Ravings on CS, OSs, PLs, SF, and other things geeky...

or how I ended up giving it up and going for AMD64

My old Socket 478 motherboard just died on me a couple of weeks back. After having served faithfully for about three years with it’s Celeron 1.6GHz it just stopped. Well, not quite that gracefully, there was a bit of weirdness before the end, freezing, kernel panics and so on… My first thought was to try and replace the motherboard, and since old and often used stuff is easy to find in Akihabara I decided to try that first. Two honest attempts later, I decided to splurge on a new motherboard. Of course even though your desktop should be easily upgradable it’s just as easily obsolescent. With a new motherboard there is no getting around buying a new CPU and memory as well. While I set myself as tight a budget as I could, I also wanted a new dual core CPU and an onboard NVidia graphic cards (since I couldn’t use my old one which was AGP). NVidia cards are cheapest at around ¥7000 and most of the time it’s not any cheaper to get motherboard without a graphic chip. Sadly though, most of the Intel/NVidia combinations were quite expensive. After walking between a few shops in Akihabara I found the perfect motherboard in my hands, it had everything I wanted, except it wasn’t an Intel board. It was an AMD64 board.

So I bought this aBit AN-M2HD motherboard along with a new AMD64 Athlon X2 Processor and 2GB of DDR2 800 memory chips for the sweet price of about ¥27.000 at Ark in Akiba. Not a bad upgrade. Of course, the board was pretty new and the next issue was if it would run Linux properly. Ubuntu didn’t take (the 32bit version), and Gentoo AMD64 absolutely refused to recognize the ethernet card, but lo and behold Fedora 8 got everything working like it was 5 year old hardware.