[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 02:43:13AM +0800, Nick Bannon wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 10:05:44PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> > We have the motherboards we need. So we need two Pentium III CPUs, 
> > and 128Mb of RAM times three (to get mussel to 256Mb and 128Mb for the others)
> > 
> > >From www.iinet.net.au/~roderick/ (RTV computers)
> 
> That'll be http://www.iinet.net.au/~roderic/ ...

Oops.

> > Component                                                           Cost
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Intel Pentium III 650MHz "E" 256k L2 on-die with SSE (100 FSB)       510
> > 8MB Apacer PC-100 7ns SDRAM with Hyundai chips. 5 Years Warranty     275
> > 10.2GB Qunatum Fireball LCT Hard Disk Drive                          205
> > AOpen KF45a ATX MIDI Tower Casing with 250w PSU                       85
> [...]
> 
> For hard drives - I got a 20GB IBM 5400RPM drive for $185 (current price
> seems to be $199, damn that dollar ::-) ) just recently from a place in
> Osborne Park ;
> http://www.bestbuy.com.au/
> 
> They seem to be a bit cheaper on RAM, too ;
> 128MBPC133 PC133 128MB DIMM					$201.00
> 
> ...and some budget cases ;
> ATMIDI622 AT MIDI TOWER CASE 200W POWER SUPPLY			$38.00 
> ATXMIDI1011 ATX MIDI TOWER FOR MICRO ATX MAINBOARD 200W		$58.00 
> ATXMIDI6002 ATX DELUXE MIDITOWER 200W				$59.00 
> ATXDESKTOP ATX DESKTOP CASE					$61.00 
> ATXDELUXE DELUXE ATX 6001 MIDI TOWER CASE WITH 250W POWERSUPPLY	$64.00 
> ATXMIDICOLOUR ATX SUPER MIDI CASE 250W WITH REMOVABLE		$73.00
> 	COLURED FRONT PANEL
> ATXTOWER ATX 7001 FULL TOWER CASE 250 W				$92.00 
> ATXMACMIDI ATX MACASE MIDI-TOWER 250 WATT			$112.00
> 
> The ATX desktop is enticing... or maybe we should buy decent cases for
> once, perhaps even rackmount ones?

Well, I'd get cut less while messing around inside them.

So, 2 * 61 + 2 * 399 + 3 * 201 + 2 * 199 = $1921.

We can definitely afford to do it, then. Although it's a little high 
considering we only have $3k in the bank and need to finance ODay. 
I'm in for $50 :)

> ...and some of the Computerman's CPUs seem oddly cheap ;
> http://www.computerman.com.au/
> PENTIUM III 700MHZ 100MHZ 7.0 SLOT 1 $399.00
> PENTIUM III 750MHZ 100MHZ 7.5 SLOT 1 $489.00
> PENTIUM III 800MHZ 100MHZ 8.0 SLOT 1 $540.00
> PENTIUM III 850MHZ 100MHZ 8.5 SLOT 1 $699.00
> PENTIUM III 600MHZ KATMAI 133MHZ 4.5 SLOT 1 $335
> 
> We should stop to think what we want the new Celeron boxes to do -
> maybe we can be stingier on the RAM (one 64MB stick - adding another
> later is easy) or fiddle with the hard disc size. Both are console
> boxes? or one's a server?

64MB really isn't all that much. I have 128Mb in my home machine and hit 
swap when doing large compiles and running X. I think 128MB is about the 
minimum for a console box.

Having one of the Celeron boxes in the clubroom with mussel's existing 
video card, and the other in the machine room doing something useful sounds 
good. Perhaps running squid (a few gigs of cache ought to be enough) and 
serving the webpages plus random other tasks. It'd also be another user 
machine. Of course, we could have two fast PC boxes out in the clubroom.

Then mussel becomes UCC's "big iron" in the machine room.

Cheers,
Grahame