MX Linux Forum

I don't mean the wiki version, but the realistic versions found by members using MX. What was your oldest PC that ran MX well?
On the other hand, what is the hardware that beyond a certain point, upgrading components resulted in a linear or near linear performance rate?

Asus eeepc 901 with 1g Ram runs MX15/16 (32bit) OK although it's rather slow as you might expect.

Editing my post with it now .

My most demanding piece of software is Silent Hunter IV...

Went through many, many upgrades on the journey from the mid 90s SH, but also *had* to hw upgrade because of job related use of AutoCad.

Software must to be responsive and snappy and it's been perfectly achieved with the current i7-930 and ATI 5970+5870 tri-fire. Gorgeously watercooled too!

It runs SH IV in full mode and with all mods without breaking a sweat.

In my experience a performance jump must be minimum 300% to have any real value. So see no reason not to stick with what I have.

And can't imagine just how snappy MX will be... Certainly looking forward to the experience!

Everyone has a different interpretation of 'well', so not an easy question to answer.

As long as you are not wanting to do video rendering or similar, the one thing that taxes older machines now is web browsing. MX will install and run on a single-core Pentium M, with 2GB RAM. Office apps, music, even 720p video, all work acceptably, but web browsing is fairly slow.

For most users, something with a dual-core CPU, and 4GB RAM, will be pretty fast for most purposes. If you can swap out the HDD for an SSD, it will be markedly better.

Something with a Core i5, and 8GB RAM, will be super-quick. Back-to-back 'seat of the pants' tests on otherwise identical machines, one with a Core i5/8GB RAM, the other with a Core i7/16GB RAM show no discernible difference. For my somewhat modest uses, the Core i5/8GB RAM would be all that I needed; anything else is mostly wasted.

Chris

chrispop99 wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 4:32 pm Everyone has a different interpretation of 'well', so not an easy question to answer.

As long as you are not wanting to do video rendering or similar, the one thing that taxes older machines now is web browsing. MX will install and run on a single-core Pentium M, with 2GB RAM. Office apps, music, even 720p video, all work acceptably, but web browsing is fairly slow.

For most users, something with a dual-core CPU, and 4GB RAM, will be pretty fast for most purposes. If you can swap out the HDD for an SSD, it will be markedly better.

Something with a Core i5, and 8GB RAM, will be super-quick. Back-to-back 'seat of the pants' tests on otherwise identical machines, one with a Core i5/8GB RAM, the other with a Core i7/16GB RAM show no discernible difference. For my somewhat modest uses, the Core i5/8GB RAM would be all that I needed; anything else is mostly wasted.

Chris

no, not on the duo core (the ones with 2 threads, 1 core), the ones that was 2 hyper threads, but not 2 core. MX is unworkable for me.
However once I reach an i5 Quad core, I see not difference on an i7.
Just wondering what other members think.

For my use case, which has a lot of compiling of kernels and other "heavy" packages, the more cores and RAM you can throw at it, the better. There's no upper limit. That will also help for video and photo work, of course.

My lowest-spec systems--two Acer-built netbooks with 1st gen Atom n270 cpu's (which are themselves based on Pentium M architecture as I understand it), 2GB DDR2 RAM, and aftermarket SSD's (120GB, 32GB, respectively), both MX17.1 and AntiX 17 run quite well. MX's Whisker menu lag is about 1/2 to 1 second, depending on what is selected, whereas with better cpu's, there is no lag at all.
I have an older (circa 2003) homebuilt desktop that is the approximate functional equivalent of n270 based netbooks, that was resurrected a while back with 32bit MX15.01. Haven't fired it up for about 2-1/2 years though--too damn noisy! Specs: nVidia based MoBo, Athlon XP1700+ cpu, nVidia Quadro 500FX video card, 1.75GB RAM, IDE based multiple HDDs.

Sparky wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 3:51 pm I don't mean the wiki version, but the realistic versions found by members using MX. What was your oldest PC that ran MX well?

At the moment the oldest computer I did manage to install MX (MX 18 32bit) on is:
Dell OptiPlex GX240 Processor: Intel Pentium 4 1,8 GHz Memory: 1GB RAM SD-RAM 133 MHz Hard Drive: 80 GB Western Digital GPU: AMD ATI Radeon 9200 PRO Swap: 3 GB

After removing 75% of RAM and leaving only 256 MB it is still usable, as you can see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Beowxg_gJaM

It is ok for listening to music, writing, browsing Internet (with Uzbl), watching video from YouTube in 480p (with mpv) and other things (there is no need to mention that it is perferctly ok to work in terminal with CLI applications). I mean, it can be done, but sometimes you need patience.

Of course 256 MB is just for testing and experimentation.

But with 1 GB RAM it is realy nice and works fine (enough).

Lowest specs is Acer C720 Chromebook with dual core but only 2gb ram. Ran quite fast.

So to conclude, I can run an Athlon 64 processor based laptop without too much lag, and after an > i5 quadcore I really wont see any difference, all other parameters being equal?

What are you going to be using that may stress the system?

You can use va-api video playback acceleration with that modern i5 that you won't get with the Athlon if you watch a lot of high definition movie files. (like me) Many websites will render a lot faster, too.

If all you're doing is email and MX forum posts, no, you won't see much difference.

I have a Gateway laptop with Celeron M processor, 1 GB of RAM and 40 GB hard drive and I'm happy with the performance. I could load LibreOffice Calc & Writer along with Firefox without too much difficulty.

2008 Toshiba Satellite - 2GB ram - 1.3GHz Celeron - operating from a 16GB SDHC card - (no HDD).

An Averatec "NetBuddy" N1130 32-bit netbook, originally with 1GB RAM and a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU. MX ran but I wouldn't call it satisfactorily. It's better now that I've upgraded the RAM to 2GB. It's still kind of slow, but it's OK. It's better than when it used to have XP on it. I think I'm just spoiled by how fast MX is on my desktop with an SSD and 8GB RAM in it.

I'll probably end up installing antiX instead of MX but I'm kind of waiting for the next version which is still in alpha testing right now. I'll probably install it when there's a beta 32-bit snapshot available. I don't really want to give up the MX tools and utilities in favor of manually editing configuration files but the Averatec is the kind of system that antiX was meant for, so we'll see.

On the subject of processors, I've had MX-15 resuscitate a non-hyperthreaded Pentium 4 and Pentium M-Dothan. Though the latter is a laptop that could not handle MX-16 (Firefox froze a lot) so its USB stick system became AntiX plus Palemoon while the latter quit POSTing long ago. Back when it still had MX-16 the USB stick ran reasonably fast tested on AMD A4-5000 and A6-3500, Sandy Pentium, and multiple Core 2 Duo machines (E7500 and higher). I'd guess the Athlon 64 X2 class is the minimum in terms of expectations for responsiveness with MX-18.2.

Still can't get our latest to boot an AMD A8-7680 even after updating the installation to 5.0.0-7.1-liquorix using an older machine. I know it's their oddest new CPU (Excavator-based) but I obtained this moderately fast quad-core the other month considering only price and DDR3. I'm confident MX will eventually run on it but insofar as the question of the maximum specification goes, I'd like to have an idea what processors (Athlon-Ryzen, Threadripper2, Intel ninth-gen iCore and Extreme?) don't dance with MX yet.

I'm impressed by you folks running with 1gb of ram. I haven't done that in years. I've got a couple machines that can only do 2gb max, and they are just tolerable for me. I like at least 4gb, and using a machine with 8gb right now with MX. Still, very good to know MX works so well with bare minimum specs.

Sounds about right for a rational person.

Cores and memory are like hotrods
--can't be too fast,
----have too many cores
------or too much memory.

And apps keep getting larger,
........................future proofing. :)

Runs v nice on a Core 2 duo 1.8 GHz and 2 GB ram.

Justinian wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 8:06 am Still can't get our latest to boot an AMD A8-7680 even after updating the installation to 5.0.0-7.1-liquorix using an older machine. I know it's their oddest new CPU (Excavator-based) but I obtained this moderately fast quad-core the other month considering only price and DDR3. I'm confident MX will eventually run on it but insofar as the question of the maximum specification goes, I'd like to have an idea what processors (Athlon-Ryzen, Threadripper2, Intel ninth-gen iCore and Extreme?) don't dance with MX yet.

I've looked at a couple of small Thinkpads that I wanted to buy, but they use AMD chips, and those make me nervous. I like to stick to intel cpu's for easy Linux compatibility. Few things as frustrating as having an otherwise excellent computer that just refuses to play well with Linux :(

KBD wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 2:57 pm

I've looked at a couple of small Thinkpads that I wanted to buy, but they use AMD chips, and those make me nervous. I like to stick to intel cpu's for easy Linux compatibility. Few things as frustrating as having an otherwise excellent computer that just refuses to play well with Linux :(

Have you looked at the X220?

Sparky wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 4:03 pm

KBD wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 2:57 pm

I've looked at a couple of small Thinkpads that I wanted to buy, but they use AMD chips, and those make me nervous. I like to stick to intel cpu's for easy Linux compatibility. Few things as frustrating as having an otherwise excellent computer that just refuses to play well with Linux :(

Have you looked at the X220?

Haha! I'm using and X220 right now with MX :)
I was looking at the X131e which only has intel Celeron in the Chromebook version and AMD in the main laptop version I think, also the X100e which only has AMD cpu.

Where did you hear about AMD CPU Linux incompatibility. I've never encountered or heard of such a thing.

figueroa wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 6:55 pm Where did you hear about AMD CPU Linux incompatibility. I've never encountered or heard of such a thing.

I'm not saying all AMD is an issue, but intel is generally a safer bet, at least from what I've seen.

KBD wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 7:01 pm

figueroa wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 6:55 pm Where did you hear about AMD CPU Linux incompatibility. I've never encountered or heard of such a thing.

I'm not saying all AMD is an issue, but intel is generally a safer bet, at least from what I've seen.

That's certainly true of GPUs, and I suppose you're not going to find an Intel chipset on a mobo designed for AMD CPUs so you're technically correct (which is the best kind of correct!) Regarding the CPUs themselves though, I've never had any issues running Linux on any Intel-compatible CPU, whether made by Intel, AMD or Cyrix.

JayM wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 8:42 pm That's certainly true of GPUs, and I suppose you're not going to find an Intel chipset on a mobo designed for AMD CPUs so you're technically correct (which is the best kind of correct!) Regarding the CPUs themselves though, I've never had any issues running Linux on any Intel-compatible CPU, whether made by Intel, AMD or Cyrix.

Well, I rolled the dice on one. Thinkpad X100e with AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 Huron. Got it to play with and not for serious use, also it having 4gb ram helped seal the deal. Some concern about complaints that AMD chip runs hot. The Thinkpad X100e is probably the closest Lenovo came to a netbook. Thankfully it is 64 bit so Chrome will run on it among other software.
I'll probably try MX first, then AntiX after that.
This will be my only single core machine, so my new lamest spec computer :)