A friend of mine asked me if I could help him build a system. He would like to keep the cost at a minimum. the system is meant to be used with Linux ( no distro chosen yet, but could be Mint for instance).

One of the options is to build the system around an Athlon II X4 750k ( basically an APU without the GPU part ). We salvaged a Radeon 5850, a HDD, an optical drive and a case, from his previous system. . We have to buy a CPU, a Mobo, a PSU and some RAM.

Does anyone here have any experience or information on any compatibility issues between Linux and this processor ?

Thanks in advance !

You won't have problems with that CPU. I'd be more worried about the AMD GPU. Not that it won't be supported, I'm quite sure that the drivers supplied by AMD do support it, but how well it will work. Let's just say that people that build their computers or buy them to run Linux on, get nvidia discrete graphics.

Thanks. Indeed I built a rig for the kids a while ago with edubuntu and a radeon 5770 and, as a matter of fact, the card is well supported but performance is not impressive at all. But it fits the needs.

In the present case, the 5850 has the advantage of being availaable at no cost. The computer is meant to be used for emails/web/casual gaming/managing pictures and the like. Considering the limited budget available, I could built something with a geforce GT630 and 4 Gbs of RAM ( I had thought I'd keep the radeon and place 8gbs of RAM).