Re: [tlug] Hardware Recommendations?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-07-02 01:03 +0900 (Thu), Lyle H Saxon wrote:

> I think I'm in the market for a new machine. Any recommendations for
> what and where would be good for a decent machine with pretty good
> specs at not too outrageous of a price?

The sweet spot on the price/performance curve at the moment seems to
be the Intel i7 systems. The hyperthreading works now (I notice no
difference between a single-threaded application running on an otherwise
idle machine with it enabled or disabled), so it's safe to enable it on
these 4-core systems to get eight simultaneous threads of execution.
They use a relatively tiny amount of L2 cache, but have a medium-size L3
cache and faster memory bandwidth to help with this.

We use Intel and Asus motherboards; out of three or four of each, we've
had one failure of each over the last year.

A minimal system should go for about:

	3man	CPU
	2man	M/B
	0.7man	memory
	1man	video card
	0.8man	drive
	0.5man	DVD-writer (SATA, but you can use IDE)
	1man	Case/PSU

	8man	total

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com