Tips for a new rig

[terrapin-station]

Hi all
Well the other my laptop died on me, so I'm looking for a new computer. I've had horrible luck up to now with driver support so I've decided this time I'll build it from scratch so I'm here to ask you guys for some hardware tips. Here's what I planned for:
-AM2 socket motherboard with the new chipset coming out in November
-4 gb DDR2 1066 mhz
-New Phenom X4 probably 2.8 Ghz
-2 SATA WD Raptor HDs
-2 of the new ati HD3000 series GPUs (I know that ATI doesn't have a good reputation, but I'm really into AMD/ATI and the new opensource drivers (radeonHD) will only get better, and with AMD I'm sure they'll make them excellent in the near futur)
-Echo Gina3G (I've already checked, it's apparently supported by the ALSA drivers. I would prefer a firewire model, but those are not supported)
-WiFi card (not sure which one, but preferably with opensource drivers)

Anyways as you can see most of this hardware is yet to be released so the main questions are:
-Given the fact that phenom processors still use the AM2 socket, there won't be any issues?
-How about the new chipset? I don't know much about motherboards and linux so I'm not really sure how much this stuff matters. If this new chipset does requier special drivers or whatever, how long until they are released?
-Any tips for a good wireless card?
-What do you guys think about 64 bit? I've heard alot about driver issues in windows, how does it work out under linux?

Thanks a lot for your help

[jexxie]

If you're looking for good driver support, you need to go with older hardware. If you're looking for something fast, why not grab an intel-based chipset, a q6600, and 4GB of ram. You'll have something that's been out for a bit, the drivers are tested and work. When hardware is freshly released, you can't expect an ETA for when drivers will work on them.

For a wireless card, I'd recommend something acx-based, or rt2x00-based. You can find a list of Linux-supported wireless cards on the internet.

You obviously won't have a hard time with the sata raptors, if you're running Linux exclusively, you can setup a software raid0 for performance. If you're wanting to use the onboard raid, I can't hazard if that'll work or not.

Regarding 64bit, it's just the same as 32bit, I haven't really noticed much in the way of speed increases, 64bit uses more memory for the same application, and it can be a pain to setup a few apps that need to run in 32bit mode (like firefox, and all your plugins / extensions). If you don't need to use 64bit, why bother?
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