I recently finished a computer that includes the Antec "Sonata Designer," basically a white Solo with an Earthwatts 500 power supply included. The computer itself is nearly silent. The power supply is another matter: it emits a low-frequency hum, a higher buzz, and seemingly a cyclical vibration tha...

Compupro, in 1980. S100 bus, dual 8085/8088, with an 8087 math co-processor, 256K of static RAM, dual 8" floppies, nine serial ports, three terminals (Heath H-29) and a dot-matrix printer. It ran MP/M (a multiuser version of CP/M), and allowed simultaneous execution of 8 and 16 bit programs. Utterly...

Just be aware that there may be some differences between the consumer and the quadro versions. I put a Zalman 900 on my FX2000, and I had to drill a hole into one heat sink (on the reverse side of the board) for the attachment to work properly. It was easy enough to do. And yes, it does make a HUGE ...

If there is no hole for a case fan, it is probably better to leave well enough alone.

Appropriate memory shows up pretty regularly. Here I pay about $20 for 256MB; local conditions may of course vary.

Congratulations! I think you will be please with what this system can do. If you start getting into any mail filtering (spam, anti-virus) you may wish to expand the memory a bit, but for serving simple static web pages or music files, this should be fine. Also, often you can remove the cooling fan f...

Have anyone exchange the CPU fan? It's seems that DELL is using a special 3-pin connector for the fan, but is is just to solder together a the cables from the old CPU fan to the new CPU fan? That's probably all you have to do. I did similar surgery on an old 250W HP power supply in my dual PIII. It...

If I were going with a single screen, I too would suggest a wide-screen monitor. Personally I use two monitors, and the 4:3 format works better for that.

Which is likely to serve me better both in terms of performance and noise, d'you reckon? It depends entirely on your workload. You have not mentioned what you do with the computer, so any guesses at this point are purely speculative. It is probably easier to get the Raptors quiet. Yet you can do it...

I never understood the attraction of disk drive coolers. The drives need just a small amount of air and they are cooled pretty well. Fans are cheap (Sidewinder has slow, quiet 80mm ones for $2 each right now). FWIW, my drives range from 29C to 34C depending on the drive and the case, and that is ple...

Ah; you don't need the upgrade to run them per se, but you would like a new system to run them on something better than geological times scales. That makes more sense.

I'm not a Linux fanatic but due to the cost of the Microsoft product they aren't an option. I'm doing my last year at the University, so money is scarce. If that was a comment on the software I run on my server, note that I run FreeBSD, not Linux. Don't overlook it if you go the OSS route. For an o...

He probably does not need more than 1GB -- few people really do.

I admit that I don't understand the necessity to get a new computer to run modern codecs, though, unless his eye is on Vista.

RAID for anything other than redundancy on a 500MHz machine is way overkill. You exceed the capabilities of the DMA channel at about 40MB/s, give or take. Any modern drive can do that by itself. The server for my small company is a dual PIII (550MHz) and it is more than plenty. It runs the usual Apa...

I will just offer a quick comment, and then leave this topic. My oldest computer I bought in 1980, before there were practical computer hard drives. My use for the desktop is with multithreaded applications used to search substantial databases (which I do locally) and for computational fluid mechani...

You don't really need 74GB for your application. 36GB, or even 18GB, would be plenty, as long as you have a large IDE drive to hold you bulk data (say, 300 or 400GB). You need the bulk drive only if you work with media files, like music or videos. Without those, disk capacity just does not fill up t...

I don't know why I am bothering with this... DrJ: "One simple question: have you used SCSI drives? If so, which ones?" I know what you're up to... So the answer is "no." You go on this whole diatribe with no experience at all. If I payed thousands of dollars to build a 1337 storage system with sever...

angelkiller wrote:Would any application (excluding server related) ever use 4 Gigs?

I frequently run two virtual machines (XP, W2k) simultaneously on a FreeBSD host. I give the VMs 750MB each; 3GB works fine for the total machine with room to spare.

One simple question: have you used SCSI drives? If so, which ones? I know the benchmarks well, but they do not correspond with my experience (or perhaps my workloads). The Raptor is of course a fine drive, and a very large step up from a 7.2K RPM drive. It should be considered if a quick, small capa...

How about a Prestonia-era dual Xeon? Warm toes and pretty good computing at the same time!

The controller is more likely to be PCI-X, though you can get any flavor you want.

The only other way really to speed things up would be to use RAID. That doesn't help latency much, but it does improve serial transfer rates if that is important to your applications.

The differences between 7200 RPM drives is really pretty minor. If you want to speed things up you really have to go to 10K RPM (Raptor or SCSI) or a 15K SCSI. You can get these to be quiet with some work, but they are not silent. FWIW, my main workstation has four SCSI drives: 3 15K and 1 10K. The ...

I have a workstation that uses dual socket 604 Xeons that makes quite a bit of noise. Unfortunately, the heatsink vendors practically do not support these old systems any more. Is there a more current socket that is reasonably compatible with S604? I know that S423 works, but that is little better t...

I haven't found the solvent to be that critical, actually. I usually use left-over toluene from the lab and have had no issues so far.

...something else for a system drive. could i find a super high quality, fast, quiet hard drive for $50 or so in addition to this one? i wouldn't need anything big. 80, 60, or 40 gb would be fine... Try a SCSI drive. You can find 10K or 15K RPM drives, 37 to 73GB for $50 to $70. SCSI4ME just had a ...

I will soon replace the noisy fan on my graphics card, an nVidia FX2000. It will take a bit of surgery, since the rear heat sink covers one of the mounting fan mounting holes. That's easy enough to take care of, but I will have to remove four of those spring-loaded plastic retaining pins. Some of th...

Agreed. For a server, you really don't need ANY horsepower. The standard on-board chip for servers has traditionally been the ATI Rage 128. It is silent, consumes little electrical power, has little computing power, and is perfectly adequate. You can choose a comparable nVidia or Matrox flavor if yo...

i also had a sun netra running for a while as my home server. a very nice machine indeed. even though it does not consume a lot of power, they are very noisy. and the scsi drives used cost a fortune. this is a bit better with the newer suns that also use ide or sata drives. The Suns lend themselves...

There's nothing wrong with what you are doing, but in my opinion this is WAY overkill. I do the equivalent of what you have in mind on a headless 300MHz SPARC on FreeBSD and a DLT tape drive. It cost me $50 for everything (including a new SCSI drive), it is quiet and does not consume much energy (it...

MSI refused to service the board, because the OEMed it to IBM. It seems silly to contact IBM to receive a board that they send to MSI, and the reverse when they are done. But that's how it is.

Alright, I screwed up. I was bringing up a low-end dual Prestonia Xeon workstation, and I lost the second CPU. I bent some pins when I put in the CPU, and I paid for it, I guess. In any event, the socket (standard 604-pin) no longer operates: it is frozen in place, and the top is full of bubbles (fr...