[TriLUG] New computer...finally!

[Paul G. Szabady]

Greetings,

I've been looking at new computers and see a number of them that offer 
raided SATA SDD disks.  Does anyone have experience with on linux?  Is 
it worth the extra $$$?

How about differences between Intel and AMD?  I don't want to start a 
religious war, but do people have a preference nowadays or are the 
issues of the past history?

Lastly, a lot of the systems I see have fairly small power supplies. 
Have they really made that much progress with technology that that a 
300-350W is sufficient for a "modest" computer with 8 cores, 8-12GB Mem, 
single DVD/Blu-ray, HD video card, etc.  It's a fairly small jump 
~$50-75 to go to 600W which would leave room future for add-ons.

Basically, I'm looking for a desktop with at least 4 cores and 6-8GB of 
memory and 2 drives in a RAID1 for OS.  I don't really care about the 
size of the drives, because I can either add drives internally or keep 
my old computer running and mount disk of NFS.  Ideally, the system 
would have 2 1TB drives.

Although it's about 4 years old, I have a fairly nice monitor.  It's 
generally off because I run my desktop/server headless.  So I'm not 
really interested in one of the "package deals" - unless it's a super price.

If you haven't guessed by now, I've been out of the hardware market for 
awhile.  My existing machine is a Pentium 4 with a 1GB of memory which 
has done its job and would like to retire.  I've been a 
RHEL/Fedora/CentOS user for ~15 years, but recently converted my $WORK 
desktop to Ubuntu.  Either way, I'll be running some form of (finally 
64bit) linux on this new system.

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc would be appreciated!

pgs

--
Paul
@ Thy Service