Also, AMD is sells low wattage Semprons. <http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/desktop/details.aspx?opn=SDD3000IAA3CN> With sufficient heat sinking, large slow fans, and some sound insulation, you could make a very quiet, cheap mid tower. I am not sure where one would get one though. On the other hand, if you replace the mini-pc in the "bling" solution with a used pentium M laptop with firewire, you can connect the Lacie drives with firewire and buy a Linux-supported SCSI PCMCIA card for the tape drive. ;-) -Adam On 9/28/06, John Stoffel <john@stoffel.org> wrote:
"Jamie" == Jamie Guinan <guinan@bluebutton.com> writes:
Jamie> I've built a few PCs over the past few years, so I can share Jamie> some experiences.
Jamie> #3: AMD64 x2, Tyan motherboard with NVidia chipset, Jamie> Coolermaster Centurion case. This is my main system these Jamie> days, it runs quiet, and I'm happy with every part of it. Jamie> Wattage numbers:
How good is the video? Do you need the NV proprietary kernel module? I'm really just interested in great 2-D graphics, with some 3-d, but I don't play games much at all these days, so I don't care. Mostly, I'm looking for clear crisp text.
The AMDs just rock.
Jamie> The VIAs are seductive, but when I looked harder at them, they Jamie> either required small (=noisy) fans,
Jamie> http://mini-itx.com/news/images/story0386-05L.jpg
Jamie> or ridiculous heatsinking to run fanless,
Jamie> http://www2.multithread.co.uk/images/en12000e_alt1_large.jpg
Jamie> So I would avoid them.
True, but they are tempting just from the size/power constraint, plus they usually have a couple of PCI slots and built-in video...
Jamie> For server purposes, it sounds like reusing your existing Dell Jamie> box is ideal. I still have my former main desktop (2x Celeron Jamie> 466) running my internal web server, Postgresql, etc.
I'm starting to think that this is the way to go really. And I think I could even stuff the DLT drive into the box, to make it even smaller.
Jamie> For the desktop, if I were building a new system today, I would Jamie> look into the Intel core2/double/duo/whatever, retail packaging Jamie> for the nice quiet Intel fan, and a mobo with an Intel graphics Jamie> chipset. The core/foo's run lower wattage than recent AMDs (I Jamie> hear), the Intel graphics are decent for 3D stuff, and the GPU Jamie> drivers are open source. No dealing with ATI/NVidia driver Jamie> madness.
I dunno... I like the AMD opterons we have here at work, but it's not really that big a deal I guess. Which ever has the best price/power/cost metric.
Now the Intel graphics are nice, if only because the specs are available, and I certainly don't need super-duper graphics. My Matrox G450 still does a nice job for what I want it to do.
Thanks for the hints.
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-- -Adam