On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 05:33:53PM +1100, Andrew Greig wrote:
I have purchased a new 1Tb SSD and I have two unused SATA 2Tb drives, and currently 8Gb RAM (max capacity 32Gb DDR3 1866) I will settle for 24Gb soon.
24GB is nice. With that and the SSD, you should see an enormous boost in performance. No more twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to boot. of course, not long after you get used to the new speed, it'll start to seem unbearably slow :)
MB = ASRock 890 GM Pro3 5 sata slots
I guess that means you have a Phenom II CPU or maybe one of the early FX series chips. Nice CPUs for their day, and still pretty good even today. most of my machines have these. If you have an FX CPU, they're happiest with DDR3-1866 RAM. DDR3 is slowly disappearing from the market so you have to get what's available - other speeds will work if you can't get 1866, but 1866 is optimal. BTW, if you're not sure exacly what CPU you have, run 'lscpu | grep Model.name'. You'll see output like this: # lscpu | grep Model.name Model name: AMD FX(tm)-8320 Eight-Core Processor or # lscpu | grep Model.name Model name: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1090T Processor
Question - Should I choose Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or install 18.10 which will need an upgrade at the end of July?
It really depends on whether you want to upgrade every 6 to 12 months (18.10), or every two years (LTS). Stuff like gimp and darkroom tend to be fairly fast moving, so upgrading them every six months or so is probably a good idea. I'm generally in favour of keeping systems upgraded regularly. IMO two years is two long between upgrades. Free Software development moves way too fast for that. craig PS: what kind of GPU do you have? if you do a lot of graphical work, it may be worthwhile comparing some of the current low-end to mid-range models to your current card. A modern $200-$300 GPU should be 2 to 3 times faster than, e.g., a high-end GPU from 5 years ago, and use significantly less power. but this is definitely something that needs significant research before buying anything. googling "old model name vs new model name" gets good results. e.g. "gtx-560 vs gtx-1050" leads to several review sites which say that the 1050 (~ $170) is roughly 87% (1.87x) faster than the 560, and uses only 75 Watts rather than 150 W. The next model up, a "1050 Ti" is a bit over twice as fast and costs about $200, also using 75W. and the GTX-1060 3GB model is about 3.65 times as fast as a GTX-560 and costs about $250 (using 120 W) BTW, "2-3 times as fast as what I currently have for $200-$300" is generally what I wait for when upgrading my GPU. Unless noise and power usage is a problem, it's not really worth the cost of upgrading for anything less. Sometimes, though, new features of newer cards (like better video decoding or newer opengl/vulkan) makes it worth upgrading earlier. There are various AMD Radeon models of simialar performance and price. Unless you're willing to use the proprietary nvidia driver, you're better off with an AMD GPU. their open source driver is much better than the open source nouveau driver for nvidia. I mostly use nvidia cards with the proprietary nvidia driver (the AMD fglrx driver always sucked and the open source drivers for both amd and nvidia used to suck. now they're kind of decent, especially the AMD driver, unless you do a lot of 3D gaming at 1440p or better with all the pretty turned up to Ultra) -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>