hardware for fedora
Dave Stevens
geek at uniserve.com
Wed May 27 20:03:48 UTC 2009
On Tuesday 26 May 2009 05:46:18 pm Stuart McGraw wrote:
> Dave Stevens wrote:
> > Quoting Stuart McGraw <smcg2297 at frii.com>:
> >> Hello all,
> >>
> >> Time has come to replace my ancient circa 2001
> U.S., and say ~$1000 although I could go a few hundred
> dollars over that if necessary.
Well, others have commented already so I'll add my 2 bits worth. Heat and
vibration are bad for computers so I pay attention to cooling and damping as
routine high priorities. Most recently I bought an aluminum case, thinking
that since steel is such a rotten conductor of heat I'd be better off with
this material. In the year that I've had it (a Silverstone TJ-09) it has
never even gotten warm. It also has three 12 cm. fans and a fairly low-tech
video card pulling only about 30 watts. From an Antec Trio power supply (650
watts). My experience is that as you run gear closer to its design limits it
gets flakier. It was my goal with this system to get decent performance with
good reliability, so keeping it cool by over-speccing the PS was part of
that. Some hard drive mounting schemes provide vibration damping, mine does -
up to six 3.5" drives in a rubberized friction fit HD compartment. I also
suggest figuring total power draw with the unit built up all the way, with
all possible hard drives installed, RAM maxed out etc. Gives a good
conservative design figure. For cpu I think you can't do better for a system
under heavy load than Opterons, but trade-offs with video needs and storage
configuration (RAID vs non-RAID, etc) will change this. If you gotta have the
best possible video right now, you can expect to pay I think about $300 US. I
have just ordered a Sapphire 4770, which has got very good reviews at a very
nice price. I use Kingston Value RAM but that's because my mobo will support
at most 667 MHz DDR2 memory. I am also using (for the first time) ECC
Registered RAM, which costs more but is very nice in terms of reliability.
Good luck with the build, let us know what you come up with, eh?
Dave
--
Canada must refuse to be entangled in any more wars fought to make the world
safe for capitalism.
-- The Regina Manifesto, 1933
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