The $165 machine showed up this afternoon.
Here's a link where you can see the gory details, the bottom line is it's a 3.2GHz P4, all the usual computer stuff, and includes an XP Pro license. http://www.surpluscomputers.com/348774/hp-dc7600-p4-3.2ghz-1gb.html They messed up and shipped me a 512M RAM unit instead of the 1GB that I ordered - more later on this. The bottom line - it worked first time, like a champ! I put in a low-profile TI-chip firewire card (the system has two free PCI slots and 1 PCIe-1 and 1 PCIe-8 slot - all low profile), applied the MS firewire hotfix, installed the Flex driver, installed .Net 3.5 - and brought up PowerSDR 1.19.1 svn 3345. And it worked. I'm running with smaller buffer sizes on both the driver and the audio settings, and I can run with higher DSP buffers than I could on my Atom 330 box. The standare Flex driver settings worked FB right out of the box. I tried my worst-case test of settings of turning on NR, both NB's, ANF, everything, and there is no stuttering, just no problem at all. I also installed the other ham software that I want to use - Ham Radio Deluxe - the current beta version. Running that, the HRD logger (which seems to be a resource hog) and DM780 using VAC - everything runs just fine. My CPU usage percentage seems to hover between 18% and 30%. I set the CPU affinity to let PSDR have any CPU it wants, and on this box I've set up all my other apps to only use CPU1. I don't know how necessary or effective that is but I figured it can't hurt. And none of the other apps locked down to the second CPU seem to care or be slow or laggy at all. Oh yeah, I also put in my USB VGA adapter so I can have two monitors. It is a bit of a resource sink but it runs just fine. It generates a bunch of hash on 17 meters but ferrites fixed that right up. What surprised me was that with only 512M of RAM and all the above running - plus Firefox with 5 or 6 tabs open - I still have 100M of RAM free and the system isn't paging! They're going to send me the missing 512M stick. I could probably get email up and running on it as well if I felt the urge. So I think that's pretty good. Cheap, easy - just what the doctor ordered. Best regards, Michael Jones W0STB _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
