I am about to embark on the purchase of a new machine (the current one is 6 years old). I do not need "state of the art"; nor can I afford it; but I want a little scope for upgrade in the next few years. I do little or no gaming but I do spend LONG hours at the machine compiling programs and editing documentation. Also, some quite complex and large database-to-spreadsheet work. Here are the specs I have come up with that are within my budget ($2500AUD). I have never used Athlon before and would appreciate comments from experienced users about things like extra cooling & the cpu capacity. Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra939 M/B Athlon64 3000+ E3 Venice core Socket939 1.0Gb Geil PC3200 400MHz DDR ram Maxtor 200Gb SATA DiamondMax 10 Hard drive Albatron GeForce PC6600GT 128M PCI-e Video Card Collermaster Wavemaster TAC -T01-BK Case 420 watt Topower TOP-526P6 power supply Samsung 710N 17" LCD monitor Samsung 16x/48x DVD-ROM LG DVD Burner GSA-4163BBK I want the extra dvd-rom drive as I play music all the time I am working and can still use & burn other cd's. My favoured supplier jumps to 3500+ cpu in "Venice" mode but does have cheaper models in between? The machine will need to run SuSE Linux v9.3 as it's primary os. I have not yet decided whether I will dual boot with Windows XP? There is very little flexibility in the budget, but I am happy to look at alternatives. Any guidance to optimise the purchase would be appreciated. Paul. -- Linux Registered User #313850
On Thu, 2005-05-05 at 17:41 +1000, Paul Trevethan wrote:
Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra939 M/B Athlon64 3000+ E3 Venice core Socket939 1.0Gb Geil PC3200 400MHz DDR ram My housemate has an older Athlon64 with 512mb RAM. He can do a make -j12 on most compiles, higher most of the time, and still have juice left to watch DVD.
LG DVD Burner GSA-4163BBK Awesome drive.
About cooling, really, if the case has proper airflow, you have nothing to worry about. My housemate's Athlon64 is in an older case, with no case fans, although he does have a decent powersupply that draws quite a bit of air out. His CPU temperature seldom reaches 50 degrees (celcius). With the cool 'n quiet feature enabled, the CPU fan turns quite slowly, but under full load, the fan speeds up so much, that bizzarely, the CPU temperature often drops to below the normal "idle" level... -- Kind regards Hans du Plooy SagacIT (Pty) Ltd hansdp at sagacit dot com
participants (2)
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Hans du Plooy
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Paul Trevethan