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The Ultimate Linux Box 2001
savaget points to this Linux Journal article which covers building a superior personal computer for general usage. See if you agree with the choices that Rick Moen, Daryll Strauss and Eric Raymond made in building their dream box.
i got a va linux box... real cheap.
you can pick up some bargains thanks to the current recession.
kinda sad, actually...
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
has a budget box building guide. You should check out their general buyer's guide as well.
--
I totally understand the case for SCSI hard disks since they are faster and more reliable but SCSI optical drives? In the article they mention the plextor 12x SCSI burner but wouldn't the new plextor 24x be way faster even if it is ATAPI? and its pretty easy to find 16x DVD-ROM drives out there as well. From a pure purformance perspective wouldn't i be better off with optical drives on IDE (one drive per channel of course) and SCSI hard disks?
But most of it seems to be dead on. The thing I really disagree with is the statement that "SCSI CD-ROMs are a generic item" - A crappy CDROM is a crappy CDROM no matter what interface it uses. At this point, the only brand of CDROM I'm even willing to buy any more is plextor; Even my 40X Toshiba Ultra-SCSI sucks horribly. There are tons of discs it won't read (or will require retries on) that seem to work everywhere else. I find myself using my plextor cd burner as a cdrom all the time in spite of the fact that I have a cdrom specifically to prevent adding up unnecessary runtime hours on it.
My next CDROM will be plextor's highest-speed CDROM drive. They extract CDDA faster than anyone else's drives, read more media, and are just plain faster. My second choice is still toshiba, but I'm less enamored of them than I once was. As a side note, both toshiba and plextor's drives can be jumpered to use 512-byte blocks for use on legacy unix workstations, which can be a nice feature. While I don't actually have any of those systems any more, if someone offers me a Sparcstation 10 (or better) for cheap enough, I'll probably buy it, and I'll want a fast CDROM.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This reminds of ESR's old PC Clone Buyer's Guide. A lot has changed since '93, or whenever he last updated that. He's still stressing I/O performance, which says something about how little has really changed.
g ui de/contents.html
The old guide is at
http://www.double-barrel.be/linux_web/clone_hw_
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
It's not linux specific, but I always find the ars technica buyers guides useful to help keep up to date on high/middle/low end hardware. Perhaps the budget box doesn't go ultra-cheap, but it goes cheap without sacrificing too much quality.
God Box
Hot Rod
Budget box
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
First off, you need SCSI because that high speed ATA controller/drive you're thinking you need instead is thrashing your CPU and sucking cycles away from things that are more important, like decoding MP3s or making that game that you're playing run better.
Next, SCSI is far from expensive nowadays. Controllers can be purchased for about the same as a standalone ATA controller ($50-$100 will get a very respectable Tekram or AdvanSYS Ultra controller), and you can get multi-gig drives for less than $200. Sure, you can get an 80GB IBM drive for $300, but why? An 18GB SCSI drive would be more than sufficient unless you're decoding DVDs, mixing video, saving every friggin' email you receive, etc. I'm guessing for less than $300 you can get a very respectable SCSI drive/controller combo and in the process claim that CPU back from the s***ty ATA controller that's killing its cycles.
Eww! i845 SDRAM chipset (20-25% performence hit compared to the i850 RDRAM chipset that's clock-to-clock way slower than the Athlon to begin with), slow and small hard drive (why bother with anything less than 7200RPM?), video card that's two generations out of date. You could build an Athlon XP box with DDR SDRAM and KT266A chipset that would destroy the Dell econo-box for less money. FedEx delivers mine Monday.
I'm not sure I agree with the eventual decision to go with PC Power & Cooling--they are occasionally ridiculously overpriced and some of their "quiet" is really just achieved by underpowering the fans--some of the Antec PSs will perform just as well. Also, anyone know if PCPC's power supplies are like their cases (i.e. just CalPC cases relabeled and marked up)?
Also, I've heard arguments that a large case is not necessarily a boon for good case cooling w/ low noise: large cases require more fans to move the air effectively within--it's not the fact that there's lots of space in a case that makes for cooling, it's moving the air over and away from the components. Seems like having a mid-tower (given the low-moderate drive bay requirements) with a low-rpm 120mm intake and outake fans might have been better.
1) Don't put case fans on the motherboard power connectors unless you have to. Keeping mb voltage levels stable is hard enough without two extra 80mm fans adding stress. CPU fans should be connected to the mb so the fan RPM can be monitored (dead CPU fan == bad news).
:-)
2) We've had IBM Ultrastar SCSI drives break down within weaks on our server at work (emphasis on drives, plural). Granted, this is under a severely punishing workload, but Seagates have been more reliable. Under saner workloads the IBM drives are probably fine.
3) SB Live! series cards are bad news on Athlon systems (as ESR found out), especially if you have other heavy DMA I/O tasks on the PCI bus. They've fixed this with the Audigy, but it doesn't have Linux support yet (AFAIK?). The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is supported; that's what I replaced my Live! X-Gamer with. Now my AccessDTV HDTV PCI card doesn't cause BSODs (Win2000 SP2). Recommended.
4) Modem? Got cable modem. Don't need no steenkin' POTS modem
5) Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. Scratch off the name if you must, but they're GREAT!
6) Word is that the Tyan Thunder motherboard likes Corsair memory best. Dunno why, the board's just picky.
7) An ultimate system should have Sony's 24" widescreen FD Trinitron. Wish I had $2K to spare to buy one. 1080i HDTV would look great on it.
8) Get a tube of Arctic Silver II thermal compound for the CPU heatsinks. Yes, it matters.
For a cheaper config: substitute a Tyan Tiger MP motherboard, PCP&C 400W Silencer (no need for an oddball power connector), IDE drives, and an Ethernet card (Intel or Linksys, I have one of each in my Linux server). Note that faster Athlon MPs are supposed to be announced next week (Tuesday?).
For a way cheaper config: as above, but with a VIA KT266A uniprocessor motherboard (I have a Shuttle mb inbound; newegg.com was out of the Epox 8KHA+ boards that were my first choice) and Athlon XP CPU.
I'm a PCP&C fan too. Antec's no slouch either, but my Silencer 400W keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails hooked up to my 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird within 1% of perfect, which is pretty impressive. Dead-on commentary on the P4. It pained me to spec a P4 for a new engineer because Dell refuses to sell Athlons and stopped selling P3 desktops.
for about $25 (really), you can get a cmedia 8738 chipset that outputs REAL literal 44.1k spdif, suitable for piping into an outboard DAC (digital to analog converter).
go to ebay and pick up a used audio alchemy DAC ($100 or so) and the 8738 card and you'll be 99% of what a pro audio card setup should be.
and never, never choose 'soundblaster' for audio quality.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Most IDE controllers are rather dumb where SCSI controllers are a bit smarter (at the controller level) and thus provide you with a bit better performance in real world applications. Raw throughput doesn't mean shit in some cases like hardcore DB applications because performance deals mainly with block seek time. The card he pointed out is a very smart IDE controller and allows normally dumb IDE RAID set ups to be as good as SCSi ones performance wise.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Do a Google search on google cluster ide. The third result is an Intel customer profile on Google:
I like two IDE drives (one per channel), plus SCSI for the CD-RW and/or DVD.
I recently built a machine for less than $700 consisting of the following:
MoBo: ABIT KT7A-RAID
PROC: 1200MHz Athlon
MEMORY: 1GB (high density, cheapo stuff)
STORAGE: 2 IBM 60GXP 20GB IDE drives in RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration.
GRAPHICS: ATI XPERT 2000 (32 MB)
CASE: Antec Premium line case w/ 300W PS.
ETC: Sony floppy drive and Creative CDROM drive.
NETWORK: 3Com 3C905 10/100 card.
I know this machine isn't as fast as the ULB, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper, and I would rather have 5 of the above machine ($700 * 5 = $3500, only $100 cheaper than the ULB w/o the "extras") than one ULB. I might even decide to make a Beowulf cluster out of them.
As I've heard other Slashdotters mention many times before, it's not the performance of your hardware, but the performance of your hardware per dollar that matters.
P.S. I would like to know what Tom (from Tom's Hardware Guide) would consider the Ultimate Linux box.
Amazing magic tricks
The price of this computer is simply
frightening. It is simply ridiculous to pay
that much for a desktop.
Besides, most things in the worl (computers fall
under the umbrella) are priced on a logarithmic scale, meaning after a point drastically increased price gives mediocre return, and vice versa going behind a certain earlier point. I always like to build a machine that has it's cost efficiency at a maximum, sitting at a very healthy point in the curve. Buying a Geforce3 card, for instance is ludicrous. Geforce2 MX 400 (Abit siluro for instance) with 64 megs ram is 69 bucks. excuse me? That is cheap as dirt.
IT's always very satisfying, also, to get a
slightly cheaper machine like this and it performs
within 10% of a machine 5x as expensive.
-mateusz-
I'm going to go practice my violin more now
Having 2 screens, if you've never worked that way, is wonderful. One screen for preview, one for tools has saved much wear and tear on my fingers switching consoles, windows, and desktops. Plus two good 19" screens are about the same price as a 22": $1,000. Lots of money, yes, but the screen is one part that you can't incrementally upgrade. Plus you can always buy one now and save up for the next
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Basically, the Escalade cards make a bunch of cheap IDE drives look like a big SCSI drive. What could be better? You get the intelligence of SCSI, the protection of a RAID, at the price of IDE. With just a few IDE drives, you get scalding performance that more the beats the most expensive SCSI drives.
Sadly, 3ware has decided to get out of the controller card business. I've bought a couple of cards that I'm going to keep until I need to build some more file servers; they say that they are going to keep selling the cards until December, but only until then.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
While the statement has some truth, it uses a bad rationale.
How long, during "typical job"s, do you wait for a modern PC usually? 500ms? At most 2s, right?
But |top| typically gives you one value every 5s or so, and only averages. If |top| would show you the peak of CPU usage during the last interval, you would see that during the times you wait for the PC, the CPU almost always has a load of 100% at some point.
Which means that part of the time, you indeed wait for the CPU during typical usage. (Often, that's only milliseconds, but with Mozilla, it can be 1s
If you are interested, I suggest, you use a CPU-load graph tool in your GNOME/KDE/WindowMaker panel, set the interval really low (like 10ms) and make the "contrast" high (black background and bright foreground). This will show you almost every CPU peak and thus show you, when you are really waiting for the CPU (even if it's just ms).
If you say, milliseconds don't matter, then you don't need a top-notch PC for "typical job[...]s under Linux"
There is at least one blatant error(or lie) in the article.. the Silverado HSF was rated at 38 dbA for noise and was tied for THIRD at 37 degrees celisus when cooling, not first as ESR says!!
Having used SCSI at home for the last year, I really appreciate the "SCSI difference". Not only have I seen better benchmarks (kernel compile times, etc), but it *feels* snappier in general. Here are some interseting things I've seen:
1) For random access to a cdrom, SCSI kicks IDE's but (on my system). When ripping a CD, espcially with overlapping sector reads, my 24x scsi cdrw kicks my 52x IDE cdrom's butt.
2) I get better performance from my IDE cdrom when using linux's SCSI emulation. That was quite a surprise.
3) SCSI drives typically have 5 year warranties, whereas IDE drives typically have 3 year warranties.
4) My IBM Ultrastar (SCSI hard drive) is much quieter and cooler than my IDE Maxtors and IDE IBM Deskstar. However, new IDE drives may have caught up.
5) You have to be really careful with IDE drives in order to get good performance. For instance, I've seen an IDE drive unable to sustain more than 2MB/sec when attached to the middle of an IDE cable, but sustain 6MB/sec when attached at the end (these speeds are for writes, not reads). With SCSI, once it works (which can be a pain if you skimp on cabling and termination), it goes *fast* and is *robust*.
6) Processor overhead: transfering data between my SCSI devices requires far less cpu help than transfering data between my IDE devices (I believe I have all the right DMA stuff configured for my IDE devices -- it helps, but doesn't make things as nice as with SCSI). The implication is that writing CDs on a SCSI system is more robust than on an IDE system. I've never had a buffer underflow, even when writing CDs while the system had a sustained load over 2.0.
And once you use SCSI, you can be a SCSI snob! You almost have to in order to justify the price for a home machine (unless you work at home like I do). SCSI really is the right way to do things. However, SCSI is doing its best to kill itself off. In that way, SCSI verus IDE is a lot like OS/2 versus Windows.
-Paul Komarek
Based on debian ofcoz, and has 2.4 kernel, LIDS with reiserfs. And dont forget about TripWire, now that its opensource.
Enlightenment and Ximian. Sylpheed as a mail client and Xchat.
http://securityportal.com.ar
Except that everytime you buy a DVD drive the DVD copyright authority gets a kickback. How does that fulfill any moral obligations? I guess their kids have to eat too but I bet they aren't starving :)
I do some video editing and thus been using only SCSI systems (even for home systems). I never realized the superiority of SCSI until one time a colleague of mine brought over an IDE based machine one day.
My workstation (800Mhz P3, dual-channel ultra 160) was preparing for render, pulling bits and pieces of files (1gig+ each) over our 12 file server LAN and mixing it with stuff on my two local SCSI drives. At the same time, I was surfing the web, listening to MP3 and preparing some word document.
My colleague's computer (1.8Ghz P4, IDE) came to a virtual halt as he was copying over a movie job from one of the file servers. His mouse was so jerky that he could barely double-click his word icon. It took forever to open and when it was finally about to display the blank page, the computer crashed.
I tried several tests and, while it performed admirably for non disk-intensive stuff, it would slowly degrade when disk i/o became involved, and sustaining it even at moderate levels would potentially crash the system. Also, pushing it even a little beyond moderate levels (something which would barely make my system sweat) may crash the system.
Then, my boss decided to skimp on his budget and get a couple of IDE based Dell workstations. They lasted less than two hours before he was forced to return them. They simply couldn't keep up with the disk intensive stuff we did here.
From this, I vowed never to get IDE systems. What good is a fast CPU when its speed and the general stability of the system is dictated by the lowly disk subsystem?
Most of you are probably not doing things as disk intensive as I am, but at my level of disk usage, the distinction between IDE and SCSI is huge. Unless you think that your reliance on your hard drive will always be minimal, go with SCSI. Skimp on CPU, sound card and what not, but go with IDE and you could be buying into a costly mistake and your biggest bottleneck.
It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.
Check these examples out:-
- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."
This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.
- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"
Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.
For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.
Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.
As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.
- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.
- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.
- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.
- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.
Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case
If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.
For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29
For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.
Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.
That's enough raving for now.
my xf86config file
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
From the bottom of the article:
"Eric S. Raymond is a wandering anthropologist and troublemaking philosopher who happened to be in the right place at the right time and has been wondering whether he should regret it ever since."
Those of us who remember when he stole the Jargon File from the community and sold it as his own think, "Why yes. Yes he should."
--Blair
The problem with external ISA bus (as opposed to ISA devices built in the southbridge) is that the southbridge knows which I/O ports are mapped on it, and can respond to a PCI transactions to this port immediately. OTOH, when there is an external ISA bus, the southbridge has to propagate any I/O transaction to the ports unhandled by PCI devices to the ISA bus, which causes a delay in the whole system. So it definitely does matter when you have a system without ISA slot.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
Rotational latency IS a very important aspect of average access time for a given sector. Here's a quick rundown of how long one full platter rotation takes at various common drive RPMs:
Seeking from one sector to another requires both moving the head and acquiring the sector once you arrive at the track. Hopefully, the drive is laid out so that most common operations (linear reads that hop track-to-track) don't have to pay the rotational latency. Also, if you do a large linear read request to the drive (something I seem to recall SCSI supports better than IDE), the drive can be smart and read the whole track starting wherever the head lands -- thus hiding the rotational latency in certain cases. But for random seeks reading single blocks, there's not much you can do.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!