[techtalk] Would like advice on building system

[Ian Hall-Beyer]

Re: Motherboards...

I have been extremely happy with Asus motherboards. Good quality boards.
Also, a friend of mine recently acquired a dual Slot 1 board (and put a
pair of Celeron 500 chips on it for under $500 - and it has *4* IDE
channels - 2xUDMA-33, and 2xUDMA-66)


Re: 10/100 NIC

If you're looking for something cheap and reliable, NetGear's FA310TX PCI
10/100 card is excellent, supported in Linux, and costs $20 at
MicroWarehouse. failing that, a 3C905 from 3Com or an Intel-based NIC are
good bets as well, but not nearly as attractive on price.

re: big disks

Any newer BIOS will have no issues at all with large (>8GB) disks, and
older ones will boot fine as long as LILO and the BIOS agree on how big
the disk is. (you can use a small disk to put /boot and your swap
partition on and use the big disk for the dirty work. The other option is
to go with SCSI.

As for RAM, get as little as you can now and then upgrade when the price
gets more sane. 

FWIW, I recently put together a system from off-the shelf parts, and the
pricing was roughly as follows:

Rackmount all-steel ATX case : $250
Asus P3B-F (single Slot 1 P3) mobo: $150
Pentium III-500: $300
512MB RAM: $1200
2 9GB U2W/LVD IBM Disks: $600
Adaptec U2W/LVD SCSI controller: $300
SCSI 48x CD-ROM; $100
ATI Rage Pro AGP 8MB: $100
NetGear FA310TX: $20
Ensoniq AudioPCI: $30

This is a pretty beefy system, and a significant chunk of the price is the
RAM.

-Ian
--
<cosmo> wow, this is kinda nifty. the win98 protocol stack is 
like a chinese finger puzzle, twist and turn in the right places, 
and it pops right off			--Seen on EFNet IRC


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