Re: [tlug] Need purchasing advice for a linux compatible desktop

[Botond Botyanszki <tlug@example.com>]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 05:13:36 +0900
"Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com> wrote:

> Okay - then I guess the AMD I just bought will have to become a
> paperweight.
I'm not saying it should be paperweight. I just don't see any sense in
building a complete system around an obsolete CPU (though modern to some
extent), which is worth around 3000 yen or so.

>  It does look nice, so it'll be a nice paperweight
You could use it as a hair-comb too. There are other possible uses.

> The only thing that I really want to carry over is the capability of
> using my old hard drives.
In addition to the SATA interface, most have at least one PATA (the old
wide) interface, on which you can hook up two drives. Some have two. 
Going with SATA is nice though. My new maxtor has around 64Mb/s
throughput compared to the old IBM deathstar model with 34Mb/sec. Not to
mention the loud whining noise that it made. Because of this I decided to
use it for occasional backups only and plug it in with a rack if needed.

> The rotten design motherboard has
> connectors for both types - do the current ones still have that?
> Hopefully they do.
This is why I said "check the specs". 

> Come to think of it - if I can use the video board I mentioned 
Is it AGP or PCI-X? (I guess it's AGP or normal PCI since you said it's older)
This pretty much decides which mobos you can pick.

> and the memory I just bought, that would help.
If it's DDR then it should work. The only issue is the speed, but it will
only give less performance if it's less than 400Mhz. Another nice
advantage is dual-channel support (with 2 identical modules).

> Then some motherboards are fan-less?  That does sound nice!  I suppose
> the heat sinks for them must be huge!
The components that need cooling are the big chipsets on the mobo, the
CPU and the graphics card. You can recognize these (usually just one) on
the mainboard, they have a smaller heatsink with or without a fan on them.

Video cards also come either with a heatsink (fanless) or with a fan on
top. It's possible to get passive cooling even for the latest AMD CPUs, I
got one recently (thermaltake brand). It's big, but completely silent.

> (Are their power supplies
> fan-less too?)
The power supply is another matter. As long as it's ATX (with enough
watts) it should do the job. There are (expensive) fan-less models too,
but you can't avoid to have at least one fan in your box, because heat
needs to go out somehow unless you use water cooling (but again this is
not for your budget). In my experience the best thing is to have a
low-noise power supply equipped with one fan that faces downwards (towards
the mobo components and the CPU).

This is the only thing I find nice about brand maker's PCs, that many
models are designed to be fairly silent, so the power supply is arranged
in such a way that is blows directly on the cpu's heatsink and the whole
box has only one silent fan. This is also possible with a PC built from
parts, bat can be tricky.

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