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Computer hardware: Difference between revisions
→April 2008: a machine that may serve as a Linux workstation
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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 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. | |||
This | 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. | ||
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Update November 2008: we replaced the graphics card in one of the machine with a stereo-capable Quadro FX card which cost about as much as the machine itself, and have now a stereo workstation for about € 1000,- . | |||