Hi Max, I'll say a few things about the T3400 and nVidia graphics support since that's what I have personal experience with-
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:33 AM, iprmaster <iprmas...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2. Dell Precision Workstation T 3400: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8200 > (2.66GHz, 4MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)375W,4GB (4 x 1024MB) 800 MHz ECC > DDR2-SDRAM Memory, HD 250 GB SATA2 7.200,16x DVD+/-RW > Dual 256MB nVidia Quadro FX 570. Price: 950 a.u. My company bundles our systems with the T3400, mostly because we have found the motherboard to be very robust. It can handle the high data bandwidth requirement of our PCI cards, and has stable enough voltages. Having run SystemRescueCD a few times, it was able to work with the hardware without issue including being able to mount the Intel ICH9 BIOS softRAID. I admit I haven't tried to do a thorough compatibility test though. > About my needs: I am a C-developer, have to compile/run/debug programs > several tenths of time a day and analyse postprocessed, two-, three- and > four-dimensional (space+time) results on the same PC. All under Gentoo, > of course ;-) HD size is not a problem, there is a big NFS-Volume I can > mount ;-) The only trouble we've face with the T3400 is quite a few of our RAID-0 drives have crashed in the 4 years our company has sold them (well the T3400 and its predecessor). I can't believe it's all due to the HDD model and/or our system thrashing the drive: it could be an issue with the Intel BIOS RAID, so you may want to stay away from that. Since HDD speed is usually the bottle neck of system performance you may want to set it up with ZFS (maybe in RAID-Z?) Additionally the combination of ZFS and the ECC RAM should guard you well against data corruption. > About my needs: I am a C-developer, have to compile/run/debug programs > several tenths of time a day and analyse postprocessed, two-, three- and > four-dimensional (space+time) results on the same PC. All under Gentoo, > of course ;-) ---snip---- > These are my questions: > > - is the most expensive PC (4.) worth to be considered? Does its > speed-up justify its price? Maybe the -list can contribute the difference of: qlop -tH <pkgname> Between the C2D and Xeon to help you decide? > - is there any compatibility problem with any of these configurations > and Gentoo? I do not want to run any other distribution! As far as I > know, nVidia and 2D acceleration issues should be solved by now... I have a very similar Quatro card on my home desktop. I had two nVidia related driver crashes of xorg-server 9 months ago, but that was resolved in a driver update and I have had no issues since. > - additional ideas/comments are welcome, but on these configurations > only ;-). * Pariksheet points at ZFS idea ;) > Thanks > Max Pariksheet
