On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 23:21 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
Baho Utot wrote:
I am gathering info on this new system
I just bought a new computer ($550USD complete) as I wanted to go 64 bit
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P motherboard AMD Phenom II X4 810 AM3 socket 2.6G 8GB High performance DDR3 ram Radeon HD 4670
Will arch 64 install and run on this? With little trouble? :)
I am concerned with the ATI video card, Any problems with this card?
What can I expect running Arch 64 on the system?
Now I can make many more errors only twice as fast :)
Baho,
Arch will run quite nicely with the box (very quickly I might add). Your problem, as you have already identified, may be the ATI card. To get optimal performance out of your graphics subsystem, you will need to run ATI's proprietary fglrx driver. The proprietary driver is not only better from a performance standpoint, but also has cooling advantages as well. (selective powerdown of unused portions of the graphics chipset) On a desktop, the cooling issues are not as acute as with a laptop, but it is still something to consider.
Here is the rub. Currently while your new graphics card is a card supported by the ATI Linux driver -- Arch isn't. (ATI should support Arch -- but nobody has kissed ATI in the right place yet) The ATI Linux driver supports the following distros:
Debian Fedora Mandriva RedFlag (where the heck did this come from??) RedHat Slackware SuSE Ubuntu
Unless you run one of the above, the chances are very slim that you can make use of the ATI driver :-(
** However, from your posts, you do seem quite gifted working with packages, you just might want to download the ATI Linux driver (released today):
https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver...
You can extract the contents of the package with:
sh ati-driver-installer-9-6-x86.x86_64.run --extract
and then take a look to see what changes would be required to make it work with Arch. (That's just a bit beyond my cup of tea).
Your alternative is to use the radeonhd driver. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe your card is supported. The radeonhd driver is really making progress and is a very good open-Source driver. I use it with laptop running Arch. Heat is a bit of a problem on my laptop, but for a desktop you won't notice any difference aside from a degree or two on case temperature rise. In the tiny space inside a laptop -- the difference is about 20 degrees F.
With the horsepower your new box has, your performance will be fine. Just make sure if you use the radeonhd driver, you read up on using EXA acceleration instead of XAA acceleration. For my laptop, it really helped.
I have a standard solution I now employ with all ATI desktop graphics cards that really works well. Open the case, remove the retaining screw for the card, remove the card, and then put an NVidia card in its place just a fast as you can. You can use the ATI card for target practice or a paper weight thereafter. With that done, you no longer run the risk of getting screwed over by ATI dropping Linux support for your card just like the millions of other ATI users that just got screwed in March ;-)
No thanks on the nvidia... I like AMD and ATI. I'll see what I can do to make it work Thanks for the info