Hardware experiences?

[William Park]

On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 12:41:19AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>
> 
> | Interesting... I'm thinking about getting rid of all my P2/P3's (all 4
> | of them) and replace them with a single P4 system.
> 
> I've never bought a P4 (except for junky & cheap Celeron D systems).
> I would think that it would be silly to do so know.
> 
> Core 2 is best right now, but not cheapest.
> 
> Athlon is good, and cheap.
> 
> So why buy a P4 which isn't good and can hardly be significantly
> cheaper than Athlon?
> 
> Back-of-envelope calculation: P4 might take 40 more watts than an
> Athlon.  If you leave your machine on all the time (which I do, and I
> would guess you do) that amounts 
> 	40W * 24h/d * 365d/y = 350kwh / y
> or about $20 extra per year in power charges.
> 
> Bonus: the latest Athlons (those that use DDR2) and all Cores (except
> T2300e) have hardware assistance for virtualization.

It seems that all AM2 socket has DDR2 support.  I am considering 

    1.	- Sempron (AM2/2800+), $48
	- DDR2-800 (2x512), $140
	- Asus M2N-MX (AM2/nVidia), $99

    2.	- P4-541 (3.2GHz/800MHz), $109
	- DDR-400 (2x512/2-3-2-5), $155
	- Asus P5GL-MX (915GL/ICH6), $80

So, it's about the same price.  And, they are the cheapest in Toronto.

It all comes down to chipset.  I'm more comfortable with Intel chipset
than nVidia.  I would be very interested in hearing any first-hand
experiences about nVidia + Linux, since all I hear is nVidia + Windows.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
ThinFlash: Linux thin-client on USB key (flash) drive
	   http://home.eol.ca/~parkw/thinflash.html
BashDiff: Super Bash shell
	  http://freshmeat.net/projects/bashdiff/
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml