New PC
I recently purchased a new PC. I had been using my Apple MacBook for quite some time without any desktop PC. And no, I’m not an Apple fan boy, but it has served its purpose quite well.
For what it’s worth, I would probably recommend that any every day desktop user use Mac OS X rather than Windows if you can’t stomach Linux and don’t have some tech savvy person to maintain a Linux machine for you. My parents have been using Linux for a couple of years and my Dad used to get my Mum to set the VCR. 
He doesn’t have a problem anymore though as I gifted him a DVR the other year and he’s quite happy using the EPG and hitting the record button to schedule a recording. Also, my Aunt and Uncle are using Linux. I’m infecting the world with more Linux users.
Anyway, the new machine and my experiences with it:
- Intel Core i7 920 (quad core 2.66GHz 8MB L3)
- 3×2GB Corsair DDR3 1333MHz CAS9 RAM
- Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
- 2×1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA hard drives
- LG DVD-RW
- Antec P183 case
- Corsair HX620W modular PSU
- Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 tower heatpipe CPU cooler
That’s all the new stuff and I’m using an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT PCI-E graphics card I’ve had for a couple of years.
So, how did it fair in my OSes of choice? The main issue is the on-board NIC. These days, if you don’t have a network connection, your OS is not particularly useful. It’s so limiting to not be able to connect to any other machines outside the one you’re using.
Anyway, I don’t know if it’s just a really awful choice of hardware on Gigabyte’s part for the EX58 series of boards, if the BIOS is doing something wrong, if it’s a bus issue, or if the drivers are just shoddy. For your information, the Gigabyte EX58 series of motherboards seem to use a Realtek RTL8111 with RTL8168 or RTL8169 that uses the PCI-E bus. All I know is that the on-board NIC does not work properly at all. In Windows, I had some difficulty installing the drivers and then, when installed, the interface would not recognise that I had connected a cat5 cable.
I didn’t want to use Windows anyway, I just wanted to see how well GTA IV performed on the Core i7. In Debian Lenny (Linux 2.6.26) and Ubuntu Jaunty (2.6.28), the on-board NIC sometimes appeared during installation and sometimes didn’t. When it had been detected and had the driver loaded, it didn’t seem to indulge any traffic.
Måns Rullgård, a prominent FFmpeg developer, has recently purchased a Core i7 machine too. He bought the Gigabyte EX58 Extreme and experienced the same issues. He gave up and used a spare PCI NIC he had. Thankfully I had an old 100Mbps 3com card lying around unused so I stuck that in and that seems to work.
With what else did I have problems? The usual Xorg ‘nv’ driver issues with my 7800GT. I look forward to that code being binned in all distributions. At least for my card it’s a piece of crap. It displays GDM mostly fine, with a few corrupt pixels, but then when arriving at the desktop, it is unusable. The cursor can be moved around, but clicking on things invokes no response. ctrl-alt-backspace doesn’t work (yes, I know about dontzap and it’s not that) nor switching to some other VT. It’s as good as hard locked, just with a cursor. Hopefully nouveau will be better.
You can see my previous post for my Hauppauge woes. Other than that, I think this machine runs very well. I have my 2×1TB drives set up with a mirrored boot partition (this doesn’t cause boot issues because the partitions can be read separately as if they had no mirror), a 6GB swap partition each (the kernel automagically stripes across the drives if you set them to have the same priority in fstab) and the rest is part of an LVM volume group.
Needless to say, it’s ridiculously fast and I shouldn’t need to upgrade for some years at least. Even one core of this Core i7 is multiple times faster than the Core Duo 1.83GHz I had been using. It’s immense.