Recommendation on Barebone kit reseller

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 01:09:11PM -0500, Kevin Morris wrote:
> I would like to get your take on what a good system is, as I am looking
> to build one sometime early next year.

Well it depends what you are trying to do with it of course.

The last machine I built (about 3 weeks ago) was for a friend that
wanted a new game machine to run windows games, and he wanted it for
$700 (before tax) which made life a real pain.  So for that I went with:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+
Asus M2N-E
OCZ (OCZ2P800R22GK) 2GB RAM
Asus Nvidia 8600GT video card
Western Digital 250GB SATA drive
Silverstone TJ04-BW case
LG DVD-RW drive
Mitsumi memory card reader/floppy drive
Enermax NoiseTaker II EG425P-VE 420W power supply

In total that gave a machine costing (about a month ago, after mail in
rebates (on the ram, and power supply)) of $662.72 before tax.  He then
added vista home premium OEM for $130 on top of that giving just under
$800 before tax.  Runs games very well and is so quiet you can pretty
much not hear it is on.  Vista even gives it a performance index of 5.0
(which is the CPU rating, everything else is a bit higher than that),
which was better than I hoped for given the budget.

About a year ago I built a Core 2 Duo system for my sister which ended
up at about $1300, and which she has been very happy with.

For running vmware on linux I would aim for:
intel Core 2 Q6600 (2.4GHz quad) which is $270 or an E6850 (3.0GHz dual)
which is $283

Motherboard I would use something like the Asus P5K-V, which
surprisingly has onboard video (intel G3100, which has linux support,
including some 3d accaleration support in mesa 7.x, which means open
source 3d support although not super fast 3D).  This is assuming you
don't need fast 3D graphics.  VMware doesn't get to use it anyhow, so it
wouldn't matter for it.  The onboard video is VGA and does not do DVI so
for LCDs it's not optimal.

For something better get some nvidia card (I would avoid anything with
turbocache usage in the design), and use a board like the plain P5K.

For high end, a board with the nvidia i680 chipset is the way to go,
since then you could have two nvidia cards installed, although I haven't
actually checked if that is supported under linux although I think it
is.

For harddisk the WD5000AAKS drives are nice and quiet and give you 500GB
for $100 or so, and a pair in raid1 works well for me.  I would never
build a machine without raid1 anymore, since I hate having to start over
if the drive fails, it's just a waste of time given the cost of drives
today.

For seperate video cards, the nvidia 8600GT seems like a nice card for
the money, while if you need fast 3D, the 8800GT is nice (although I
don't know if the nvidia driver has been updated to support that one in
linux yet, although it ought to be soon if it isn't).

For case I have now used the silverstone TJ04-BW for a few machines, and
I love the fact it uses almost no screws, has no sharp edges, the layout
is great, it looks very nice and won't look tacky in a few years as many
of the plastic cases will, and it won't break (it's hard to break steel
and aluminum).  If you need lots of room, the TJ09-BW is essentially a
larger version of the same thing.  They use 120mm ball bearing fans,
which make no noise but cool well.

Silverstone and enermax both make decent priced power supplies that work
well and make very little noise, while pc power & cooling is the way to
go if it just has to work perfectly forever.

So it all just depends what it has to do and for what budget. :)

--
Len Sorensen
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