[conspire] Last Year's Supercomputer

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Edmund Biow (biow at bigfoot.com):

[VIA C3 CPUs:]

> I bought one of these CPUs for $35 at http://www.softwareandstuff.com/ in
> Santa Clara (its now $50) along with a $20 Asus 810 chipset motherboard
> (integrated video, but I had to pony up $7 for a nice-sounding Vortex audio
> card, since it didn't have integrated sound).  The CPU goobles 7-12 watts.
> For a while I ran it without a fan, only a heat sink, but it would start to
> act funky on hot days, so I added a cheesy $3 fan, and now it does fine for
> as long as I care to run it (it will actually crank out a command line SETI
> unit in only 50 hours!)

Ed, I doff my virtual hat.  You've just walked away with the Maximum
Effectiveness Through Careful Cheap Bastardhood award.

> The VIA C3  draws so little current that the system works well with a
> feather-light crummy "MaxPower" (wasn't that Homer's adopted name in a
> Simpsons episode?) 300 watt power supply that came with a $15 ATX case. The
> whole rig with 512 MB of Kingston PC133 ($40), $40 after MIR 40 GB HD & a
> $20 after MIR IDE CD-RW probably didn't cost me much more than Rick would
> routinely shell out on a nice SCSI burner.

Just a note:  I'm picky, but I'm not spendthrift:  Last time I bought a
CD burner, I waited until I was going to attend a Robert Austin Computer
Show at the Oakland Convention Center, and found out who has a good
deal.  One of the vendors had a Ricoh SCSI burner for just over $100, so
I took it.

One of the benefits of buying the Ricoh, Yamaha, or Toshiba units is
that they're built to last, too.  My drive is now really slow by modern
standards, but that's because it hasn't died like the cheapos.

My point is that, rationally, the cost of a component should be measured
in dollars _per year of productive use_.  Something that's cheap today but
useful only for a year is no bargain compared to something with twice
the price but useful for five years.

"Productive" use is of course a matter of judgement -- as are estimates
of how things are likely to play out in the future.

Next RobAusCo computer show isn't for a while -- Saturday, June 21 at
the Cow Palace.  Might be a more cost-effective place to get parts (most
kinds, anyway) than Fry's, for people who aren't in a hurry.  Don't
forget to do the on-line registration thing well in advance to get free
admission.

http://www.robertaustin.com/

-- 
Cheers,             "Don't use Outlook.  Outlook is really just a security
Rick Moen            hole with a small e-mail client attached to it."
rick at linuxmafia.com                        -- Brian Trosko in r.a.sf.w.r-j