Hi all,
Over this summer I will be building myself a workstation that will
have to last for 4/5 years without upgrade. I'm rather at a loss as
to what to build!
It will be running linux and various microkernels, (no windows). It
will be on for lots of time and will be used mainly for programming.
Total cost can not go over 2000ukp inc VAT which includes Monitor,
keyboard, case, PSU etc. So I reckon that leaves about 1400 inc VAT
for mobo, cpu(s), hdd, cdr, memory
So what would people buy? I've looked at SMP, but most of the
benchmarks I've seen suggest the gain isn't that great. OTOH, the
benchmarks have been carried out under windows which I doubt has
quite the same granularity of SMP support. Dual PIII mobos are
cheap, but would they really out-perform a uni Athlon?
What about a high-end chipset like the Serverworks LE chipset? Both
Tyan and Supermicro make dual PIII mobos with this chipset. What
about dual athlon? Could one really get this within the price limit?
Would using SMP mean that microkernels that don't support SMP would
not run, or would they only run on one CPU. Could I afford to risk
this?
I would prefer to use Maxtor Atlas III SCSI hdds (2 of them in
a software RAID 1) for fault tolerance and because SCSI hdds come
with 5 years warenty instead of 3: I really doubt I'll be able to
afford upgrades or replacement parts over the next 5 years being a
student in London. So SCSI on mobo or a seperate card?
Would people make use of ebay etc for this kind of thing?
Of course I'd love a 4 way sledgehammer system but some how I don't
think I'll be able to afford that. (nor will it be available in
time...) There just seems to be too much choice and very few black
and white answers as to which combination is better.
Any advice at all that anyone can give most gratefully received.
Matthew
--Matthew Sackman Nottingham England
BOFH Excuse Board: It's stuck in the Web. -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Sat 27 Apr 2002 - 11:21:11 BST