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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.
My budget doesn't allow ultimate boxen... I'd be more interesting in seeing information on ultra-cheap (but still decent and reliable) systems. An older guide exists, but it hasn't been updated in a long time.
I realize the SCSI disks, especially the close to "SCSI 3" mentioned in the article, would decrease disk latency, but is it really that much different than 7200 or even 10000 rpm ATA100/ATA133 drives? An unless you have onboard SCSI, you have to go through the already busy PCI bus. As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth the price difference.
Okay, Raymond isn't a millionaire any more, either. But he does have corporate backing, which is a hell of a lot more than I've got. When I feel like dropping 15 large on a personal computer, I think I'll go for an OS a bit more upscale than Linux. Solaris, maybe.
Anyway, "dream" is the key word in the title of the article. No real Linux users (mostly college students, AFAIK) can afford a PC like ESR has designed. And I'm not sure what they'll accomplish by "dreaming" about the "ultimate" Linux box when the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
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?
Am I missing something?
I know RAID is overkill for most workstations, but so is a DDS drive and seperate home and system drives. If you want fault tolerance, (the stated reason for two drives) having one system drive and one home drive with no RAID means you spend your money only to become twice as vulnerable to downtime due to drive failures.
If you want to avoid downtime, especially if money is no object, get a RAID controller and have a single filesystem mirrored over two physical disks. Not only will it be more reliable, it will be faster too.
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.
At 50MB/s, Firewire is slower than either ATA or SCSI. Linux supports Firewire, but I wouldn't bet my data on it yet. (Not to mention that x86 BIOSes can't boot over Firewire.)
I type around 90 WPM if I'm on the Model E. Anything Else, I'm lucky to get 50. The other's just don't give you the necessary feedback when the key is down for your brain to realize it is ok to push the next key.
Also important is the fact that some of the really really cheap newer keyboards have problems where the keys all don't trigger at the same point in their downward stroke. Since I type fast enough that I actually (subconciously, mind you) "overlap" my keystrokes - that is one key is actually going down milliseconds behind the next one - I have seen some really bad keyboards this way that will actually reorder my keystrokes because even though I pushed key B after key A, key B shows up first. Needless to say, this causes some inaccuracies.
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.
"Today's flatscreens also have a really coarse dot pitch with sharp square pixels. As far as I'm concerned, that puts them out of the running for the ULB. I do a lot of writing and, not infrequently, my own typesetting; I want to be able to preview two pages of Postscript at actual size and have the fonts look good."
I'm sorry, but has this guy ever seen a high-end flat panel? I personally own an SGI 1600SW, and not only do you not see the pixels, but you can also preview two Postscript pages side-by-side with its 1600x1024 widescreen aspect ratio. Of course, SGI stopped selling it (*sigh*). But there are other excellent flat panels out there, like the Samsung line that lets you run a TV signal in and do picture-in-picture. I've seen the Samsung ones up close, and they have wonderful image quality. Apple also makes some excellent flat panels (does anyone know whether there is an adapter to run them on PCs yet?)
All I'm saying, is while there are still plenty of reasons to run CRT's, in a "cost-is-no-object" type of article, you should at least consider the high-end flat panels.
P.S. I've seen the dual 1600SW setup, and it is STILL, to this day, the only monitor setup that ever made me speechless with its absolute beauty.
The Thunder K7 motherboard has two 10/000 NICs built in. Gigabit seems cool, but I don't have a NAS at home.
Well designed controllers like the escalades provide out of order execution, scatter gather, etc at the controller level, and offer a fully switched bus for all data. The 7000 series also have 64bit PCI support (and actually utilize it).
Forget the HPT36x and 37x controllers, as well as most Promise controllers, all the smarts is in the driver software and they suck performance-wise. High-end Adapted controller appear to be ok, but they are pricey compared to the 3ware controllers last time I looked.
One controller with one or two drives may be faster with SCSI, but dollar for dollar, 3ware and IDE walk all over them (particularly with database servers where you want a few spindles to minimize blocking seek activity.
What's interesting is that there are two very different schools of thought on this. I have friends who absolutely love the Model M's and wouldn't dream of typing on anything else. I have other friends who prefer more silent keyboards. (The Model M does tend to keep SO's awake when you're typing late at night, but those of us who use it understand that we have to make certain sacrifices to use the keyboard of the gods. ;)
I see a mention of a 56K modem, but no mention of an ethernet card. Perhaps ESR didn't have enough money to get the "ultimate network connection" to go with his "ultimate Linux box"?
my PC is never idle!
<grub> Reading
> the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
Maybe that's YOUR whole point in using Linux, but it sure as hell ain't mine! If that's the way you feel, you'd be better off getting some nice DOS 3.11 disks somewhere.
I'd rather build a nice, fast 3Ware Escalade RAID array with 4 or so fast, big, and cheap IDE drives... and still save the CPU cycles.
The double-banked SDRAM has a lower latency and otherwise the same speed as DDR. Plus, the S2688 would take twice as much RAM - 6GB instead of 3GB.
Plus, the SDRAM is a lot cheaper...
but good luck finding any.
I can imagine this article causing more religious arguments than almost anything else recently
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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."
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.
Maybe 4 months ago, but if you check out crucial.com now they both run about the same price.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Naturally. I mean, he does have a mustache, you know.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
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
Anyone think the X-Box will make a good, cheap Linux box?
Sure.
PIN number = Personal Identification Number number
ATM machine = Automatic Teller Machine machine.
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
I just followed your link and found the FAQ for the Apple flat panel monitors. According to the FAQ, the monitors can only run with a Power Mac G4 or G4 Cube.
It is incredibly disappointing to see a company come up with great technology and then not devise some sort of adapter for the majority of computers (PCs and older Macintoshes.) I am honestly surprised that Apple wouldn't sell some sort of Apple --> DVI/USB adapter. Guess I'll have to stick with the PC digital monitors. What a shame. :\
I'd hate to see your electricity bills!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If you really want "cheap", grab a Coppermine barebones complete with memory, floppy and a CD-ROM for about $200- (see cpusolutions.com, for example). Then migrate any usable spare parts (eg network cards, modems, soundcards etc) to the chassis. Add another $100- for a decent hard drive, and you've got a $300- computer. For $200 extra, you could use an Athlon barebones as a base, and you'd have a $500- computer. (no "after-rebate" smoke and mirrors here either)
Um, I don't think so; Escalade's card uses one channel per drive.
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."
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"
I don't understand how one can call any box without hardware RAID an Ultimate Linux Box. Yes, it costs money (which is why I've decided on IDE RAID for new systems unless I miraculously get about 20k USD for storage subsystem), but it's better.
Never go for a non-redundant disk subsystem. Disks crash. Go bad. Die.
Also, I need some space to live with. About 200 gigs minimum for my next setup.
So, for ULB it would be a dual channel U160 RAID controller (64bit PCI bus, please), 14 36GB 10k rpm hotswap disks configured as 6 disk RAID5 with hotspare on each channel and mirror over channels, yielding 180GB. Takes one SCSI tower case. Performance and redundancy. And even for the ULB going for 14 72GB disks would be pretty expensive.
Also, to get the best out of CD-ROM/R/RW get Plextor UltraPlex 40 and PlexWriter. Absolutely forget all other CD-ROM/R/RW manufacturers.
Then for DVD get the Pioneer and a DVD-R(G), DVD-RW drive. Note that You still need the Plextors to get the best CD-ROM/R/RW drives available.
Hook all four into an external case, and put the DDS-4 drive there, too.
Now, put the computer case and the drive case away from Your table, take the removable media case onto Your table and be done with it.
I can't afford that setup. So, I'm going for IDE drives and 3ware Escalade IDE RAID controller. Cheaper, and gives me about 240 gigs with seven 80GB drives.
I just picked up 4 Model M's for 25 cents a piece at Boeing Surplus.
I expected more from the big wigs.
/pixel) = 1718 pixels wide
The "resolution" of a CRT is given by (veiw size)/(dot pitch). Any more pixels than that is literally wasted because the screen can't resolve one from another. The Mitsubishi 21" CRT he suggests has a view area of 20.3 inches and a dot pitch of 0.24 mm which works out to
20.3 in * 4width/5diag *25.4 mm/in / (0.24 mm
And he suggests running this at 2048 pixels wide? Sure memory is cheap, but bus bandwidth is teeny on PCs. Display what your monitor will do and no more. Also if back off the resolution a bit you could bump it up to 85Hz.
On an LCD a pixel is a pixel, and they're sooooo crisp compared to a CRT. They say the pixels are blocky, the rest of us call that clarity. Awesome clarity compared to a CRT.
I hate crap like this because these guys are supposed to be authorities, but they're spoiled brats whose hardware visions are 5 years out of date. Sure I'd like to use SCSI for everything, but get real. Looked at HD prices lately?
And apparently these guys haven't used a Contour keyboard (don't have a link off hand). I've put my hands on one, and you meld wih these babys, no stretching for keys or shifting your hands around, it's just BAM!
Crucial.com memory compatable with the Tyan Thunder K7:
256 MB, DDR PC2100 CL=2.5 Registered ECC 2.5V 32Meg x 72) - $40.49
Crucial.com memory compatable with the Serverworks II HE chipset:
128 MB, SDRAM, PC133 CL=2 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 16Meg x 72 $26.99
256MB SDRAM, PC133 CL=2 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 32Meg x 72 $40.49
512MB SDRAM, PC133 CL=3 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 64Meg x 72 #74.69
1024MB SDRAM, PC133 CL=3 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 128Meg x 72 $200.69
So, if you go with all four sockets you have a maximum of 1Gig with the K7.
Okay, Crucial.com is promoting DDR by matching SDRAM's prices - but don't even produce any but 256MB modules.
Other manufacturers supply compatable 1GB DIMMS, but as Tyan's site points out:
Some modules on the list above contain stacked DRAM parts (36 chips per module). These parts have thermal limitations in some chassis configurations. It is advised to verify that your chassis configuration as adequate airflow to support stacked (36 chip) parts
And the drive requirements of all those chips means Tyan has to recommend only using 3 of the DIMM sockets with them.
Kingston Registered PC133 RAM - best pricewatch.com price - is $142.
The 1G Registered DDR PC2100 - best price on Pricewatch.com - is $488. Ouch!
I think the SGI panels are not the pinnacle of flat panels anymore--it's an older design and actually has less contrast than more modern flat panels. I also don't view the small dot pitch as an advantage--it seems unnecessarily small for normal viewing distances. I think you can get something better and pay less from other vendors now.
Umm, the Thunder SE requires Registered DDR RAM. The newegg page doesn't say. Say that it is...
Okay, you can use all 4 (not recommended?) slots on the Thunder K7 board and populate with 2 Gig.
Or for about the same price get 4 gig of RAM on the HEsl. Slightly faster RAM used in banks. And still have slots free.
My box (single Athlon 1Ghz, IBM 7200RPM IDE drive) compiles kernels in 5m 45s (make clean; time make dep bzImage on 2.4.13pre1). Pretty good in comparison, considering that this box cost me ~$AUS2000, or perhaps $US1000. I'm using a nvidia geforce card and the emu10k1 driver, and the machine is rock-solid. It would also be a lot cheaper now - high-speed Athlons have come down a lot in price.
I understand the point of having the *ultimate* (rather than just "good") machine, and I realise that kernel compile speed isn't the most wonderful of metrics, but it does drive home the point that the more you pay, the less of a performance advantage you get. There's a price / performance sweet spot, and it's certainly not at the ultra high end.
The only thing I'd add would be a DVD drive - perhaps another $AUS170 for a cheapie Pioneer IDE model.
Good point on the motherboard requiring registered memory. If I had to make this choice right now I'd keep my present systems (couple of Celeron 850 Mhz's and a 550 Mhz) and keep them loaded up with cheap SDRAM (as they are). Then in 3-6 months when there is a clear high speed ram winner I can upgrade without a paying a bundle... Of course if you happen to need a new system now this advice doesn't help very much.
The ServerWorks HE chipset is damn nice though... But for a desktop it does have a few bugs. If you're considering it for a desktop system it would be a good idea to do a little research on it (groups.google.com, etc).
I should also add that I agree with you about the Tulatins and the P4s - but the thing I find really irritating is that the P4 RDRAM chipsets allow using two banks of RDRAM at a time, and the new 845 chipset only one SDRAM bank. Doubly castrated... pretty obvious they're *still* trying to push Rambus - whether you like it or not they aren't going to give another solution that really works.
It would be interesting to see what banked DDR RAM would be capable of with the Athlon too...
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.
Strange, I can't find the word 'drool' anywhere in the comments for this article...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I'm not sure wether I should laugh or cry.
Linux can definetly be used as a multimedia OS. The only thing it still can't do as well is edit videos (Don't start with Broadcast 2000) and professional audio editing.
Linux is definitely a multimedia OS, unlike BeOS, which I have to say, is dead.
But! You can now buy off-the-shelf parts (here, for example) that all work together and can just be bolted together. You can build sealed systems, removing the risk of spills if you move the machine and meaning you don't have to top the system up to allow for evaporating levels. You can get dinky little 120mm radiators which can be fitted inside the case, meaning the entire system can be self-contained. And if the system is well-built enough, the risk of a joint bursting and soaking your motherboard is a lot less than your HSF falling off and frying your Athlon.
Balanced against that, you can get cooling performance superior to a fan-based system and a hell of a lot quieter. And the disadvantages of watercooling will only get less as they become more and more commoditized.
You win again, gravity!
Sigh. More sickeningly pompous prose from ESR in a completely useless article. Building a $7000 personal computer is a pointless exercise which almost nobody who reads Linux Journal could afford to do. All of his "insightful research" and "surprising discoveries" is stuff you could easily find out on Usenet or the various hardware enthusiast sites -- the last time I built a machine (well equipped Tbird 1.4 for under $1000, tyvfm), I researched all the bits and pieces before buying them and avoided all of the headaches he's complaining about. And he can't even build the stupid thing himself:
You could build the ULB yourself from scratch. But unless you're either a very experienced hardware hacker or seriously interested enough in having a learning experience to accept possibly trashing some expensive parts, maybe you shouldn't. I wouldn't.
Way to encourage the hacker ethic! Yeah! Let's all run out and pay someone to do stuff for us, because everyone knows work is hard. With hardware prices as low as they are, it's a perfect time for people to "hack" their own hardware and build a powerful machine on a budget even a college student can afford. That would make an interesting article, but this one is simply, to use a phrase ESR seems to enjoy, an exercise in mental masturbation.
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I work with Solaris (7.0, 8.0, etc.), FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux (debian, Mandrake 7.2, and DEC Alpha Red Hat) every day and can firmly attest that both FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are far, far nicer systems on the software side than Solaris for anything one would want to do on a desktop system, and for most things one would want to do on a server.
Fifteen large would probably mean for me a 50" plasma screen, a $4k Pioneer DVD
authoring system, and recycling my existing hardware (since I've just blown the
$15k budget on the other two items), but then that's me.
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The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This reminds me of the section they use to have on Mac OS Rumors* (yes, I used to read them :-/) called "Dream Machines". Basically it was the kind of thing a 12-year-old would do. This was like 3 or 4 years ago, and they had things like "Quad 900 MHz G5 with 1024 MB ram" and "25 inch monitor". I guess the main difference between that and this is that this is a "dream machine" that could conceivably exist, whereas MOSR's stuff was complete fantasy. And they had it linked right off the home page. Amazing!
* mosr.net is a Mac OS Rumors parody.
rooooar
seek time is a factor in the size of the platter and the head mechanism.. not the RPM rating of the drive, as indicated in the article. RPM will affect the average time it takes for a given sector to re-appear under the head... but that's not as important.
If you look at single-drive systems, IDE can be arguably just as good as SCSI. Certainly, it's an order of magnituded cheaper.
IF you go to multiple disk systems, right away, you start getting increases in perfromance on scsi, and drastic decreases in IDE. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't tried it.
Now.. I don't know how well IDE performs under such things as the 3ware IDE raid controllers... that may be a different story... (separate channel for each drive, etc).. but that's not that common.
Remember, part of this guy's goal was future-proofing his system. SCSI is more expandable in the long run.. he can add a new drive later. SCSI also has longer-range... so external high-speed devices are not out of the question.
Most poeple building a new 'killer box' will probably opt for some big, fast, cheap IDE drives than the scsi setup given the huge price difference.
The card he mentions is more than just some 'ide expansion'.
It provides a separate channel directly from the card for each drive, and handles IDE stuff itself instead of the CPU.
The article you talk about compares standard SCSI setups with standard IDE setups. This is completely, totally different.
A DDS is for *backup*. Separate from the computer. You don't skip backup, even if you use RAID to the nuts.
Yes... a raid controller may have made good sense... but your logic about 1 drive being better than two is flawed.. that's rediculous. Sure.. you have half the chance of a drive failing, but if it does, you lose ALL your data.. that's the point.
And mirroring doesn't make anything faster, it just provides redundancy.
Plus.. how much increased performance would he get -vs- what he's doing now for the cost?
Hmm.
Faster... faster how? Yes.. I know it works really well. What about CPU loading? The SCSI solution is much lighter on the CPU... which is what he wanted.
Remember, the goal was to build the ultimate linux box. I would not consider IDE part of an 'ultimate' box.
Obviously, for a home user, well thought out IDE is a far better value.
There's a kernel module for them, so the short
answer is "yes". A slightly longer answer -- I
was getting some corruption problems with the 3ware (kernel 2.4.5), and it appears several others also reported problem. They updated the driver. I'm using 2.4.10 now, and it seems to be working.
In summary, they do work with Linux, there have been issues, and it's an open question (at least as far as I'm concerned) whether the issues have been fully addressed.
He gave his rasons for not wanting raid, and not wanting lots of drives. Noise.
As for 200 gigs.. I thought about that issue.
I decided that, if I want mass online storage, I will build a file server out of IDE drives for all that data. The fast SCSI drives are there for current work and projects.
I've been having problems with the Thunder K7 hanging under heavy loads when running with 2 processors. Similar to Eric's problems, but I don't have a sound card to blame it on.
It doesn't seem to hang under casual use, but hangs only under heavy load (long make -j2 compiles). I suspected hardware troubles, but everything is running cool and I've swapped all pieces with the same results (NMB power supply, SIMMs, CPUs, motherboard)
Has anyone else had this problem, or found a solution?
jeff
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
I run a plaltry and horribly outdated SMP machine that has dual P-III 866's (I know Runnig hardware that is 9 months old.... I should be publically impaled) that Blows away their Kernel compile benchmark. 1.8 minutes for a REDHAT compile (which means everything is compiled in as modules.. and I mean everything!) althuogh I do bet that they didint use the make -j2 command. even on a non SMP box asking for the -j2 will make a huge difference in everything except deps.
I cant believe they chose a tyan board. I learned the hard way that you use ASUS and only ASUS motherboards, the performance and the reliability are always there... Spacewalker and gigabyte are the worst and I have never had any good luck with tyan.
SMP on linux is plain awesome, and anyone that tries it will refuse to downgrade back to Uniprocessor systems ever again. (anyone make a SMP laptop??)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, per MB DLT and AIT are not that much more than DDS. Each tape holds more than a DDS tape, and the price is higher.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I just created a page where I post comments about some hardware I used, telling if I am satisfied with it or not.
I suggest that you do the same, so we can all make better buying decisions.
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
The 1.7GHz Xeon processors that you use at work are not P4's though, although to be fair, the option to use Xeons should have been mentioned in the initial article. It is perhaps important to note though that the current Xeon (such as the one that you have at work) is essentially identical to the current P4 except for the different socket used and the fact that it has been validated for SMP use. The actual processor core is the same.
That being said, the price tags of the P4 and the Xeon shows a definite difference between the two chips. Combine that with the fact that Xeon boards are quite expensive, and for the time being they require fairly expensive RDRAM memory, and you get a rather costly setup. However, in situations where cost doesn't matter as much as performance (which is what the original article was trying to get at), the dual Xeon would definitely be the closest competitor to the AthlonMP.
Now, as to just how close of a competitor the Xeon is to the AthlonMP, well, if you read this article at Ace's Hardware (one of the very few hardware websites run by people who actually know what the heck they're talking about), you'll notice that dual 1.2GHz AthlonMP's match or beat the dual 1.7GHz Xeons pretty much across the board. The high-end workstation market is one area where AMD currently has Intel beat solidly in terms of raw performance, and pretty much trounces them in price/performance. Of course, that hasn't stopped Intel from maintaining 95%+ of the high-end workstation marketshare... but I digress.
Hey, I'll send you my old 386 for free...
You can't possibly beat that kind of preformance per dollar.
hawk
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!
The rendition at http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/style/0013.h tml professes to be the "unabridged version". Sadly, it isn't: It's considerably edited down from the full article, which can be viewed at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/ultimate-linux -box/.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Yeah, but now I have to figure in the new 1.53Ghz Athlon MPs AMD just released as well. At less than the 1.26 Tulatins... I think the balance just shifted. :-)
Yeh I forget I was going to go with dual CPUs when mentioning the SIS chipset.