> Hi,
> My current box is on its last leg of its life. A new box will be
> needed soon, and will be M$ free!
> It'll be use for graphics, web development, plus some entertainment side
> duties
> like playing CD-V, DVD, etc.
> Here's my hardware list, I'd like to have some of you gurus out there to
> take a look, and give me some opinions and suggestions.
I just went through this, so I did unearth some information
Quote:> * Should I get a so called year 2000 ready motherboard?
> Thanks,
> Alex Lam.
> - Tyan S1592S Trinity mother board w/ AMD K-6/266MHz cpu with heat
> sink and fan. (VIA Apollo VP3 chip set & Award pnp bios.)
> (Will consider 300 MHz if there's a good price drop when the K-6 2
> comes out by the end of the month.)
> - 128 Mb DIMM
ECC (Error Correcting) memory approved by Tyan (or whoever) is highly
recommended. Non-parity memory was a big mistake on my previous
machine.
Quote:> Two Seagate Medalist Pro 6,5 Gig, 512 K cache, 7,200rpm Ultra DMA/33
> hard drive.
I understand that 7200+ rpm drives can emit a very annoying whine. Be
sure you can live with it. They also run very hot, and disk failure
is mostly heat-related, so you have to make sure there's enough
airflow for them (no drive in the bays directly above and below, extra
fans, and so on). You might consider getting a 5600 rpm drive and a
bit more capacity for the same amount of money, if you can live with
the loss in latency performance.
Quote:> - Maxtrox Millenium II AGP video, or ATI All-in-wonders video card
The MMII AGP was my choice. Very fast (maybe the fastest---see the
XFree86 web page's description of it), and very supported.
Quote:> - Creative Lab DVD drive.
> - Creative Lab 32Awe Wave table sound card (NOT PNP)
> - *would like to have a CD burner if the Ultra DMA hard drive is fast
> enough for it.
> without going SCSI.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't a CD burner be the
bottleneck in any recent system? Anyway, my sense was that despite
the fast ATA drives SCSI was still worth the money for reliability,
stability, support and, yes, speed (although I've seen this hotly
debated). As an example, the Asus P2L97-S motherboard has a built-in
Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI controller for only about $80 more than their
P2L97 (both supposedly very good boards, not to take anything away
from the Tyan). Of course, the drives wind up costing a more, and the
only trouble I've had with my 3-year-old IDE system is running out of
channels and having to buy a 3d controller to install more hardware,
so it depends. My choice was all SCSI, but only 1 drive.
Quote:> - Mid tower case with 3 fans, 300 W. power supply.
Given a 7200 rpm drive speed, I'd at least consider a full tower,
especially since you're getting 2 drives. A larger enclosure is
cooler, and more drive bays means it's easier to have more air flow
between them by separating them. Full towers aren't that much more,
and drive failures can really dent your day.
Quote:> - Probably will run SuSE 5.2 Linux on it. Or Red Hat 4.2, or 5.1.
SuSE I only know by reputation. 4.2 was really stable, but if 5.1
doesn't show any signs on the net of being as troublesome as 5.0, I'd
probably install that just to avoid having to upgrade to glibc (which
is the wave of the future, I guess). But I don't think you can lose
with any of those. Debian is good, too. FWIW, I run RH 5.0 with all
updates applied (I chose to do a fresh install on a spare partition
rather than an upgrade from 4.2; a good move, and the resulting setup
works well, but I wish I had waited for 5.1 to do it). I also FreeBSD
on another partition (another good choice).
(Disclaimer: It goes without saying that most of the above is personal
opinion (or at least it should). It may be "wrong" for any given
person, but I don't think any of it is "Clearly Erroneous" in the
sense of being unsupported by any knowledgeable people at all or by
the underlying available facts.)
--
Boston College Law School PGP Public Key: 0xF3476F39
"I may be wrong, but I'm not Clearly Erroneous."
-Judge Hillman
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