[ale] Do people still roll their own Linux desktops?

Tue Mar 16 23:34:09 EDT 2010

As a 20+ year veteran "hardware peddler", I can say with some authority that
it pretty much comes down to two questions (1) How much do you want to
spend? (2) How much customization do you want? You are right to suspect your
power supply. The moving parts are usually what fail first, which includes
hard drives and fans. Often, a fan rpm slow down or even a stopped fan will
result in a continual overheat situation and precipitate the failure of the
power supply. Good components not subjected to over heat and over voltage
conditions can last for many years.
If you want to go cheap on the build, you can continue to use your existing
power supply and just know that you will have to replace it sooner or later
fails. One caveat, most modern [single processor] motherboards will have a
24 pin and an 8 pin (but can probably run off the 20 pin and 4 pin power
plugs). Any dual processor motherboard will at least have a 24 and an 8 pin
and likely also a 4 pin plug, all of which will be required. Any current
generation power supply should have at least a 24/20 pin plug and an 8 and
probably also a 4 pin plug. You can use the "heft" of the power supply as an
indication of the quality. If it says 700W but is a feather weight unit,
don't buy it! You can't get decent hold up time for power sags without some
substantial weight regardless of the efficiency.
If you want a more durable system, go with a "long-life" motherboard that
has solid vs. electrolytic capacitors (those are frequently the parts that
fail on the motherboard).
Which CPU to use? Until the past year or so, AMD was better for general
computing tasks, but Intel has pretty much kicked AMD to the curb with the
Nehalem family of CPUs and in fact just introduced today their newest 32nm,
6-core processors with AES encryption instructions in the higher end
processors. The Nehalem (base of current non-Adam processor) line has built
in memory controller as does AMD (though the lower end CPUs don't have all
the features and memory controller speed) and they support hyper-threading
so if you run multi-threaded code, you will see a lot of performance
improvement. If you want to "cheer for the undergod [yes I'm dyslexic], buy
AMD, they still have some decent performance and pretty much use DDR2 memory
where the Intels require DDR3.

Now, as to buying a built system vs. the do-it-yourself, if you buy a good
name brand such as HP or Dell, you can still get a good system for very
little money. The economy of scale allows those guys to buy components at
prices far below what Frys, Micro Center or NewEgg or Tiger pays. HP and
Dell continue to duke it out over market share, and you the consumer
benefit. I actually bought a Dell SC440 a bit over a year ago landed cost
for ~ $250 with 1GB of RAM and no OS for an Asterisk server. It is a very
nice case and very well designed build. The motherboard, had no PS/2
connectors and some USB device I plugged in fried the USB controller, so
Dell sent a repairman with a motherboard and fixed it at no charge. No
further problems. Not sure I would buy a $200 off brand system, but I think
you would get quality with Dell or HP in the $400 range, but they do tend to
limit your configuration options severely on the low end systems. A couple
of sites I use to check on deals are www.gotapex.com and
www.dealnews.comAmazon.com is also worth a look.
Oh, and I write this on my single core AMD Athlon 64 system (mobo + CPU @
Frys was ~ $59 about a year ago) with an overkill of 4gb of OCZ Platinum RAM
that I got at Micro Center for ~ $89 after rebate, running Ubuntu 9.10 64
bit.

Good luck on your decision and build.
GC

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Brandon Checketts <
brandon at brandonchecketts.com> wrote:

> I recently built my own system with parts from newegg.  My reasoning was to
> ensure that I get good quality parts.  I don't trust the extremely cheap
> systems.  I also wanted to make sure that I got a pair of hard drives with
> a 5
> year warranty as they always seems to be one of the first components to go.
>
> Thanks,
> Brandon Checketts
>
> Jim Kinney wrote:
> > The newer systems are far poorer quality. Those <$500 systems are 2 year
> > throwaways. Mobos have really taken a beating in the low end.  Those $50
> > specials are really crap.
> > A pretty nice system can be built for $800 unless you want top end
> > graphics cards. Add an extra $150 for a good mid-level nvidia.
> >
> >> On Mar 16, 2010 7:53 PM, "Björn Gustafsson" <bg-ale at bjorng.net
> >> <mailto:bg-ale at bjorng.net>> wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm in the market for a new desktop Linux system, and I've never
> >> bought a consumer unit before.  This time though I'm sorely tempted by
> >> deals I see in the $350-$450 range on discount desktops, which are
> >> sometimes even quad-core systems.
> >>
> http://www.buy.com/prod/hp-pavilion-p6203w-desktop-athlonll-x2-r-215-2-7-ghz-4gb-500gb/q/loc/101/213720391.html
> >> for example is $370 for an older model dual-core desktop.
> >>
> >> My 5+ year old case is feeling creaky, and I'm probably due for a new
> >> power supply, so I don't think I can build a comparable system myself
> >> for under $450, and I worry about durability with such cheap parts.
> >> My main requirements are a dual or quad-core processor and at least 4
> >> GB of RAM, with a decent video card.  If I look at pricewatch.com
> >> <http://pricewatch.com> and
> >> similar sites the components add up to $500 or more. (Not including a
> >> monitor, which I don't need.)
> >>
> >> Does anyone have suggestions on a low-budget alternative to pre-built
> >> systems, or am I wasting time even thinking about that?  For example,
> >> are the "no OS systems" that Ascendtech sells any good?
> >> http://www.ascendtech.us/customkititems.asp?kc=DTPCC2DE8400912
> >>
> >> --
> >> Björn Gustafsson
> >>
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