Computer hardware

As of April 4, 2008:

a Dell Vostro 400 MT costs 549,- € (plus tax and shipping, but on the other hand Dell gives a discount to universities). It comes with a (extremely fast) NVidia 8800GT graphics card, a 500 GB disk, and a quadcore Q6600 CPU running @ 2.4GHz. If your data reside on a fileserver then you might want an additional GB ethernet card (5-10€).

If you want to install Linux then it is a good idea to switch the SATA mode from (default) IDE to RAID, because this activates the very good Linux AHCI driver and makes the use of the Linux kernel option "irqpoll" unnecessary.

This NVidia card is quite suitable for coot, O, pymol and so on, but it does not have stereo.