[conspire] Last Year's Supercomputer

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Sun Jun 8 20:32:05 PDT 2003


[Cutting distribution again to just this list:]

Quoting Bill Moseley (moseley at hank.org):

> I've got a XP 1800+ and a P4 2.4 sitting right next to each other with
> otherwise the same hardware (well, the P4 has an extra 80GB drive).  I'm
> amazed how much more heat the Athlon produces.  Just something to think
> about.  

What he said.  

The guys with the gonzo high-powered-CPU systems are also those who
can fry eggs on their system cases and/or have hearing loss from all
the damned noise.  Deirdre's right about her nice little P4 and how the
Celeron option would have been even a little cooler and quieter.  Go
that route and you'll have the last laugh over the 3D guys with their
OpenGL and frames per second / bandwidth fixations, because your system
will neither sound like a jet engine nor self-destruct.

> I've been using Zalman Flower CPU coolers.  I'm really trying to
> cut down on noise.  

Yeah.  It's funny, but the old VA Linux 2U PIII-Katmai/500 in the living
room (the server for linuxmafia.com) has seemed noiser as other systems
in the house have gotten quieter over the years.  These days, I mostly
do satellite computing via my 802.11b-equipped laptop, and the relative
silence is a blessing that grows on you.
 
It's kind of like the peace of mind that quality parts (Mushkin RAM,
Antec cases, PC Power & Cooling power supplies, SCSI mass storage) get
you:  People will try to tell you it's not cost-effective, but you get
to just smile when they have problems and you don't.

Of course, if you're doing 3D rendering, then you need either NVidia
(w/proprietary drivers) or ATI video plus serious CPU power.  Ditto on
the latter for some other applications like scientific computing.  But
if those sorts of exceptional situations apply, you already know.

-- 
Cheers,                    I've been suffering death by PowerPoint, recently.
Rick Moen                                                     -- Huw Davies
rick at linuxmafia.com  



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