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Comments · 8
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Re:Control Card?
Motherboard $60: http://www.ascendtech.us/itemdesc.asp?ic=MBTAS2729G2NR
http://www.gearxs.com/gearxs/product_info.php?products_id=110752.7Ghz Xeon $12: http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=632 (3GHz+ CPUs went up, stock may be low right now)
512MB ECC PC2100 $7: http://www.trustprice.com/651566/hp-genuine-512mb-ddr-266.html
Note: All from a 5 minute quick search. A little effort would find better prices and alternate equipment.
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Re:ideas
No, it shouldn't matter. AGP is backwards compatibile, so it should just be slower.
If you want to try less expensive options, and don't need fast 3D, an (OEM) TNT2, GeForce2, or R128 card should be pretty good too. At this point, they're so low power that they don't even include a heatsink.
http://www.gearxs.com/gearxs/product_info.php?cPat h=76&products_id=3511
http://www.pcpartsohio.com/BookDetail.aspx?item_id =384
http://www.pcpartsohio.com/BookDetail.aspx?item_id =228 -
Naked PC's vanishing? No.
PCs bare of an OS seem to me to be a rapidly vanishing breed.
I'd hardly say that they're a vanishing breed. Rather, it seems to me that they're a *growing* breed, Nevermind the occasional beige-box company offering naked PC's in certain markets for short periods of time (last one I saw was from Dell I think).
Last April, I bought two systems from SMK Superstore, built exactly to my specs, and shipped with no OS (in fact, I opted to not even include hard disks, didn't need new ones yet). I ended up paying some $550 for a socket 939 AMD 64x2 3800+ processor with 1GB RAM on a decent Gigabyte motherboard, with a low-end nV MX4000 card for my husband's box. The second system (mine) cost about $650, due to my getting an nV 6600 from another website to go in it.
Before I bought them, I checked a few key sites (HP, Dell, one or two others) and decided there was no way in hell I was going to pay the prices I was seeing, for a PC that was less than half as fast as what I ended up with.
The only downside on my purchase was that I didn't make a good decision on the heat sinks, so the CPU on mine (the workhorse of the two) tends to overheat and switch the computer off if I run it full-bore for too long (thank you lm-sensors for helping me sort this out!). Big deal, good copper heat sink/fan combos will set me back about $35 each (with a tube of grease) and I'll replace the under-specced ones when I can be bothered to do so.
Just to get back on topic, I can say that while I don't use one, I do like the Mac and I like how OS-X looks (what little I've seen anyway). I can't imagine Apple selling their systems in any other way than as a computer and an OS in a single inseperable package; something just doesn't seem right about the idea of Apple going the way of the beige-box market.
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Re:upgrading hardware
The price must of changed since I last looked though, then the cheapest mobo was about $80, cpu I don't recall for sure but I think $100 and the last tyme I bought 128M of ram was about $100. That was two or three years ago and I'd want at least 512 preferably 1 GB ram.
That was awhile ago. If you live near a Fry's (many big cities in the U.S.) you can buy a combo with a motherboard, CPU & fan for as little as $50, though the cheapo combo this week is a lordly $80 for an AMD A64 3000+ CPU and an ECS Nforce3A board. Look on pricewatch.com and you can find 512 MB of PC3200 RAM for as little as about $43 and a gig is maybe $54. But you'll need a new power supply and that will run you about $30 for a decent one.
But it still may not make much sense to upgrade your current rig.
What are you going to do with your old "perfectly adequate until 10 minutes ago" mobo, PS and CPU? Put 'em in a drawer until you throw them away? E-Bay them for not much more than the transaction cost? Resell them to various recyclers? The boards are worth 80 cents a pound, CPUs used to get a pretty penny, like $18 a pound, but the vast majority of a PII CPU is fan, casing, etc. The power supply is just scrap metal, a few cents a pound.
Even if wait until you can get the best possible deals on the parts, maybe $110 after a Mail In Rebate on 512 MB of RAM, you still have to pull the old stuff, screw the new stuff in, hoping you didn't short anything out, and then reinstall Windows (or at least reconfigure X and your sound card for Linux, not, I'll admit, a big deal).
In the mean time you could buy a whole new system with a legal copy of Windows XP and a new 17" CRT monitor for less than $300 after MIR. Then sell your old rig for $75. Buy a cheap PCI video card for $14 and you are good to go with a dual monitor rig using Xinerama. Use QTPARTED to shrink the XP partition to 30 gigs or so, so you can dual boot, then blow on your favorite distro.
The motherboard for the computer has a number of things built onto it, the graphics is though I installed a second one.
Actually, if your second video card is PCI, you can run a dual monitor rig now, either in Win or Lin. Unfortunately, onboard video tends to be on the AGP bus, so if you have an AGP card you can either us it or the onboard. All new motherboards come with USB 2.0, you can buy a cheap firewire card for $10-15.
I wouldn't worry too much about exactly which CPU to buy. Practically anything you buy these days will have plenty of pop for most purposes. Maybe you should take that statement with a grain of saltpeter, since my primary machine benchmarks, according to KBoincSpy, a Dhrystone of 309 MIPS and a Whetstone of 110 MFLOPS, and I'm reasonably happy with it. -
Re:Not sure...lets see how close I can get.
I happen to have a 440BX, and I've got a PII in my Intel 440BX right now.
Me too, but that doesn't change the fact that that particular motherboard won't fit a Pentium II no matter how big a hammer you try to pound it in with, because that motherboard has a CPU socket and the Pentium II CPUs were all slot-mounted.This isn't a huge problem -- there are plenty of Celeron 333-533 MHz CPUs that would work fine in a 440BX Socket370 motherboard. For example: Celeron 366. A 440ZX board would probably even take a more modern "Coppermine" Pentium III or Celeron.
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Re:Not sure...lets see how close I can get.
I happen to have a 440BX, and I've got a PII in my Intel 440BX right now.
Me too, but that doesn't change the fact that that particular motherboard won't fit a Pentium II no matter how big a hammer you try to pound it in with, because that motherboard has a CPU socket and the Pentium II CPUs were all slot-mounted.This isn't a huge problem -- there are plenty of Celeron 333-533 MHz CPUs that would work fine in a 440BX Socket370 motherboard. For example: Celeron 366. A 440ZX board would probably even take a more modern "Coppermine" Pentium III or Celeron.
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Not sure...lets see how close I can get.
I'm sure it's going to end up being bad, but I'll give it a shot:
First of all, no case. It'll work without one, so I'm not including it in my attempt. Given this, along with the fact that I'm using old, slow and therefore cooler processors, no cooling should be needed.
Second, I'm ignoring labor. If you can put Linux on your machine yourself, you can build it yourself.
Cheapest new CPU I could find was a PII-266 for $6:
Compatible motherboard Intel 440BX for $10
Lets go with a good 64MB of ram. This one uses EDO, which is $8.
Then we add a a 4MB AGP video card for $6,
a sound card for $6,
and a 10/100 LAN card for $4.
Power supply for $14.
8x CDROM drive for $9,
At this point, I might add that all of these things actually have free shipping in case you want to do this.
With the exception of power supplies, which are cheap, harddrives go bad the fastest, so people are always buying up the surplus ones. It makes it a lot harder to find old stock that hasn't been sold.
So I'd like to consider it separately. Right now we're at $63.
The cheapest harddrive I could find in 4 minutes of searching (about that for the other stuff) was a 20GB 7200 drive for $30 with shipping.
So...we're done at $93.
You might also have to buy an IDE cable. I was just hoping that the harddrive or the motherboard or the CDRom drive came with one.
Using this same procedure, you can probably get a case for about $20. Same low quality. But why bother with such cheap parts? Keep 'em in a shoebox. -
Not sure...lets see how close I can get.
I'm sure it's going to end up being bad, but I'll give it a shot:
First of all, no case. It'll work without one, so I'm not including it in my attempt. Given this, along with the fact that I'm using old, slow and therefore cooler processors, no cooling should be needed.
Second, I'm ignoring labor. If you can put Linux on your machine yourself, you can build it yourself.
Cheapest new CPU I could find was a PII-266 for $6:
Compatible motherboard Intel 440BX for $10
Lets go with a good 64MB of ram. This one uses EDO, which is $8.
Then we add a a 4MB AGP video card for $6,
a sound card for $6,
and a 10/100 LAN card for $4.
Power supply for $14.
8x CDROM drive for $9,
At this point, I might add that all of these things actually have free shipping in case you want to do this.
With the exception of power supplies, which are cheap, harddrives go bad the fastest, so people are always buying up the surplus ones. It makes it a lot harder to find old stock that hasn't been sold.
So I'd like to consider it separately. Right now we're at $63.
The cheapest harddrive I could find in 4 minutes of searching (about that for the other stuff) was a 20GB 7200 drive for $30 with shipping.
So...we're done at $93.
You might also have to buy an IDE cable. I was just hoping that the harddrive or the motherboard or the CDRom drive came with one.
Using this same procedure, you can probably get a case for about $20. Same low quality. But why bother with such cheap parts? Keep 'em in a shoebox.
