[ubuntu-uk] Advice on motherboard upgradw ...

[Jim Price]

On 17/10/10 20:54, Rob Beard wrote:

> You can get boards with AMD/ATI chipsets but they're a bit more
> expensive and I'm not entirely sure how well they work with Ubuntu (okay
> they should be fine with the proprietary ATI drivers but I'm not sure
> how well they work with the FLOSS drivers).

I'm fairly sure how well they work with Ubuntu. All the machines I've 
bought in the last 4 years have ATI chipsets, and all of the chipset 
features work just fine with Ubuntu. I have 690G, 780G and 785G 
machines. The proprietary drivers only work on ~3000 series and above 
ATI graphics, but the 690G (now called 740G) boards work well with the 
FLOSS drivers. My next machine is most likely to be 880G, but there is 
no pressure to upgrade as everything is working just fine at the moment 
(including the MythTV setup, which used to be a real pain with ATI 
graphics a few years ago). Installation is so straightforward that my 
brother did his 690G based machine on his own, and he had never 
installed an operating system before that in his life. I'd recommend 
785G or above as worth the extra cost over Nvidia chipsets if you are 
going to use the onboard graphics, although native 1080p video does need 
one of the faster processors.

-- 
JimP