Computer hardware: Difference between revisions

1,163 bytes added ,  25 February 2009
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The Vostro has changed its model number (410), comes with a GB-ethernet card, and should be ordered with a 8800 GT card. The system that I would order would cost € 699,-, so unfortunately Dell seems to have raised the price significantly.
The Vostro has changed its model number (410), comes with a GB-ethernet card, and should be ordered with a 8800 GT card. The system that I would order would cost € 699,-, so unfortunately Dell seems to have raised the price significantly.
== February 2009 ==
We purchased 3 identical core i7 940 machines; this represents the second-fastest CPU currently available (it's a quad-core with Hyperthreading - look at the benchmarks at [http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results]!). Their configuration (with MSI X58 Pro motherboard, 6 GB memory, large disk, and a cheap NVidia graphics card) was established at http://www.hardwareversand.de (I'm not affiliated with this company but I bought my son's PC there, and he's happy with it); the price of such a machine is slightly below 1000,-€, including sales tax and 20,-€ cost for putting the pieces together!
The BIOS has lots of things that one can adjust; at least the IDE mode should be set to AHCI. After installing the 64bit version of CentOS 5.2 we discovered that the network adapter is not well supported by the slightly old installation kernel. So we grabbed one of the kernel (plus kernel-devel and kernel-headers) RPM packages from the site http://people/redhat.com/dzickus (at least version 128) and installed those with the help of a USB stick. This worked beautifully and we now have three machines that are really fast, for 1000€ a piece.
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