Re: Time to refresh my hardware
On 10/11/19 6:27 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
My requirements are not very stringent. Onboard video and audio will
do,
as long as it works out of the box with x.org, and has reasonable
compositing and can keep up with full screen video playback. Dual 1GB
NIC, a pair of SATA drives, and then as many cores and RAM as I can get,
hopefully 12 cores at least. I guess what I'm really looking for is some
place which offers a wide selection of hardware that I can match up to
within my budget. But all the places that I looked seemed to be limited
to 5-6 models, and quite limited customizations options. I end up with
either having my only video choices be the latest and greatest Nvidia
chipsets that only work with their binary blobs (no thank you), or all
the 12+ core options are ridiculously overpriced Xeons; or they seem to
intentionally hike up their prices by having no storage options other
than high capacity SSDs, for storage.
If you don't mind saying, what country are you in? Would you be
comfortable with building the system yourself? You will probably find
it difficult to get the combination you want otherwise.
Dell came pretty close, if slightly pricy. They actually have a
workstation that they certify RHEL for (but ship with Ubuntu). I
would've overlooked having to overpay for Xeons (no AMD options), except
that I looked at their manual. Their motherboards have button cell
batteries. Maybe I'm off base, but who still puts button cell batteries
on their motherboards? Dell can't just pay a few more cents for proper
NVRAM? So they go with button cells, to keep the lights on for the BIOS
settings. This is obviously intentional; this is their business product,
clearly the reason for that is to have the CR2032 go flat in a few
years, and lose all BIOS settings; but who cares since they expect that
business will replace their hardware every three years. Still, this is
just plain silly.
I don't know where you're looking, but pretty much everyone still uses
batteries on the motherboard. It's to keep the RTC going when the power
is off, not just to keep the settings. The only batteries I've had to
replace were on computers that were well over 10 years old.