bringing my computer into the 21st century

[josephc at etards.net (josephc at etards.net)]

On the theme of putting together a good PC on a tight budget, I just 
picked up two of these:

http://www.computer-show.com/itemdesc.asp?CartId=6275479UQK-ACCWARE-XQ175&ic=SYS287&tpc=

It's only a P3 500, and skimpy on RAM, but for less than 100 bucks you can 
get 1GB of RAM and the second CPU, making this quite the formidable linux 
server.

I'll likely pick up a third and put together a cluster. Before I saw this, 
I was going to buy 3 Pentium 200's with 96mb of RAM for 500 total. Glad I 
didnt go through with that.

-joe

On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:

> Seth Gordon wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 20:38, Scott Prive wrote:
> > 
> >>"Balance" for your budget... removing bottlenecks is what you want. I think
> >>you'll get a lot more targeted advice if you state the intended purpose of
> >>your system, and what you are willing to spend.
> > 
> > 
> > I would like to spend some of my Copious Free Time getting more
> > experience with databases.  The computer that I want to upgrade would be
> > used as a database/web/mail server, not as a desktop machine, and not
> > doing anything that's really CPU-intensive.  For that reason, I'm more
> > interested in having big fast new disks than a big fast new CPU.
> > 
> > I don't have any practical justification for the RAID aspect; I just
> > think it's cool, and refurbished SCSI drives are finally cheap enough
> > that I can buy a few of them with money in my "toys, books, and candy"
> > account.
> 
> Sounds like the RAID/SCSI plan is a reasonable one, then. Just make sure 
> you'll actually be satisfied with the amount of disk space you get.
> 
> If you buy those IBM drives, you'll also have to budget the extra 
> $10/drive for the SCA to Wide SCSI adapters, unless you buy an SCI RAID 
> cage. Somebody at the last MIT flea had some cages that held three SCA 
> drives; I think he wanted $20 each for them. They would have been just 
> the thing for your project.
> 
> I'd advise against spending a lot of money on a CPU upgrade; you get a 
> lot more bang for the buck with a new motherboard/CPU combo. On the 
> other hand, if you get a good deal on a faster CPU (say, something at 
> the flea), then it can be worth doing.
> 
> I went the other way recently, starting with a CPU and working from 
> there. I had an old 550 MHz Slot A Athlon lying around (it got taken out 
> of a system that got upgraded with an 850 MHz processor a while back), 
> and I found a motherboard for $5 (an Asus K7M - quite a nice board for 
> its day) at the May flea. At that price (add $4 for the CPU fan I also 
> had to buy), it was worth building a system around, especially since I 
> already had most of the other parts, including a 40GB hard drive that 
> came out of a ReplayTV that I had upgraded and an old ATX case that I 
> had replaced with a silenced one in my media convergence system. Not a 
> state of the art system by any means, but it should serve well as part 
> of my network infrastructure.
> 
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