Slashdot Mirror
System of the Year, Linux Style
Bob the Blob writes "LinuxHardware has put together a wonderful article that gathers up all of the top hardware into the ultimate Linux system from 2001. In the article, there is a review of the hardware from 2001 that discusses what we've seen and why the parts were chosen. To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux." Worth noting that this
machine is of course now at least 10 days obsolete ;)
Still pretty impressed with what it does on my 70MHz SparcIPX (it's got a sped up processor ;)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Anyone use these things? If you get a hardon for those window kits and want to show off these are fine. If you actually want to cool/overclock these are POS. Did they get paid by thermaltake to use all their products I mean listen to this, "Other supplies we'd like to mention all come from one company, Thermaltake. Thermaltake is a total cooling solutions company and provide the best products for many of those extra cooling jobs." WTF? For anyone interested in some real cooling for about 20 bucks more and peice of mind the damn fan won't die check out this. I have no comment on the memory coolers as they give a whole whopping 1 degree celsius of difference in tests I've seen. Were these people stunned stupid into liking shiny impractical things?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Isn't it obvious why Nvidia will not open source their drivers? (I'm not an ATI/Nvidia fan-- A conspiracy loony, maybe) Because releasing that information will show that when drivers are first released they are intentionally designed to be underperforming! This is how they can release drivers that increase the performance of their cards. Now, logically, you could say that this makes no sense, that Nvidia should simply release the most optimized code right away. However, underperforming drivers mean that they can tweak their drivers in the event that ATI releases a new card and Nvidia does not have any new silicon ready. Likely they learned this lesson from Intel when Intel was caught with its pants down when AMD released the Athlon.
Doesnt RTCW (Wolfenstien), Q3A and Tribe2 also have linux ports?
I know I'll get flamed for this, so I'm going AC. ;)
What's the point of a Linux-based powerhouse with a GF3 Ti500? I mean, you have what, 5 games to choose from? If I'm going to spend that much money on a video card, I'm certainly not going to be using it under Linux anywhere near its full potential. I'd rather stick it in my Win2k box and play some sweet Wolfenstein or Medal Of Honor.
Great system and all, but frankly, I don't need that much gaming power under the "stability" of Linux.
There are two main areas in 3D production, modelling and rendering. These kind of cards are for the first part, modelling and creating the animation files.
...
When you have millions of polygons and want to spin the camera, you need a card of this quality. It has nothing to do with rendering, which is a processor intensive task.
Sure, you can model a landscape in bryce with any card, but when you have the LOTR balrog sitting in Houdini or Maya, you need something really powerful, even the Geforce 3 will not be enough.
For the rendering phase you have the clusters and render farms, and there you need an 1's and 0's cruncher, and a CGA card will do the job as good as the Geforce 10.000
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Couple of points:
OS advocates say is fast release times, lower bugs, and quicker bug fixes then most CS projects, but, If a company wrote good software, fixed bugs quickly, and had a fast release time, why would we need OS?
If MS came out with a truly secure, well written, stable OS, wouldn't that kill most off the advantages of OS?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I use free-as-in-speech software because I have been burnt too many times by closed source software which changes in ways I don't want, or doesn't change in ways I do want, or goes out of business, or changes its licensing model, or doesn't keep up with the times and won't work with newer software. Etc etc etc.
I WILL NOT be burned by proprietary software again if I can help it!
As a semi-aside, my original disgust for Microsoft was the patronizing "we know what you want" attitude of their software. Then of course there was the bugginess of it. I also grew to loathe their business non-ethics. A few years ago, a wonderful job went away when some vulture capitalists would not fund a friend's startup "because M$ would dup the effort and we wouldn't get our money back". And since then M$ has compounded all reasons for disgust. However, all this disgust for M$ is not why I use free source software; it's because I don't want to ever again be trapped in proprietary software over which I have no control.
Infuriate left and right
The problem isn't just with the ethics of people who want to use open source software. If you have a closed source module loaded into your kernel and it oopses on you, you only have one recourse: take the oops to Nvidia--even if the crash was in your scsi driver or the network layer. Kernel developers won't touch bug reports from people who have proprietary drivers loaded because there is no way to know what that driver is doing to other parts of the kernel (without disassembling it).
dan.
An open-source BIOS would be helpful, because often there are bugs in the BIOS that must be worked around (Linux contains several workarounds for BIOS bugs). But since the BIOS can usually be bypassed, it's not a huge problem.
For a hard drive, there's not much point in having open-source firmware. You can already access the full functionality of the drive using open-source drivers.
With Nvidia's video cards, you can't access many of the features without using their closed-source drivers (you need to load the closed-source driver into your kernel). This can cause noticible problems, like crashes when there are driver bugs, or incompatibility with new kernel versions. Some people say it's not a problem (right now Nvidia is pretty good at fixing the bugs), but what happens when Nvidia decides their cards are obsolete, and stops providing drivers? They already did this with their 3dfx cards - not only did they stop updating the drivers, they don't even offer old ones for download.
I picked the 7500 because:
1. I've never have gotten nVidia's drivers to work on my system.
2. I believe it's good to support hardware vendors that support open source.
I believe that voting with my wallet is the only way to effect change with hardware manufacturers. So my last two purchases have been an Epson USB scanner and now the Radeon since both companies support open source developers.
nVidia needs to open up the drivers so that it can be properly be supported under linux. The only way to reach the "fantasy world" is by making the choice to support the companies that work with the community.
- subsolar
For XMas, I built a more modest version of linuxhardware's version: xp1600+, soyo d+, 512MB PC2100 DDR, MSI GF3 ti200, plextor 24/10/40 CDRW, antec 400W PSU, HSF. I had a case and a maxtor 60GB IDE drive already for it. I spent $900 with burn-in and shipping.
They chose all scsi, which is a bit over the top IMO - the dragon+ has 4 IDE controllers for 8 devices (2 of which are promise raid which can run as normal ide for linux). The PC2400 memory is overspec for the board (unless you want to boost the FSB beyond 148).
RH7.2 installed without a hitch - lan and audio drivers found and installed no problem. cdrecord is happy with the CDRW - no configuration there. I installed nvidia's drivers and have full opengl - that did require a kernel recompile (because of the the athlon I think). lm_sensors is working, etc. All on a board that was released in November - says a lot about the state of linux drivers.
Point is, I believe I have a rock solid system that by any measure meets price/performance/value.
I can also run the FSB at 143 reliably which shows the cpu/mem benchmarking as a xp 1800+. The geforce 3 ti200 can be overclocked to come close to a ti500 (the MSI driver provides overclocking in the windows driver - a linux version -nvclock - is available at http://209.167.100.83/ (evil3d).
I'm satisfied.