Local system builders? preferably North York or Thornhill

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 07:57:21PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   I stopped by the place (near Keele and Steeles W) after work today,
> and I'm drooling.  Maybe the reason their motherboards aren't cheap is
> because they're not cheapskate crippled motherboards.  E.g. the Intel i3
> (the low end) motherboard has a couple of goodies...
> 
> * the built-in video chip has *BOTH* VGA and HDMI ports

Give me a DVI port instead, and I can do either one with a $2 adapter.
In fact just the HDMI will do (since it can carry audio) and is trivial
to adapt to DVI, and who cares about VGA anymore. :)  I guess if you
care about VGA, having both is nice.

I have never been certain about MSI at all.  I just don't know.

> * it has PS/2 ports.  WOOHOO!!!!  I have a couple of genuine IBM PS/2
>   "clickety-clack" keyboards that I was getting ready to tearfully throw
>   away, because I couldn't buy new machines with PS/2 ports anymore.

All the Asus boards I listed have a PS/2 port.  Still quite common.

>   When I saw the VGA/HDMI and especially the PS/2 ports, I knew I was
> going to be buying it.  Does anybody know of any linux-compatability
> show-stoppers with Intel i3 motherboards?  If not, I'm buying.

The video support is still being worked out.  You will need a bleeding
edge distribution for it to have any chance of working.

The Asus boards I mentioned for the Core i3/i5 has HDMI and VGA too.
I think they all do.  It's nothing special at all, and certainly not
justification for a high price.

The $99 ASUS P7H55-M even has an optical digital audio out.  That's more
unusual.  And apparently the PS/2 port is both mouse and keyboard
compatible (and with the proper splitter you can use both in fact.
Many laptops used to do that too).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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