hardware for fedora

[Dave Stevens]

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




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