On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:39:37AM -0400, Clint Moyer wrote:
To the point, the original request was:
"I want to build a compute/file server. I do a lot of heavy duty software development using the Eclipse IDE and the Java and C++ Development tools. Also, I need to store a lot of data - mostly images."
Not especially high-end requirements, beyond perhaps CPU and memory.
I responded mostly because of the recent talk about being bewildered by the wide variety of hardware selections and conversations like this help set/spread rules of thumb. While the OP probably won't *need* a very high performance anything (Eclipse is a big boy but it doesn't require top of the line), the place to find it is in discrete components. Which is why I ended with "Start with onboard components if it doesn't cost you of your requirements (and doesn't cost too much) and plan on using discrete components to get higher performance at the start and as your later upgrade path." Frank (Oh, and, if you've got the money to spare, those new fancy vidcards can do more than just video... VDPAU, OpenCL, and so on seem like very cool things to check out to me!)