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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Tweaking M2NPV-VM motherboard + NVIDA 6150; & Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor ?



William Case wrote:
Hi;

I recently asked these questions on the Fedora mailing list but got no
response.

I have installed M2NPV-VM motherboard with an integrated NVIDA 6150
GeForce graphics chip; and a Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor. This
replaced a 5 year old Intel GB850 board and chip (plus an ATI Radeon
9600 graphics card) that was fried by a dysfunctional power pack. I
currently have Fedora-7-i386 installed

My main criteria was to select the most up to date board etc. I could
get that a small pension cheque would allow for.

Frankly, I haven't seen much improvement over my old board, cpu and
graphics -- and in some instances things seem slower.  I don't use high
end graphics i.e. games.


If you're not using high end graphics, you're very unlikely to see any real performance difference with an upgrade to a CPU/Graphics card. Perhaps dragging windows across or switching between windows may be faster, but thats very subjective. Compiling the kernel (or anything else) should definitely be faster, if you're into that.


I have read the bumpf and the technical papers re: the M2NPV-VM
motherboard, the AMD processor and the NVIDA 6150 chip.  My discussion
points are:

      * In practiacal terms, what difference should I be seeing?
      * How can I tweak things to get full value from my new
        installation?

You could try the proprietory nvidia drivers, the seem to work better for me than the regular nv driver. If you want programs to load faster, you probably need to upgrade to a faster drive. Or if you're memory-constrained, perhaps adding more RAM may help. How much RAM do you have right now? If you have >=512M, you could turn on fedora's read-ahead scripts and tune them to your system - they enable pre-caching of files at boot time, which helps with faster booting and program load.


      * Should I install the Fedora-7-x86_64 (64-bit), for ordinary
        desktop usage? Or, are too few applications ready for 64-bit
        yet?

no, don't, there's a lot of browser add-ons that are just not 64bit ready yet (flash, sun java to name 2). and I personally haven't seen a performance difference between the 32bit and 64bit systems for general desktop usage.

      * My CPU fan seems to be making more noise than before.  Should I
        replace it in the future?  Is there a cost vs quietness rule of
thumb?

Try and blow out the dust on the cpu fan/heatsink with some compressed air and see if it helps :)

cheers!
--Raj.


I will be glad to supply more info if it will help the discussion.  I am
calling it a discussion because, unlike on other occasions, I am not in
desperate need of help; I would be interested in several opinions and
exchanges; this is meant as a chat that doesn't take other people away
from regular work.