Building a new desktop: hardware advice

[dotancohen]

I am building a new desktop machine for home use (no gaming, but we will output DVD and MPEG movies to the TV). I would appreciate the Phoronix community's opinion regarding my hardware selection, as this is the first non-MS machine that I am building. I have tried to select components known to work with Linux in general, these are the components:

Athlon 64 5200+
http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopCPUDetail.aspx?id=39

Asus M3A board
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1934&l1=3&l2=149&l3=592&l4=0
(we need both IDE and SATA, as my current 500GB hard drives are IDE)

2 GB Kingston Value memory

One of these video cards:
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1720&l1=2&l2=6&l3=551&l4=0
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=2&l2=8&l3=634&l4=0&model=2051&modelmenu=1
I am leaning towards the second card because of the quiet fanless design, but I am a bit concerned about a fanless card. It also mentions OpenGL 2.0 compliance, which sounds good.

Optiarc AD-7200S DVD±RW sata DVD burner
http://www.sonynec-optiarc.eu/en/exhibits/half-height-drives/ad-7200s

This machine will likely flip flop between Debian and Fedora about once per year, with the occasional test drive of a different distro. I am on a budget, so I tried to cut corners but not too many. Any advice and suggestions regarding the hardware mentioned are much appreciated. Thanks.

[Dandel]

ok, well first off, i'd look at integrating as much as you can in to the board if your looking for linux.

Biostar TFORCE TA790GX3 A2+ (http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en-us/t-series/introduction.php?S_ID=376) which has the following ready to go.

HDMI, DVI and VGA built in.
Radeon HD3300 video card w/ built in video memory ( 128mb )
completely fanless.
2x 16X pci express slots and 2x 1X Pci express ( both are v2.0 )


as for the network, it's gigabit and has good linux support ( you can pick up the driver from http://www.realtek.com.tw/ )
similar story with the sound card... also made by realtek.

[deanjo]

If your going a ATI based chipset for a MB I would recommend switching that optical drive to a parallel based one instead of a Sata based drive and purchase some IDE --> Sata converters for your harddrives. Sata+Optical= can result in really weird issues ranging from drives not showing up to disappearing. Given ATI's southbridge Sata issues, the safest route would be to go with a ATA optical.