[Linux4christians] hardware

[AKA ImBatman]

The setup looks good to me. The A8N is a great board too. (Same one I stuck
in my most recent computer.)

A few comments:

1. Do you really need the SLI board? The A8N-E is the same thing except for
the SLI functionality. You might be able to save yourself some money if you
go for the -E.

2. A single 2GB stick is fine. I use my machine heavily and 1GB is
sufficient. Even if he's a heavy graphic artist, I have a hard time seeing
him using more than 2GB. Besides, the Windows Virtual Memory is so screwed
up it won't make effective use of it anyway.

3. I hope that's a SATA harddrive you're sticking in there. The A8N board is
SATA-II (aka SATA-300) compatible, which means that it has twice the
bandwidth of regular SATA (which already creamed ATA).

4. Get a second harddrive. I know it may seem a little weird putting two
160GB drives into a system, but hear me out. The A8N board uses the Award
BIOS software (IIR the manufacturer correctly) These BIOSes have a built-in
bootloader. In earlier versions, you used to be able to hit ESC on boot to
chose the drive to boot from. On the modern A8N, you can chose the boot
drive by hitting F8. What this means is that you can install Windows on one
drive and Linux on the other without installing a special bootloader. You
just hit F8 when you start the computer to chose the drive you want. It's
quite nice.

5. The Flash drives are cool, but the 3.5" floppy is revolting to my sense
of modern hardware design. I understand that they're a complete unit, but
you might look into saving a few bucks by going with a flash-only drive.
It's not a big deal, but having a 3.5" floppy drive can cause all kinds of
nasty pauses as the super-fast computer pauses to let the head
sllllooooowwwlly move across the disk. Or even worse, your super-fast
computer can lock-up for 5-10 seconds while it waits for the drive to
timeout and say, "I guess there's really NOT a disk in the drive. Sorry!"

I did a writeup not all that long ago on building a modern PC. You may find
it interesting:

http://akaimbatman.blogspot.com/2005/09/synergistic-pc.html

Those of you with computer envy may also find the article of interest. I
built my machine (which is very similar to the one I list) for ~$1000
without the monitor. The LCD TV is nice, but not at all necessary. If you're
not a multimedia-phile, a regular LCD is more than sufficient. (Heck, I
watch TV on a 17" LCD.)

Hope this helps!

P.S. Tell him that he made a good choice on going with the full tower case.
Nothing says "airflow" like empty space inside the case. :-)

On 12/22/05, singingfalls <mohair at singingfalls.com> wrote:
>
> I have an acquaintance who is building his first non-proprietary box. He
> asked me what I thought of his intended acquisitions. Since I have not
> been keeping up with hardware I pose it to the list for comment. He's an
> older fellow, a printer by vocation, and he will be doing small graphics
> related projects. He's a Mac user most of his years but is being forced
> to do windows for work purposes. He's requested I install linux dual
> boot for him. Here goes:
>
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