[Tfug] building new pc

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 07:08:04AM -0700, Zack Williams wrote:
>
>If you need the entire thing (ie, you don't already have a case/power
>supply/removable drives), your best bet is to look for a good deal
>from a major brand (Dell, HP, etc.) and augment it with extra drives,
>cards, etc.   The price difference between a new system and parts is
>probably under $50 or so, plus you get a warranty, and the thing is
>guaranteed to work out of the box.
>
>Building PC's from scratch can be fun and educational, but frankly
>with the incredibly thin margin on parts out there, it's not as much
>of a cost savings as it could be.

Cost savings may not necessarily be the goal, however.  In fact, unless you
stick to very inexpensive components, it can be very hard to beat the prices
of the brand name builders.

In my case, I wanted a PC that wouldn't slowly drive me insane.  All the
noise, Noise, NOISE! (my old PC was full of fizz tubelers and gram danglers,
you see...)

So, I spent a few bucks to get a very nice Lian Li mid-tower with some slow
120mm fans, giant heatsinks for the CPU and GPU, and a PSU with a huge slow
fan.  There's no way I could get that from one of the major dealers, but the
end result is PC so quiet I can actually fall asleep with it in the same room
(if I have need to leave it on for an extended period).

>Oh, and pick a processor with hardware virtualization support - this
>is increasingly important going forward.

I definitely second this.  I had to use qemu a fair bit to make some OS images
for my OLPC-X0.  My old desktop PC was much faster than my laptop for normal
tasks, but it lacked hardware virtualization support.  My laptop completely
smoked my desktop when running qemu (as in an order of magnitude faster).
VirtualBox can do okay without it, but it's even better if you have it,
especially if you're running more than one VM.

Of course, nowadays, I think the difficult task may be trying to find a
AMD/Intel CPU that doesn't have this...


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--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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