On one of my Linux groups sombody asked about A series AMD machines a while ago. I kept quiet because I
was in the process of getting one. Here is the spec:
MBO - ASUS® F2A55-M LE
CPU - AMD A8-5600K Quad Core APU (3.6GHz) & Radeon™ HD 7560D Graphics
MEM - 4GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz
SDA - 120GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s - '/' & /home'
SDB - 180GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s - '/audio' & '/source'
I've now spent a few days getting it exactly as I want it. I made very few BIOS changes. I disabled serial and parallel ports (the machine doesn't have them anyway) and set the CPU to 'performance'. Initially I disabled the on-board sound as I'm using my trusty 2496. But I got occasional boot oddities so re-enabled it.
I installed a minimal debian-squeeze without any problems at all, then just added the software I wanted. This was a bit harder than I expected as my notes from last time were not complete, and going from Linux 2.6 to 3.1 meant there were subtle differences, especially with stuff I had to compile.
The machine is very, very responsive and almost completely silent. The PSU has a slow running 120mm fan and the cooler on the CPU looks like something from a space lab!
With the stock 3.1 kernel I'm running at a latency of 5.8mS with no x-runs even when going full steam on Rosegarden and Yoshimi soft-synth munching 12 tracks of MIDI into far more multi-layered voices generated in real time (not from wavetables). Sequencer + synth playing of complex material that used to peak at around 70% total processor on a dual core Athlon, now peaks at around 20%!
My old computer has been re-purposed as a (rather fast) office machine, so that involved a lot of file swapping and checking that nothing was missed.
Now, I suppose I'd better get on and compose some music
