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• Case Cooler Master Stacker 810: $179
• PSU Corsair 1000HX 1000 Watt: $218
• Mobo Tyan S4989WG2NR: $872
• 4 x CPU Opteron 8350 HE Quad-core 2.0 GHz: 4 x $927
• 16 x 2GB DDR2-667 ECC Registered: 16 x $31
• GPU Gigabyte GV-N98XPZL-1GH GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB: $180
• RAID card 3ware 9550SXU-8LP: $416
• 2 x HDD WDC VelociRaptor 300GB: 2 x $230
• 6 x HDD Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB: 6 x $100
• DVD Burner Pioneer 20X SATA: $23
• Sound card ASUS Xonar DX: $90
• Liquid cooling system: ~$300
• Total: $7542 (compare to Puget's price of $16338)

Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.

• Case Cooler Master Stacker 810: $179
• PSU Corsair 1000HX 1000 Watt: $218
• Mobo Tyan S4989WG2NR: $872
• 4 x CPU Opteron 8350 HE Quad-core 2.0 GHz: 4 x $927
• 16 x 2GB DDR2-667 ECC Registered: 16 x $31
• GPU Gigabyte GV-N98XPZL-1GH GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB: $180
• RAID card 3ware 9550SXU-8LP: $416
• 2 x HDD WDC VelociRaptor 300GB: 2 x $230
• 6 x HDD Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB: 6 x $100
• DVD Burner Pioneer 20X SATA: $23
• Sound card ASUS Xonar DX: $90
• Liquid cooling system: ~$300
• Total: $7542 (compare to Puget's price of $16338)

Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.

• Case Cooler Master Stacker 810: $179
• PSU Corsair 1000HX 1000 Watt: $218
• Mobo Tyan S4989WG2NR: $872
• 4 x CPU Opteron 8350 HE Quad-core 2.0 GHz: 4 x $927
• 16 x 2GB DDR2-667 ECC Registered: 16 x $31
• GPU Gigabyte GV-N98XPZL-1GH GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB: $180
• RAID card 3ware 9550SXU-8LP: $416
• 2 x HDD WDC VelociRaptor 300GB: 2 x $230
• 6 x HDD Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB: 6 x $100
• DVD Burner Pioneer 20X SATA: $23
• Sound card ASUS Xonar DX: $90
• Liquid cooling system: ~$300
• Total: $7542 (compare to Puget's price of $16338)

Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.

• Case Cooler Master Stacker 810: $179
• PSU Corsair 1000HX 1000 Watt: $218
• Mobo Tyan S4989WG2NR: $872
• 4 x CPU Opteron 8350 HE Quad-core 2.0 GHz: 4 x $927
• 16 x 2GB DDR2-667 ECC Registered: 16 x $31
• GPU Gigabyte GV-N98XPZL-1GH GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB: $180
• RAID card 3ware 9550SXU-8LP: $416
• 2 x HDD WDC VelociRaptor 300GB: 2 x $230
• 6 x HDD Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB: 6 x $100
• DVD Burner Pioneer 20X SATA: $23
• Sound card ASUS Xonar DX: $90
• Liquid cooling system: ~$300
• Total: $7542 (compare to Puget's price of $16338)

Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.

• Case Cooler Master Stacker 810: $179
• PSU Corsair 1000HX 1000 Watt: $218
• Mobo Tyan S4989WG2NR: $872
• 4 x CPU Opteron 8350 HE Quad-core 2.0 GHz: 4 x $927
• 16 x 2GB DDR2-667 ECC Registered: 16 x $31
• GPU Gigabyte GV-N98XPZL-1GH GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB: $180
• RAID card 3ware 9550SXU-8LP: $416
• 2 x HDD WDC VelociRaptor 300GB: 2 x $230
• 6 x HDD Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB: 6 x $100
• DVD Burner Pioneer 20X SATA: $23
• Sound card ASUS Xonar DX: $90
• Liquid cooling system: ~$300
• Total: $7542 (compare to Puget's price of $16338)

Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.

• Case Cooler Master Stacker 810: $179
• PSU Corsair 1000HX 1000 Watt: $218
• Mobo Tyan S4989WG2NR: $872
• 4 x CPU Opteron 8350 HE Quad-core 2.0 GHz: 4 x $927
• 16 x 2GB DDR2-667 ECC Registered: 16 x $31
• GPU Gigabyte GV-N98XPZL-1GH GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB: $180
• RAID card 3ware 9550SXU-8LP: $416
• 2 x HDD WDC VelociRaptor 300GB: 2 x $230
• 6 x HDD Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB: 6 x $100
• DVD Burner Pioneer 20X SATA: $23
• Sound card ASUS Xonar DX: $90
• Liquid cooling system: ~$300
• Total: $7542 (compare to Puget's price of $16338)

Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.

1) I wouldn't say it was "obvious" that you can't run XP Home under VM. I bet if you asked people (only that even know what a VM is) maybe 80+% had no clue it wasn't within the license. *I* didn't know you couldn't legally do that until a few years ago (granted, I avoid using MS-Windows as much as humanly possible, but there was a case I had to set up some XP-under-Linux machines and had to determine which MS-Windows licenses to buy; that is how I learned).

2) You are right that I didn't click on the link, though- now I did, and it lists all MS-Windows products, it is not a pointer to just Pro or Ultimate. Plus, that $89 price is an illegal sale of a Dell OEM license. OEM licenses, branded and customized by OEM's, are NOT allowed to be sold separately nor run on other (in this case Dell) platforms. A more realistic street price for a non-locked-to-platform XP Pro OEM is $140 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116515

3) I didn't mention IEs4Linux, although I should have- I have used it in the past. Sometimes it works great, sometimes not. But it is certainly a nice option to have when you simply must use IE under Linux.

4) I only mentioned Linux, because it seemed like he knew what he was doing and could benefit from running MS-Windows 2000 under Linux instead of under another MS-Windows. It would all be free, and give him even more options to use. But he certainly could also use Virtualbox, free, under MS-Windows to run another MS-Windows.

5) You're welcome for mentioning Linux.

6) You are right, I should have ignored the Anonymous Coward. Sometimes I am a sucker.

They whine and cry on the forums, threatening to quit, when an upgrade to a compliant computer would only be ~500USD.

Plus a new $189.99 copy of OEM Windows for this computer. And how long will this $500 computer remain capable before it has to be replaced with yet another $500 computer?

Absolutely not true.

1.5 TB hard drive - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs - $54

Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.

If you want convenient access to your DVD-Rs, you'll want individual cases. These cost slightly more than the disks. Then you'll need a storage shelf and maybe some labels. Add these costs and DVDs and hards disks are roughly equal.

Absolutely not true.

1.5 TB hard drive - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs - $54

Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.

If you want convenient access to your DVD-Rs, you'll want individual cases. These cost slightly more than the disks. Then you'll need a storage shelf and maybe some labels. Add these costs and DVDs and hards disks are roughly equal.

I think there are several poor business decisions that the company made in the past 10 years or so that can explain why they failed. Starting with their venture into the DIVX fiasco (hint: if your "partner" in a business venture is a law firm, it's probably one to avoid). They probably could have recovered after they finally killed DIVX, if it wasn't for also deciding to get out of the major appliances business. Talk about pure stupidity there -- you see, most major appliances customers are older people, homeowners, with money, and while they're buying that refrigerator or dishwasher today, in six months, they'll probably be looking for a new wide screen television or laptop. Getting rid of appliances just eliminated a huge segment of the market, and lots of sales!

Mistake #3 was just simply not figuring out your basic store structure. After I left the company, every time I walked into the store, I swear to God, they had a new format and arrangement! I could never find anything! If you can't figure out something as simple as this, you're doomed. Going along with this, Firedog was simply at least three years too late in responding to the Geek Squad -- Best Buy won that one easily.

The final nail in the coffin (and I'm sure this has already been stated in this thread somewhere, but I'll put it here just for my own completeness) is firing all of their experienced salespeople and replacing them with non-commissioned, inexperienced, Wal-Mart-esque, clerks. I do understand that ultimately, they had to ditch the commissioned model, simply because of the change in the marketplace. But they went about it totally wrong -- a better solution would be to take advantage of the high turnover rate in retail as it is, and just not hire new commissioned salespeople, and grandfather the experienced ones, who can then be a huge resource to the newer salespeople in teaching them the ropes.

So, it's sad to see them go, but not surprising based on their business decisions of the past 10 years. I did learn a lot from working there back in the 90s, especially regarding computers, installations, and technology in general, so I thank them for that. In the meantime, I guess I'll get my electronics from Newegg or TigerDirect. At least until some new entrepreneur decides to open up a Buy More,... ;-)

The miniSD thing isn't that big a thing:

4GB for $8:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211343

16GB for $42 (which is only about $12 out of line with regular size SDHC)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134912

The miniSD thing isn't that big a thing:

4GB for $8:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211343

16GB for $42 (which is only about $12 out of line with regular size SDHC)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134912

Hard disk space is cheaper than DVD space.

Absolutely not true.

1.5 TB hard drive - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs - $54

Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.

Hard disk space is cheaper than DVD space.

Absolutely not true.

1.5 TB hard drive - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs - $54

Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.

1. DVI? Nearly (if not every) HD tv has one. If you don't have that then your tv should at least have s-video. Of course if somehow your computer doesn't even have s-video there are vga to svideo cables. They're like $5.
2. My grandparents don't even own only a single computer. Even if you do you could build another one for pretty cheap who's only function is to have 5TB of space and play HD videos. They sell computer cases for this exact purpose.
3. Can't really respond to this one because I'm not quite sure how your computer can't go 2h without error messages, programs crashing, the video card turning off (while playing a video) or screen savers coming on (again while playing a video).
4. Again if your internet connection goes down every 2h or so then agreed, this option isn't for you. In my experience however, when something happens that makes my DSL shit out, the cable shits out too. The times that each one of those goes out on their own due to some other problem, they dont last long and are very infrequent. They also seem to go out at about the same frequency which is almost never.
5. See point 2.
6. The remote controls your TV. It has nothing to do with which device your TV is receiving input from. If you're talking about being able to tell your computer from your couch which episode you wish to watch then that problem has been solved for a long long time. Computers have been taking wireless input for years, through mouses, keyboards, presentation clickers, TV remotes, wii controllers etc.

And for your final statement, I think the point the parent was trying to make was exactly what you said. It'll be a box and you'll buy from someplace else which you just plug your TV into. It'll be like a ps3 or xbox360 or tivo or a (newer) mac (let the foaming of the fan boy mouths begin), just a fancy box with PC parts inside. Or in other words, a PC.

This is an excellent idea, probably the best thing he can do. As a Marine in Iraq at the moment as long as he doesn't need to get full power everyday he'll certainly be able to power himself especially if he can charge up a USB battery device (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16800997042) continuously and then use that to power his IPod etc as long as they will charge from USB (a consideration for the camera).

I'm not sure where you found them for $90 but MSRP is closer to $100-$110. There's really no point in comparing anything other than MSRP or this would go on forever, trading ebay links back and forth.

His concerns are IOPS and latency. For my money, I'll take two OCZ MLC 60GB SSD's in RAID0 for $300 for a total of 120GB, just as he requires. It would provide vastly better performance for his workload. Of course, as he said, price isn't even a concern so really how about 4x64GB Intel SLC SSD in RAID10 for $3,396. I'd love to see how many spinning disks it would take to provide the same IOPS - obviously you won't ever achieve the same latency with spinning magnetic disks.

I'd also backup my work frequently like I would with any disk setup. You're much more likely to have a "human" error (accidentally deleting a file) than you will a hardware failure in either case. No RAID can save you from: $rm -rf . /

d) When their datasheet also says, "Should the host system attempt to exceed 20 GB writes per day by a large margin for an extended period, the drive will enable the endurance management feature to adjust write performance, this feature enables the device to have, at a minimum, a five year useful life"...

You make many good points, but I should point out that the quoted feature never made it into the retail product. When conducting the testing for my article, I wrote several TB per day to my X25-M and experienced no drop in write speeds - provided those writes were more sequential than random.

Constantly hitting an X25-M with small writes will net you at most an average 50% drop in sequential write speeds. The drive will eventually reach an equilibrium based on the mix of write sizes you hit it with. The M has larger flash blocks and has to track a relatively higher level of write combining, and it is possible for it to get 'stuck' at some very low write speeds (see the article for more detail). This is a unique condition that Intel is currently looking into.

Getting back to the quoted section: The write speed slow downs seen in my testing resulted only from the ratio of small/large files written and had nothing to do with the rate / volume of data written over any particular time period.

Article in question:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/13/2337258
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669

In response to the post, I would recommend either an MLC SSD with very high IOPS (Intel), one of the newer MLC SSD's with on-board SRAM cache (OCZ Vertex / 3rd gen Samsung), or for the highest overall read/write throughput, a pair of SLC SSD's in RAID-0. For SLC, the Intel drive is very good, but there are much cheaper alternatives out there (i.e. G.Skill rebranded Samsung SLC). Note that the X25-E uses write combining, and will take that same 50% worst-case sequential write hit. Other SLC units are not as fast at small writes (no combining), but their performance remains rock steady regardless of what you hit them with.

The G.Skill SLC drive I mentioned:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231186

Regards,
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PCPer.com

RAM is not cheaper than SSD why the fuck do people keep saying this? Can you not do simple math? The cheapest 2GB DDR2-800 DIMM on newegg is $17.99. Now let's forget the fact that you can only get, at most, about 8 of these things in a PC for a total of 16GB (which includes system memory). Trust me, you don't want to go to 4GB or 8GB DIMMs, it will just make you look even worse.

That would cost you: $143.92
Remaining expansion? None.

Here's a 16GB MLC Super Talent for $74.99 (HALF THE PRICE OF THE RAM):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609330
Remaining expansion? LOTS

At $3,000 for 80GB you're referring to Fusion's ioDrive. We're talking about something like an Intel X25-E SLC drive. The difference is in the host bus interface - the Fusion ioDrive uses the PCI-e bus for transfer whereas normal NAND flash-based SSD's (like the Intel) use the SATA[II] interface and are _DRAMATICALLY_ cheaper.

Here's a 32GB Intel X25-E for $419.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167013

$13.12/GB for the Intel SATA SSD
$37.50/GB for the Fusion ioDrive

Another thing: "those external enclosures generally aren't known for their performance."

That's very misleading - it depends on the interface. eSATA and SATA are exactly the same.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812120124

Yet another overpriced and underspec'ed "gaming" machine from an OEM. As always, the proc is pretty good, but *only* 4GiB of RAM and *only* a Radeon 4850, for that price? No way...

For that much cash, and also considering OEM's like to have bigger numbers on their checklists to sell better, give me an MSI K9A2 Platinum, 8GiB of RAM,

FWIW, I have that mobo (v1) and just upgraded my Phenom 9500 to the Phenom ii 940 and a Zero Therm short ninja $30 HSF. Windows Vista cpu score jumped a point and a half or so to 7.3 (yeah yeah mock the vista metric, it's simple and conveys the relative metric for those who don't care about their bogoMIPS rating :)

Running it with the Radeon 3870, 8GB ram, 2x250GB raid, 1x30gb SSD, and 2x1TB hard drives it cruises along sipping a mere 140watts, peaking at about 210watts on bootup.

Very, very nice system and a much cheaper upgrade than my intel quad will eventually be.

Yet another overpriced and underspec'ed "gaming" machine from an OEM. As always, the proc is pretty good, but *only* 4GiB of RAM and *only* a Radeon 4850, for that price? No way...

For that much cash, and also considering OEM's like to have bigger numbers on their checklists to sell better, give me an MSI K9A2 Platinum, 8GiB of RAM, and the x2 variant of the graphics card, in quad-sli, leaving 2 PCI-Xpress slots open for more later (it is marketed as "enthusiast/gamer")

That's not to say 4GiB of RAM isn't already a metric ton, but for that price...

And, if I want eSATA I have to get an ExpressCard which isn't so bad EXCEPT the only model that works well, from the research I have done, runs around $90. That's a bit pricy.

I use this $28 card in my Rev B MBP. No driver installation required, and I haven't had any problems so far.

I know what a pro workstation is. You're only showing your ignorance when you lionize the Dell and HP workstations. And to say that newegg components are cheap is just plain wrong.

For example, a dual-socket intel Skulltrail mobo is $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121330

This asus mobo is also $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131287

There are 15k hard drives faster than anything you'll find in the apple store:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822332012

You can also get the nVidia quadro 5800 at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133253

Any workstation you buy from Dell or HP you can match with parts bought from newegg. At the moment, only Apple is offering the dual nehalem xeons, but that won't last long. In the meantime, you can't get the quadro 5800 from apple and you can't get any 15k drives.

I know what a pro workstation is. You're only showing your ignorance when you lionize the Dell and HP workstations. And to say that newegg components are cheap is just plain wrong.

For example, a dual-socket intel Skulltrail mobo is $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121330

This asus mobo is also $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131287

There are 15k hard drives faster than anything you'll find in the apple store:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822332012

You can also get the nVidia quadro 5800 at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133253

Any workstation you buy from Dell or HP you can match with parts bought from newegg. At the moment, only Apple is offering the dual nehalem xeons, but that won't last long. In the meantime, you can't get the quadro 5800 from apple and you can't get any 15k drives.

I know what a pro workstation is. You're only showing your ignorance when you lionize the Dell and HP workstations. And to say that newegg components are cheap is just plain wrong.

For example, a dual-socket intel Skulltrail mobo is $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121330

This asus mobo is also $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131287

There are 15k hard drives faster than anything you'll find in the apple store:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822332012

You can also get the nVidia quadro 5800 at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133253

Any workstation you buy from Dell or HP you can match with parts bought from newegg. At the moment, only Apple is offering the dual nehalem xeons, but that won't last long. In the meantime, you can't get the quadro 5800 from apple and you can't get any 15k drives.

I know what a pro workstation is. You're only showing your ignorance when you lionize the Dell and HP workstations. And to say that newegg components are cheap is just plain wrong.

For example, a dual-socket intel Skulltrail mobo is $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121330

This asus mobo is also $600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131287

There are 15k hard drives faster than anything you'll find in the apple store:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822332012

You can also get the nVidia quadro 5800 at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133253

Any workstation you buy from Dell or HP you can match with parts bought from newegg. At the moment, only Apple is offering the dual nehalem xeons, but that won't last long. In the meantime, you can't get the quadro 5800 from apple and you can't get any 15k drives.

You have indeed found another flaw found in my comparison. It would be great for the Mac Pro's value if that DDR3 RAM would make up the $1300 difference. Unfortunately it can be had for well under $450/GB. Basically it will come out to costing, at most, exactly the same as I originally quoted. Or less. Coupled with the savings on the CPU, the "Ferrari" you referred to is looking more and more like a new chassis dropped on the same old Ford Focus. But that Ferrari logo sure is sweet.

Grandparent has it totally wrong about the prices, at least on the mini. There was no increase in price, but this is slashdot and everybody loves to hate Apple. The new ones are $599 and $799, which are exactly the same as the old one, if you don't believe the newegg, look at the wikipedia page on them it has all the prices and specs for the old models. Also, as you can see here, Newegg has one of the old models for sale still. They price it at $594, according to wikipedia it's the lower priced model with a smaller hard drive.

The big differences I see is a larger hard drive (120 GB vs. 80GB on the basic), Firewire 800 on the new one vs. 400 on the old one (!!! Looks like firewire ain't dead yet!), display port video out + mini-DVI vs. just mini-DVI, a bump in the processor up to 2 GHz from 1.83 GHz, DDR3 memory vs. DDR2 in the old one (which is nice), and finally the new one has NVIDIA 9400M vs. Intel GMA 950. Oh, and the front side bus is 1066 MHz now vs. 667 MHz previously.

Overall it looks like a nice upgrade on the system.

That is a ripoff. For $4 more you can get one with 4 times the capacity.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240522%201309421176&bop=And&Order=PRICE

Somehow I feel like you aren't telling us all the specs for an equal comparison.

Newegg, Quad-Core 3.2 GHz processors I get two listed, one for $1000, one for $1550.
(Desktop Processor - Filters on were Quad-Core, and every processor speed greater and equal to 3.2 GHz ) (If I turn on all the speeds from 2.5 up I get prices from $150-$1550)

Somehow I doubt you spent only $2000 for a 3.2 GHz machine. Unless you might be running a single or dual core, lower graphics, etc?
(Article is for a Quad-core (core 2 extreme) 2.53 GHz CPU, GFX: Quadro FX 3700 (which linked Evaluation says is the basis of the GF 9800 cards) )

You don't have openfirmware for this* router.

*Clue: This is a house brand.

And what does the $100 comment have anything to do with what the GP said?

Microsoft Windows XP, I think. $100 is about right for the street price of XP Home if you look hard enough.

Mother board is $80
Processor is $50
4GB of ram is $50

Small cases aren't cheap. But the builder in me would rather build something out of a nice hardwood or plexi-glass. (Depending on the decor of the house).

I can't wait until XBMC supports full hardware decoding and HDMI Audio out.

Mother board is $80
Processor is $50
4GB of ram is $50

Small cases aren't cheap. But the builder in me would rather build something out of a nice hardwood or plexi-glass. (Depending on the decor of the house).

I can't wait until XBMC supports full hardware decoding and HDMI Audio out.

This item is nice:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811998021

It is a tray, but it also has a little button on the front that lets me turn the disk on or off (before the machines boots obviously). Two of these would probably do exactly what you want to do, assuming you only had one on at a time.

I'd like to get something to replace my antique Dual Pentium II 450 FreeBSD 4 server.....something around $100 that draws less power, but could do RAID mirroring and could run MYSQL, PHP5 and Apache 2

Something like...this then?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813153045

If you mean go build my own PC with Windows XP, that hasn't been possible for months.

Uh what? You gotta be kidding, right?

Microsoft is the exclusive lawful supplier of Windows XP Home Edition licenses in the United States, and it declines to supply new copies of Windows XP to people who build their own PCs.

You might want to check Newegg then.
You can buy as many lawful copies of Windows XP Home Edition for you to install on your own system for $90/each.

Thanks for playing.

I'm currently on a hold for funding reasons, but I've intentionally sought out a motherboard with Intel integrated graphics based on a review that suggests it would be suitable, and possibly the best low-budget option, for watching HDTV under MythTV.

I have a pair of trendnet TPL-202E's, and they run flawless. Never wavering connections, or anything. I've hit above 1MB/s in transfers on comcast which is pretty decent.

No matter what is added, they run constant. In addition I tested the maximum throughput (since I run them on an extension cable) with a heater on the other side of the extension cable and it didn't affect speed at all. I have not bothered with the encryption but I could, I guess.

For me for gaming it is dead on perfect, no problems of packetloss. Keeps up with games.

they may well replace the machine when it fails but what about the downtime,

I doubt people who need the five nine's are going to be renting servers. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc...they probably don't rent servers.

But there's a market for people like me who can't go out and spend $1,000 on a server, and shipping, followed by colo prices. But I can afford $60/mo for a box, remote hands when it's occasionally needed, and someone to fix any hardware problems.

I'm also not doing enterprise hosting. I mainly host small websites for family and friends. There are a few 'business' sites on there, but they usually get under 1,000 hits per months, so their main concern isn't paying for their own server with five nines, but rather some very cheap hosting.

and what about your data if the drives fail?

Every 5 days, my server at my house does a full backup (BackupPC), followed by a incremental backups daily. I store full backups for 3 months, and incrementals for 30 days.

If the hardware ever dies, my hosting provider simply has to get Ubuntu reinstalled and get ssh up and running. Then I'll connect in and dpkg --set-selections followed by restoring the backup.

Consider that $60/month (is that all on hardware, or is it the full price of the service?)... in 12 months you have paid $720, a pretty decent server could be had for that.

The $60/mo is for the hardware, bandwidth, occasional remote-hands, ssh-based serial console, and the cell phone number for the guy who runs the place. But you do make a good point--I should call him and find out how my rates would be affected by putting my own colo server in there--it's tax time, and I'm looking at a refund that could buy a nice 1U.

Will the colo provider upgrade your hardware in the future, or will you be stuck with the original machine? For a rental, i would expect to receive an upgrade to the current model every few years...

They can't just come in and upgrade your machine--but I can start renting another server for $60/mo which today will give me a slightly faster and newer machine. Then I can transfer all my sites to the new machine and stop paying for the old one. Upgrade.

I would prefer to buy a decent quality server and host that, that way i know what i'm getting, and a decent server will have remote console capability and thermal monitoring etc too.

Agreed--but I'm not a big-time hosting provider.
Personally, I'd love to have a few of these servers at my disposal. One for mail, one for mysql, one for websites, and one just to sit there rack up uptime.

Not quite correct. FTA:"...when Dell was accused of gouging customers by charging $150 to downgrade a new computer to XP. Dell countered that although it did charge $20 to install XP on the machine, as well as to cover the cost of the additional media, the bulk -- $120 of the $150 -- was the price of upgrading the PC from the standard Home Premium to the more expensive Business edition . . . Well, if you want XP you're SOL, that'll be $120 to 'upgrade' the Vista you want to 'downgrade'.

The cheapest OEM version of XP only cost 109.99 for us mere mortals (you know Dell gets it cheaper)and the difference between that and Home Vista Premium is only 16 bucks. So I don't think Dell is really telling the truth here.

Not quite correct. FTA:"...when Dell was accused of gouging customers by charging $150 to downgrade a new computer to XP. Dell countered that although it did charge $20 to install XP on the machine, as well as to cover the cost of the additional media, the bulk -- $120 of the $150 -- was the price of upgrading the PC from the standard Home Premium to the more expensive Business edition . . . Well, if you want XP you're SOL, that'll be $120 to 'upgrade' the Vista you want to 'downgrade'.

The cheapest OEM version of XP only cost 109.99 for us mere mortals (you know Dell gets it cheaper)and the difference between that and Home Vista Premium is only 16 bucks. So I don't think Dell is really telling the truth here.

Not knowing what D-VHS unit your using I couldn't tell ya, at the end of the day it really depends on the cable box and the D-VHS unit. Say combine this, this and for $3 probably one of these you then end up with a story like this (Which was in August 2005, Knoppmyth has since matured significantly!)

And if you want a bastardised 4 pin cable, then here is your answer. And if your D-VHS unit or Cable box doesn't support what you want to do, then I'd hazard a guess that the cable is probably the least of your worries ;)

Not knowing what D-VHS unit your using I couldn't tell ya, at the end of the day it really depends on the cable box and the D-VHS unit. Say combine this, this and for $3 probably one of these you then end up with a story like this (Which was in August 2005, Knoppmyth has since matured significantly!)

And if you want a bastardised 4 pin cable, then here is your answer. And if your D-VHS unit or Cable box doesn't support what you want to do, then I'd hazard a guess that the cable is probably the least of your worries ;)

Dude, those ARE the FB-DIMM prices. FB-DIMM long ago stopped being more than a few dollars off from the normal DDR2 option.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134688
Kingston 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 800 - $33.49 each, $66.98 total; GP quoted $67.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134862
Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 800 - $156.99 each, $627.96 total; GP quoted $604.

FB-DIMM memory does not invalidate his argument in any way.

Dude, those ARE the FB-DIMM prices. FB-DIMM long ago stopped being more than a few dollars off from the normal DDR2 option.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134688
Kingston 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 800 - $33.49 each, $66.98 total; GP quoted $67.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134862
Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 800 - $156.99 each, $627.96 total; GP quoted $604.

FB-DIMM memory does not invalidate his argument in any way.

Here ya go...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148239