Computer hardware

April 2008: a machine that may serve as a Linux workstation

A Dell Vostro 400 MT costs 549,- € (plus tax and shipping, but on the other hand Dell gives a discount to universities) in Germany. It comes by default with a (high-end!) NVidia GeForce 8800GT graphics card, 3 GB of memory, a 500 GB disk, and a quadcore Q6600 CPU running @ 2.4GHz. If most of your data reside on a fileserver, then you might want to put an additional GB ethernet card (5-10€) into one of the two empty PCI slots.

This machine is very cheap, fast, small, and quiet - we have four of those. But as we ordered them in March they "only" have the 8600 GTS graphics (in practice even a GeForce 5200 is fast enough for coot, O and pymol).

This GeForce NVidia card is quite suitable for crystallographic visualization, but - being GeForce and not Quadro - it does not support stereo. But a 22" TFT monitor (about 250,- €) does not support stereo either.

It is a good idea to switch (in the BIOS) the SATA mode from IDE (the default) to RAID before you install Linux, because this activates the very good Linux AHCI driver and makes the use of the Linux kernel option "irqpoll" unnecessary. (This hint applies to all modern chipsets featuring SATA disks; "IDE", "legacy IDE" and "enhanced IDE" are often not the best setups for Linux - depending on the distribution's kernel - , whereas "AHCI" and "RAID" are good. This option can be found in the BIOS, often under "Integral peripherals" or the like.) It is also a good idea to check in the BIOS if the power-saving option of the CPUs is switched on - it is probably called "Speedstep" or "Intel Enhanced SpeedStep" or the like and should be enabled.

Update: we replaced the graphics card in one of the machines with a stereo-capable Quadro card (I believe a FX 1400) which cost about € 400,-, and have now a stereo workstation for about € 1000,- .