building new pc

[phoneJunky]

Hey. My last pc I (my friend and I, mostly my friend) built my first pc in 2003 and she finally died this year.

So, I am going to build a new pc, but there is a few things I want to find out before buying.

I am looking at the asus p5kpl motherboard and quad core q8400 and asus 9500gt graphics card.

My questions are:
How well does ubuntu handle quad cores?
How well does ubuntu handle dual SLI? - want 4 screens

On google I saw some links to ubuntuforums which will probably explain all this, but I can't seem to open ubuntuforums today.

Thank you very much

 

[Tinuva]

Linux handles quad cores just fine, in fact it will actually make full use of all of them since most Linux applications split into multiple processes anyways.

As for SLI, well that is dependant on the card, but overall its not an easy on to set up and 60% of the time it won't work.

My personal opinion on SLI is, 90% of the time it is not worth the money to go through this setup and your money is better spent on a card that match the price of both your SLI cards give you roughly the same performance if not more. The only ever time you want SLI is, if you buy 2 of the TOP END cards (this is the FASTEST card available at the time) and you have money to blow on that.

 

[ponder]

My questions are:

How well does ubuntu handle quad cores?

How well does ubuntu handle dual SLI? - want 4 screens

Linux handles quad cores just fine, probably better than windows as more applications are coded to take advantage of multipe cores. SMP has been with linux for a very long time.

Dunno about SLI, but you don't need SLI to run 4 screens though.

 

[phoneJunky]

Thank you guys, I am not a hardcore gamer or anything.

Just play a bit of dota and thinking about buying unreal tournament 2k4 as it runs on linux.

The quad core is more important anyway as I use matlab and its really resource intensive.