On Thu, 19 Nov 2009, Eric House wrote: > Ok, so let's say I wanted to build my own system (for the first time in > my life). Where to go in Portland?
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 05:16:14PM -0800, Tony Rick wrote: > I second the ENU suggestion. On the other hand, Keith went through an > exercise to build a small, low power, quiet machine recently, although it > may have been targeted at something less than general purpose. He had > several posts about it, probably available in the archives (???) or > digests. Better yet, Keith, can you chime in here? I am running a fairly old distro (an RHEL5 clone) with an older kernel, and I wanted a DVI video motherboard to digitally drive an LCD. That turned out to be fairly difficult - I first bought a nice little Intel motherboard, locally, but it turned out that there was no way to get drivers that worked with the new Intel chipset, my 1400x1050 display, and that older kernel. Yikes! I ended up buying a Gigabyte motherboard from Newegg, with an nVidia chipset. That did work. I think I still have the Intel motherboard, and for most distros and screen sizes it ought to work fine. To save power and reduce noise I did not go to a quad core. I am using a 2.93GHz E7500 Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. I have a much more powerful machine with an nVidia 8800GTS card that supports CUDA programming, which I will use for some supercomputer style number crunching Real Soon Now. Mostly that is turned off. I also got very finicky about the case. I had bought a Antec Sonata superquiet case for another system, and wanted more for my office. Antec stopped making them, I guess gamers don't care about case noise anyway. I ended up getting some of the last cases available transferred from Fry's in Sacramento. I did all the power savings partly because it is The Right Thing, but mostly because lower power means slower fans and more quiet. And I really, really want a quiet office. Which I have, the new cases (one on my desktop machine, one on my compute server) are quiet, and the motherboard is quiet. Both machines have extra large CPU fans, selected for low DB at the low setting. Now the loudest thing in my office is the sound of paper moving in my printer. I like the people at ENU, but they are mostly an ASUS shop and gamer-oriented. I have heard unsubstantiated rumors that the newest ASUS mobos use chipsets that are not Linux friendly (I would love to learn differently). I tend to get stuff from Newegg because of the wide selection and the customer reviews - many Linux people share the details of their experiences. So - the bottom line is: Don't buy too much compute power - save power and money. Use Big Slow Fans - look at the dB ratings, some are much quieter than others. Find a quiet case with sound dampening panels in the side. A high efficiency quiet supply like the Antec Earthwatts series is nice, and unless you are running a monster CPU, lots of hard drives, or a gynormous video card, you can get by with 400 watts of power supply (probably less). Look desperately for a sound dampened case - it makes a heck of a difference. ----------------------------------------------------------- Finally, I suggest you prepare a bill of materials for your new system and share it with this list. After we argue about what you should buy ( "200W Quad Core!" "No, Atom!" ), you can order the pieces and bring them to the next Linux Clinic on December 20. We can watch as you put it together and help you avoid some of the goofier mistakes. Perhaps we can designate that day as the Christmas Clinic and all have fun opening packages together. ----------------------------------------------------------- Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug