ATHLON 64 MOBO, SATA hard disk on Linux, dual boot

[godblessedson]

Dear All

I am looking to buy Athlon 64 939 3000+ processor and a good motherboard with comaptibility for SATA hard disk and atleast 5.1 channel sound system. My budget for processor and mobo is 15K. It will be good if somebody can give me the individual price of both processor and mobo. I have 80 GB samsung harddisk for same and looking to install the dual boot XP (50 GB) and Linux (30 GB) for same. Please provide me with partition summary for same. Somebody told me thats its good to keep c:\ partition of lower size for OS (less than 6 GB) and not to install subsequent softwares on c:\ but on d:\. Is that right?

Further I also come across there is usually problem with SATA hard disks for linux system. I am looking for a linux distribution with all important library included in first install itself so that I need not to look around for libraries while compiling any program. My knowledge on Linux is poor than a novice but I am enthusiast to move to linux.

[mohit]

Go for the following,

AMD ATHLON 64 3000+ (939 PIN) - 8,000/-
ASUS A8N-E - 8,000/-

Total for 16,000/- , u will get a very very good setup. the mobo supports SATA 2 also which is backward compatible with SATA. Also it supports the new amd dual core X2 processors. only thing is u wont get any onboard gpu/vga , so u will have to buy a separate pci-express card.

If u want a board with onboard gpu then go for the above mentioned procc with the MSI RS480M2 board which will cost around 5,000/- , this board has gr8 oboard grafix and also supports SATA , PCI-Express Architecture.

Regarding Linux , somebody will help u out soon.

[godblessedson]

how much an average Pci-express card will cost. is not there any board with on board grapics as well as SATA-2 comaptibility. My recently bought harddisk is probably SATA-2 comaptible. I hope the data transfer rates in SATA-2 are in order of about 1 Gb/Sec comapred to SATA-1.

is MSI RS 480 M2 is SATA 2 compatible or I need to set my harddisk in SATA-1 mode. I may go for a good graphics card later but not right now.

[mohit]

u will get a basic 128 mb pci-express card based on the geforce 5200 chipset for around 3-4 k. msi rs480m2 does not support sata 2 so ur sata 2 hdd will also work at sata speeds without giving u the perfomance boost.