On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Matthew Gardner <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks again, everyone, for all of the feedback. It's helpful. > > On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Andrew McNabb <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:29:05PM -0600, Topher Cullen wrote: >> > I'd be in favor of buying a super cheap case and ditching the dell >> > altogether. >> > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119243 >> > I've used the piece of junk in a bunch of builds and its worked out well >> > every time. >> >> Yeah, trying to get a non-Dell motherboard to work with a Dell case is >> probably not going to work.
I'd disagree if this Dell is less than 5 or 6 years old. > I took it all apart this evening, and spent quite a bit of time looking at > pictures of motherboards on newegg and comparing them to my current > motherboard (I would really like to keep the case and power supply, as I'm > on a pretty tight budget). I'm pretty certain that the MSI and Gigabyte > motherboards wouldn't fit (at least only some of the screws would be in the > right place, because the board isn't square, and it looked like there might > be issues with the direction of the SATA ports), but the Intel and ASUS > boards look like they will work. It was relatively easy to disassemble > everything in the case, except for the power supply. I had a Dell machine a > number of years ago that I'm sure would have been a nightmare to upgrade, > but this one actually seems pretty easy. The case reminds me of the Antec > Minuet cases that the potatoes are in (it's a Dell Studio Slim, from the end > of 2009). > > At this point I'm leaning towards a new i3. I think I'll wait to see if > anything goes on sale between now and Black Friday. In the last 2-3 years Intel has been beating AMD(you can compare a last-gen Intel proc to a current-gen AMD) and has also been so focused on ARM that the low-end market is where you can find some good AMD pricing, especially if you're not buliding a gaming box. A recently manufactured APU(AMD's term) or Intel proc w/integrated graphics should even support Blu-Ray and high definition Flash video playback w/o stuttering. My wife wants our next boxen to be mounted to the back of their 1920x1080 displays, and I'm inclined to agree with that idea. Some very affordable small form factor(SFF) solutions are available, and they get even cheaper if you throw out the need for wireless in favor of Ethernet. I'd say the sweet spot for memory right now is DDR3, with nearly a tie between 8GB and 4GB modules. And get an SSD for less than a dollar per GB, even if the SSD is only for the OS/apps. The Crucial M4 series(I'd go with 128GB) is one model I recently read of to be in the sweet spot. Is TRIM support independent of the OS yet? Fun thread. I like to know technical users' hardware preferences. -- Lars -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
