GeForce 9600GT/512 ok?

Well my 7600GT/256 has died, my mainboard is living on badly-fitting replaced power capacitors. The whole system is ancient junk, mostly salvaged scrap anyway . Time to upgrade (about 6 months earlier than I had planned), but now I have a day job so all is good.

Specifically: Any reason I should avoid a GeForce 9600GT/512?

Generally: I am looking at a Core 2 Quad Q9300 based system (I run some not-sl-related stuff that can benefit from all those cores). Not sure what sort of chipset to use, SLI-capable nVidia chipset for future-proofing possibly. Maybe 2GiB of DDR3 RAM if a board that supports it is available at short notice, otherwise high-specced DDR2. Then I hope to keep this system for 3-5 years.

If any of that rings an alarm bell, let me know (I am more concerned with stability than performance, though I like that too . No point recommending specific boards as I will likely be restricted to what is in the local PC shop on Thursday night shopping anyway. But any specific tech to avoid - particularly from a SL-on-Linux perspective - is most helpful.

Thx.

I've always liked the Nvidia cards under linux and they have always done well for me. A multicore system is useful even for SL, there is a option to decode textures in a 2nd thread and that should go on to a 2nd core and possibly the OS will run on a different core again as SL should pretty much hog one core so you may get a nice responsive system. You can *never* have enough ram although there were some issues reported here on large memory systems but i think that was >4GB.

I would recommend digging through the Nvidia forums for the cards you are considering and linux issues, is SLI fully supported on Linux now?, i know when i last looked i didn't think it was (but that was ages ago).

See phoronix:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=asus_9600gt&num=1

They say there's a framerate loss compared to windows, but otherwise it works well.

I've had great luck sticking with intel chipset motherboards, my current desktop is almost 7 years old and I haven't replaced it because its been 100% trouble free except for a video card cooling fan.

Doug, I read about the framerate issues with Linux. Hopefully that will get ironed out over time, which will be fine with me as it is a long-term purchase. And thanx for the link - that was most helpful I habitually prefer the intel chipsets but would like SLI support for the future - buy a second 9600 when they approach the middle/end of their product cycle and are cheap. (Actually, I would prefer to use an AMD/ATI card because of the open-sourcing of the drivers, but that won't have stabilised enough in my purchase timeframe, and I had enough trouble with SL last time I had an ATI card to make me too nervous to try again just now).

Offloading texture work onto a second thread is something I didn't know about and will be very useful for keeping more cores occupied when I offload my server processes to a second box later in the year.

Michelle re SLI, thanx for the tip. I don't see myself adding a second card for at least a year if not 2, so will have to hope that SLI works properly by then on Linux but for now it is just a nice thing to look forward to hopefully.

Where's this option to decode textures in a 2nd thread? There's more optimization options for a dual core system?

I'm running a "Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz" with Ubuntu 7.10

Thanks in advance

"However, if you have multiple CPUs and enable Client > Rendering > Run Multiple Threads, the decoding will be done on the second CPU and go much faster."
(http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:Texture_cache#Current_Caching)

Guess who's testing that now... Gimme textures!

I found it.
In the current client, it's Advanced > Rendering > Run Multiple Threads (in the pull-down menus).

Probably won't be here in time for the long weekend

Went with an intel x48 chipset since SLI apparently won't work for the kind of incremental upgrading I do (GPU/card revisions mean you need to buy the cards at most within 6 months of eachother to have a reasonable chance of them working together, I was told).

Looking forward to my new spec:
Q9300 CPU (Quad-coer 2.5GHz)
Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 mainboard
2x1GiB PC-12800 (1600MHz) DDR3 RAM (9-9-9-24)
Gigabyte 9600GT PCI-E 2.0 512MB DDR3 graphics
VX-550 ATX Power Supply
Antec SOLO ATX MiniTower

and rolled over from my old system:

Samsung single-layer DVD-RW
2x 80GB PATA HDDS (one on it's last legs and used only for caching space)
1x 160GB SATA HDD (which I don't actually use yet as I am waiting for a PATA HDD death . I will probably use it to experiment with 64-bit OS+SL now.

Here's hoping I chose decent stuff for the long-haul

After fighting with intel's CPU-heatsink and deciding in future to use the term 'push pin' as an appropriate insult for people I don't like. Give me nuts and bolts ay day!!

Had to use the latest Beta Linux driver from Nvidia. All else seems to work with 'out of the box' Hardy Herron Kubuntu.

All is sweet so far (10 min testing before work thismorning).