control, as if it goes down, I can't really afford to waste hours and hours figuring it out myself, he'll come in, revert to a backup and be online in minutes.

Oh, and if you're getting new HDD's make sure they are fit for purpose. ie fast drives for os & /home and low energy, reliable ones for data. This is something I've only recently started to take into account.

AMD processors will tend to give you more "bang for your buck". In other words, comparing an AMD processor to the Intel processor with comparable performance, the AMD will be cheaper. Against that, the Intel will use less power and will likely run cooler. I build all my own machines (including my laptop). For myself, the machines in my office run AMD, and my laptop has an Intel I7 (uses less power and runs cooler).

I have always found Asus motherboards to work very well with linux. My workstation runs an Asus Sabertooth FX990 R2 (with a Phenom-II 955 processor) and its performance is simply outstanding. I am contemplating an upgrade for my now 7 year old Phenom-II. My NAS runs an Asus M5A-78L-M motherboard (with a dual-core Sempron processor and an Areca 16-port SATA-II RAID controller) and its performance is quite adequate for its purpose. The NAS runs FreeBSD for its operating system. For your stated purposes, something in this range might be appropriate; I purchased the motherboard and processor combined for about $90 almost two years ago.

Other people like Gigabyte motherboards. I personally had a run of bad ones many years ago and have not purchased that brand since.

No matter what you do, purchase a high-quality power supply. It may not be the sexiest component, but it is THE single component that can wipe out every other component if it fails. In fact, given the symptoms you describe, it is very possible that replacing your current power supply will solve your problems; I do not agree with the previous comment that it could be capacitors because wiggling a wire and causing a reboot is not consistent with capacitor issues, but is consistent with a bad wire, bad connector, or cracked trace. Intermittent problems could indeed be capacitor problems, but also could be a power supply problem.

Thank you all for the help in trying to fix my PC
I am back with Mageia. Never left but I didn't have my favourite OS working.
Rebuilt the PC with the other identical PC I had running Windows and I have been working like normal now for 3 to 4 weeks now.
I was surprised how much I missed have my Mageia PC.
Cheers Roy

Glad you made it work.

I have found Mageia to work great on everything. I remember how everyone suggested Intel+Nvidia a few years ago, but I think that modern AMD APU products work really great and AMD looks determined to support Linux as well. So if you want better bang for the buck, definitely go for AMD