Just a quick Q.

[civint]

I am gonna be upgrading in a few months/weeks (depends how poor I am iin the next few weeks, lol), and I was just wondering, how good is AMD support in mint (stupid Q, if mint is half as good as I know it is, then it'll be about the same as say *buntu ).

I intend to get a DualCore 64 bit amd cpu (prolly 5xoo or 6000, just for the lolz, lol. PLus i want a scorchin linux system to show up my vista buddies at lan party night)
like, 2Gig of ram, and maybe an upgrade in graphics card (7x00, since Im GeForce6200 atm, and if i get a high end ddr3 7800 or something it'll be more than good enough. PLus I can stick Dawn of War on my linux box and kick ass, lol).

If anyone was actually reading that and can get past the teenage revelry of it, lol, could osmeone give me a ballpark figure? SImply because I'm way too lazy to do it myself.

[scorp123]

how good is AMD support in mint

None. As of now Mint is only 32-bit; it does not make use of any 64-bit features. It will boot on an AMD-64 machine (I tested that already with a SUN server here ...) but you will probably only see the first 2 GB RAM, the rest will remain unused (as per 32-bit limitation).

[hairy_Palms]

it supports it fine, imho theres no point in using the x86_64 version of ubuntu+derivatives, phoronix did a benchmark that showed there was absolutely no benefit for most things, the exception was video encoding, and the software problems of 64 bit are too much hassle or me.

[clem]

scorp123: isn't the limitation 4GB of RAM??

It will use your 2GB RAM without any problem, and also take advantage of your dual core processor. I have Celena on an Intel Core2 Duo e4400 with 2GB RAM and it's lightning fast.. even with a crappy nVidia 8300GS.

Now Mint is built for 32 bits so:

1) it can only deal with 4GB of RAM.
2) it doesn't take advantage of the 64bits in your architecture.

Number 1) is OK because you don't have more than 4GB RAM, so it makes no difference to you....

Number 2) is OK because comparisons between Ubuntu 32 bits and Ubuntu 64 bits on a 64 bit architecture actually don't show any noticeable speed difference... and worse than that, Ubuntu 64 bit presents compatibility problems with some applications due to the fact that most software is still compiled in 32 bits and sometimes doesn't work well on a 64bit OS.

In the years to come 64bits OS will become more and more stable and as software will get compiled in 64bits they will show better speed performances than 32 bits systems... but it's not the case yet. Eventually when PCs will come with more than 4GB of RAM people WILL have to switch to 64bits, but again very few people have that much RAM in their system at the moment.

I'd say stick to 32 bits OS (like Linux Mint for instance) and check again next year to see if things have changed.

We've read reports and benchmarks and we're preparing to make our own investigation (cause what I told you was basically true last year) in order to know if it's worth it for us to roll out a Linux Mint 64bits Edition or not..

Clem

[civint]

so basically it all looks good, except that I might be better off not opting for the 64bit cpu (although it will boot from 64bit cpu)....

[scorp123]

scorp123: isn't the limitation 4GB of RAM??

Depends ... mostly on the BIOS. On some systems you can use the full 4 GB if you have them. On others you only get about 3.2 to 3.5 GB, the rest is being "reserved" for some obscure reasons for God knows what. And some systems flat out won't see beyond 2 GB when in 32-bit mode. Your mileage may vary.