[TriLUG] seeking hardware advice...

[Jason Tower]

my man sinner is absolutely correct on both counts.  cpu speed is
secondary to lots of ram and a fast hard disk.  a pII 400 with a gig of
ram will be faster than a p4 1.8 w/ 256MB, especially when dealing with
large images.
i've built maybe two dozen PCs in the past year or two and have found
antec cases to be outstanding.  intrex sells the sx600 for 50 bucks, add
the power supply of your choice (PC power and cooling ones are really the
best if you can afford them, if not go with the powerman noise killer
which intrex also sells, they appear to be very good quality, are quiet,
and i've never had one fail me).
if you want quietness (and you should) get a big heatsink that takes 80mm
fans and use an adjustable speed fan to get the best cooling/noise ratio
(newegg sells one from enermax that is great).  and stay from mobos and
video cards with fans on the chipsets unless you don't care about noise at
all.  seagate barracuda IV disks are almost totally silent and have
excellent performance and reliability.  with a little careful planning you
can build a very fast, quiet system that is easy to live with.
jason

> Avui, Diumenge 16 Juny 2002 22:52, no tenieu res mes que fer i me vareu
> enviar  aquest e-mail
>> I think the CPU will deliver much more performance than you need,
>> unless you're doing some really computationally intensive audio
>> manipulation or insist on real-time processing of multiple audio
>> channels. The RAM might be more than you need, but it may still make
>> you happy.
>
>> Just so you know, I'm do video editing on a 1.33GHz Athlon with 512MB
>> RAM. The processing perfomace seems to be enough. I do have to wait
>> around 9 hours for it take uncompressed video and encode a DVD quality
>> result, but the editing process works fast enough. As for RAM, the
>> system does only a little swapping when I'm doing video editing with
>> multiple video and audio sources, have several Mozilla windows open,
>> and leave the GIMP running with a few 720x480 images open.
>
> In my opinion, anything beyond 1.5GHz is overkill. Get the CPU that
> gves you  the best GHZ-to-dollar ratio
>
> Just get tons of RAM (if you are editing big images, you'll love 1 GB
> of RAM,  because you can assign a big chunck to Gimp's own cache for
> colour palettes,  undos and effects. Really, go with 1 GB
>
> Also, on monitors... I recommend you to try a "different" class of
> monitor:
>
> Aperture Grille monitor.
>
> All the tubes are manufactured by Sony, so they all have the same video
>  quality. They are all TrueFlat, BlackTrinitron-esque, perfect squares.
> The  resolution is awesome. My "cheap" 17" ApertureGrille (Avitron
> AV-7F or  something like this) provides me 98dpi.
>
> Have I told you that the image is very very crisp and has no light
> reflection?
>
> If you know "Maximum PC - minimum bs" magazine, you will understand
> when this  is what they call a "Kick-Ass" product.
>
> Before buying any other screen, try an Aperture Grille one. It's been
> my best  computer-related buy sofar since.... since 198?... let's say
> ever.
>
> Then you say you want an Antec case. Me too! Not so much for the nice
> case,  but more for the built-in fans, and the reliable power-supply
> (or so they say  at Tom's Hardware and such).
>
> Also, I've gotten an e-mail from Intrex that they just have lowered
> prices for  MoBos and CPUs and stuff like that. And they usually are
> Linux Friendly.
>
> Happy shopping!
>
>
>
> Salut,
> Sinner
> --
> RedHat QA Test Engineer  --  Running RedHat 7.3 on i386smp
> http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/
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