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here, i found what you want for $75: HIS H365F512ANP Radeon HD 3650 512MB 128-bit DDR2 AGP 4X/8X HDCP Ready Video Card

I've been keeping up with Dr. Dietz's work since Purdue. I really admire his work, and I even ran a small 2-node PAPERS cluster at home using his AFAPI library.

PeTS may be applicable here, especially his research into Flat Neighborhood Networks (FNNs). However, I think that AMD/Intel sytems use too much power (70 watts or so each). A computationally-equivalent cluster of VIA EPIA motherboards (maybe 10 watts each) would be both physically smaller and much easier on the electric bill. At $100 each for a VIA EPIA V10000A or $163 for the newer VIA EPIA M10000 Nehemiah I could afford to both buy a cluster and run it. Running an AMD cluster would use more electricity than I could afford.

The picture in the middle of the PeTS page, KAOSlab.jpg, is my background desktop at work, and I often get comments. I wish I were so lucky as to work with that sort of thing every day. :)

I've been keeping up with Dr. Dietz's work since Purdue. I really admire his work, and I even ran a small 2-node PAPERS cluster at home using his AFAPI library.

PeTS may be applicable here, especially his research into Flat Neighborhood Networks (FNNs). However, I think that AMD/Intel sytems use too much power (70 watts or so each). A computationally-equivalent cluster of VIA EPIA motherboards (maybe 10 watts each) would be both physically smaller and much easier on the electric bill. At $100 each for a VIA EPIA V10000A or $163 for the newer VIA EPIA M10000 Nehemiah I could afford to both buy a cluster and run it. Running an AMD cluster would use more electricity than I could afford.

The picture in the middle of the PeTS page, KAOSlab.jpg, is my background desktop at work, and I often get comments. I wish I were so lucky as to work with that sort of thing every day. :)

My only concern is how long it would take for it to sync back up once you replaced a bad drive. If you 8 drive at 200GB each...that's a lot of data.

But I think $179 is pretty cheap for an 8-channel RAID controller.

(Supported RAID Levels RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, JBOD)

Done, and done.

Axiontech has a 1GHz VIA EPIA-V10000A for $123, and an 800MHz is $90. I got the 1GHz, and it is real nice. Here is the case ($72) I use with it.

Axiontech has a 1GHz VIA EPIA-V10000A for $123, and an 800MHz is $90. I got the 1GHz, and it is real nice. Here is the case ($72) I use with it.

While I can understand wanting to help out businesses on-the-cheap, basing support on a RadioShack freebie that needs to be modified seems questionable. Especially when you can get a barcode scanner for much less than "$200-$500":

$79
$67
$58.98
$69.75
$82
$89.63
$89.99

While admittedly none of these are cheaper than a cue::cat (or however it was supposed to be spelled), they do afford you the luxury of not supporting a business decision on a third-party's freebie handout product, and not requiring any hacking.

Might as well give the run-down

• VIA EPIA CL motherboard. Has dual ethernet builtin. This is my router/NAT/Linux server box.
• VIA C3 1GHz
• 512M DDR
• I found a nice case on axiontech (Also made by VIA.)

That's room for console access, small serial LCD & serial GPS unit. Hmmm..That's one extra serial slot! w00T. BTW, Axion is cheaper than Idot.

I can't wait to have these start appearing in all sorts of Palm devices. The processors and screens of these guys have long caught up to the PC's of min 90's, but the sotrage capacities have been hovering around late 80's levels with the micro-drives being too large to fit in.

Yowza, you haven't been paying attention to the Palm market lately.

I'm listening to music on my Palm Tungsten T right now, from a 256MB SD card -- these are the static RAM cards the size of a postage stamp (although thicker). Right now, you can get these SDs for about $70, so this is pretty affordable. You can actually get 512MB SD cards, although they'll set you back closer to $300. I remember 40MB hard drives being pretty decent storage for a PC in the early 90s, so the static storage for Palmtops have certainly surpassed the early 90's PC.

Curiously, the cost curve for static RAM seems to be an inverse bell. The lowest cost point seems to be the just-less-than-the-maximum storage capacity, for SD around $0.27/MB. The maximum is over $0.50/MB, and anything below the second-to-best is between $0.40 and $0.50. I'm not sure why, but this strikes me as odd.

Best:

Newegg. Not the cheapest, but good and have never had a problem.

Axion Technologies Never had a problem, lots of interesting stuff in their surplus section - always worth a browse.

Computer Surplus Outlet Good for very cheap systems that you can tweak with a few extra bits, especially old P2-grade machines at ridiculously low prices and occasional weird stuff. Component prices aren't all that good, but they often have specials (I got a heap of P2 Xeon 400s from them, with heatsink, for $9.99 each.)

Worst:

CNet PC

They marked a delivery "no signature required" without telling me. When the package never arrived they just said "not our fault" and stopped replying to my emails.

Another piece of advice: if you're ordering from out-of-state to avoid sales tax, remember that it's going to be a lot harder - probably not worth your while - to take them to small claims court...

I personally use the same vendors most often but will use pricewatch to find deals when buying individual parts. my Fav vendors are:

• www.newEgg.com
• www.mwave.com
• www.hyperMicro.com (for scsi)
• www.axiontech.com
• www.2coolPc.com (oc cooling stuff)

Before you buy from ANYWHERE, check out ResellerRatings. You may not thank yourself (or me :-) later, but at least you won't be cursing yourself and the fly by night vendor that screwed you. Just remember to keep in mind: People (in general) are much more likely to bitch about bad service than praise good service.

That said, I've been really happy with NewEgg for equipment. For some higher end (or rather specific) cooling equipment, 2CoolTek is really good. Crucial is great if you're looking for high-quality RAM. PCBoost has never given me any trouble when dealing with less expensive RAM. And everyone and their brother will mention Pricewatch. :-) And although they aren't always the cheapest, Axiontech has always treated me right as well.
People have said good things about MWave, but I ordered a pair of NICs from them a while ago and they shipped in an old motherboard box without any padding -- rattling around loosely! Luckily they both worked.

But these are just MY experiences -- yours may vary.

OK, so I built a machine for my fiancee's parents (gigahertz-class duron, 256 ram, geforce 2 derivative, etc. quite a jump from the p200mmx they had). I went with the ECS board, becuase of all the good things I heard about it. The first motherboard suffered a catastrophic error, some widget on the underside of the board sort of exploded and the motherboard basically soldered itself to the case, shorting it. It's the first time I'd ever seen computer hardware _literally smoke_, and I don't mean just a little puff. (There's still a great big scorch mark on their case.) This also nuked pretty much everything plugged into the board except the cdrom and floppy. Thankfully, the shop we bought everything from (axtiontech, here in houston tx) really bent over backwards, giving us no problems about returning components. The next ecs board we got has been running flawlessly for a couple of months now. I guess we just got that one in a million lemon.

I believe he's talking just about the mobo, which can actually be had for even less (e.g. $115.95). Getting the complete barebones system for $150 would indeed be a steal.

Read about it here Ahead of schedule is not exactly true, but its coming soon.