[ILUG] Thoughts on a compile box

[Philip Trickett]

If you can find a Dual Motherboard without SCSI, it can be had for around
IR£140. I had a Tyan one until recently (I sold it after upgrading to a BP6,
I know, sounds wierd, but I haven't had that many probs with it), it was a
S1832DL Tiger 100 BX chipset board.  Looking at 500Mhz Celerons, with
Slocket adaptors to be had @ ~ IR115 each, that could come out as a fairly
cheap alternative. Add a Promise ATA66 card (and do the IDE RAID mod if you
are brave), and you could have a pretty cheap machine for around a grand,
depending on hard disks.

Alternatively, you could look at (gasp!!) i840 chipset boards, as some come
with functionality for SDRAM, but I am not sure of the performance hit with
that.


Phil
-----Original Message-----
From: ilug-admin at linux.ie [mailto:ilug-admin at linux.ie]On Behalf Of Kenn
Humborg
Sent: 27 April 2000 14:57
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: [ILUG] Thoughts on a compile box



It's getting near time to replace my trusty P133
at home, as kernel compiles are just taking too
damn long...

Overall, I'm happy enough with the performance of
Linux on this machine, except for starting Netscape
and compiling stuff.  I don't really play games any
more...

And with 64MB of RAM, the compilation bottleneck
is currently the CPU.

So, I'm thinking that, say, a dual 500MHz Celeron box
should give me more bang-per-buck than, say, a
single P-III.

But where do you buy dual-CPU boxen?  I'd hope that,
at this stage, I should be able to get something
reasonable for about 1000 to 1200 (before VAT).  I just
need CPU, RAM, disk and 1280x1024x16M.  I don't want
a flashy, expensive, whizz-bang graphics card.  I don't
need another monitor.  Maybe I'll go SCSI for disk if
it's not too expensive...

Dell, for example, only do dual CPUs on their Precision
"workstation" series (and Poweredge servers) which are
going a bit over my budget...

Kate mentioned that he put together a dual Celeron/BP6
machine fairly cheaply, but then said a while later that
it crashes every few days.  Now, I've given up trying to
keep up with the alphabet soup of RAM types, montherboards,
front-side buses and back-side buses, cache sizes, speeds,
on-chip/off-chip, yadda, yadda, yadda, and don't really feel
confident enough to put together my own box.  And, besides,
I'll happily pay a bit more to a box-builder to whom I can
say "This machine crashes every few days.  Take it back and
give me my money back."  It's much more difficult to do this
when you've bought all your bits from 5 different sources.

So, any recommendations of clone builders that do this kind
of thing?  Galway area would be nice, but not essential.

Thanks,
Kenn



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