Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Thanks Dennis. Wow, you really know how to make things work. Impressive.
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Thank you. I've been at this in one way or another for three decades, and have learned at least a bit along the way.
For a few further thoughts, I agree with Glorfindel that a quad core CPU is an improvement over a dual core, but how much of an improvement will vary.
A quad core CPU is essentially four CPUs on one die, and the machine can be executing four different instructions at any particular moment. But there are still constraints. Most applications software is not written to use multiple cores. Doing so requires the app to parallelize the tasks into parts that
can be executed independently on separate cores, with message passing to keep things in sync.
Multiple cores come in handy to handle other things going on besides the application you're running. For instance, I have a quad core CPU, and spend most time in Firefox. Looking at a process status, I may see 25% CPU usage, indicating that Firefox has maxxed out one core but the others are essentially idle. Firefox can only use one core at any particular time. On the other had, I make extensive use of Calibre to manage my eBook library, and Calibre may spawn several Calibre Parallel tasks. Those are separate tasks that can be run on separate cores.
One thing I would do is max the RAM on whatever machine you get. Current OSes like lots of RAM, and Ubuntu is no exception. It tries to run entirely in RAM where possible. On an older iteration of my desktop, I had a quirky motherboard that supported four IDE devices, period. I had multiple IDE hard drives, and had a PCI IDE card installed to provide additional IDE Connectors to accommodate them. It would work for a while, but then a drive would simply drop out and no longer be seen by the system. I preferred to install different OSes to different drives when I multi-booted. I once had the drive Ubuntu was installed to drop out while I was
in Ubuntu. I didn't even notice until Ubuntu updates were failing because the file system they needed to be written to no longer existed. The running Ubuntu image was in RAM and didn't care. (I could only imagine what would have happened if I was in Windows and that drive dropped out...
)
The HD is the slowest part of the system, so anything you can do to reduce HD Access improves performance. More RAM allows better caching by the OS, so I/O requests can more likely be satisfied from cache instead of disk access.
And I'd look seriously at installing an SSD. The usual concern is that SSDs have finite write operations. A cell on an SSD can be written to about 10,000 times. Beyond that, it becomes inaccessible. Current SSDs use firmware that attempts to spread writes evenly over all cells, and the firware also attempts to transparently migrate data on failing cells to good spares and mark the failing cell as bad. In practice, you are likely to upgrade to a new maching lone before you even
notice SSD wear.
Last but not least, pay attention to what video is offered on the machine you get. Will it be adequate for your needs, or will you want to add a video card? Will the video card you use be supported by Linux? Is there a manufacture's driver for Linux, or are you limited to existing Linux support for the card? You didn't mention details on what sort of video editing you wanted to do, but you need decent video on the machine to support it.
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Dennis