What Hardware? -- A Question From A Mac User

[Ratsima]

My iMac is five years old. Time to upgrade. Sadly, as a fixed income retired geezer I really can't justify the Mac's price premium. (Been using them since 1984.) So, I'm thinking of buying or building a linux box. But, I know nothing of current hardware choices: motherboards, processors, graphics cards, etc. I'm living in Isaan and the closest place with any significant IT shops is Korat.

Can someone point me to some hardware advice; specifically stuff that I might find locally?

I'm looking to spend about 20K baht. If I spend that on a built box I can get a Intel Core2Duo (2.4GHz) on a Gigabyte(31) motherboard with 1 GB RAM and onboard Gigabyte 512 MB video. Cheap monitor and keyboard included. I think I can do better building my own, but don't know where to begin. (Approximately equivalent iMac is 42K baht.)

I've searched a bit, but the most recent linux motherboard guide dates from 2006. I suspect things have changed since then.

TIA

[slackula]

Welcome to Thai Visa

What is it about the iMac that makes you feel the need to replace it, and what do you use it for? If you haven't moved up to Leopard yet you may find it gives the machine a new lease of life.

To get better answers to your question it might be an idea to post how much experience you have with Linux, state of the art hardware can be hard to configure for the inexperienced user so buying hardware that is not brand new to the market can sometimes be better as the Linux people have had time to write drivers and so on for it.

[Ratsima]

The Mac is a G4 1 GHz model that is five years old. It's slow. We use FUS and there are generally three users logged in. I also run a web cam and have torrents running most of the time. CPU load is very high, lots of pageouts and disk thrashing. I have installed Leopard and found it to be the most troublesome Mac OS ever. (A whole other story.)

I think I have enough 'nix experience to make a go of it. I first started using unix back in the late 80's. I've installed and used Linux before. (Even managed to get it to drive old token-ring cards....) I'm no expert, but I do manage to download and compile unix source code to run o the Mac.

Thanks for your help.

[Ratsima]

Processes:  106 total, 3 running, 103 sleeping... 362 threads           07:04:56
Load Avg:  3.18,  1.85,  1.29    CPU usage: 99.75% user,  0.25% sys,  0.00% idle
PhysMem:  245M wired,  785M active,  332M inactive, 1361M used,  175M free.
VM: 68G + 0   346073(25) pageins, 62013(0) pageouts

[autonomous_unit]

If you are looking for "bang for buck" you could try assembling a custom PC from parts?

In my experience, AMD is much better performance for the same money in the low-mid range. If I were shopping for your situation, I'd be looking for a basic everything-integrated micro-ATX motherboard that has socket AM2+/AM2 support and a Phenom triple or quad-core processor. A whole system would be just: CPU, motherboard, RAM, disks, case and power supply. The motherboard would have on-board graphics, SATA controller, ethernet, USB, etc. I've had luck finding boards with DVI output for attaching my LCD. Almost all such boards will still have a PCIe graphics slot in case you later want to install a faster graphics adapter. The main trade-off with micro-ATX is fewer PCI slots, but who needs them in a low-budget system?

Even when shopping for parts locally in Bangkok, I've found it extremely useful to use the "power search" function on www.newegg.com (USA reseller) to do research on available boards and features. Browse to motherboards/AMD CPU support/power search; then you can select different motherboard features and do a search to see how many results come back. There are so many parts on the market, I'd be lost without this sort of data. Of course, availability may differ, but it helps to have a short list of desired parts.

If there are budget issues, you could consider a socket AM2 board (without AM2+ support), as the Phenom works in both. The downside is you would be stuck with DDR2 memory speeds for the life of the system, whereas you could install DDR3 with the AM2+ bus support. Of course, DDR2 is cheaper, so that may be sufficient for this system... it seems to me you should be able to get a system with Phenom quad-core, 2-4 GB of RAM, micro-ATX board, case+PSU, and one or two SATA disks for your budget.

Given the types of load you are describing, several modest cores will give you more system throughput than a higher-clocked dual core. You're the perfect customer for lots of cores, really. I think most people recommend installing the 64-bit variant of LInux these days, as the "compatibility" support for running a smattering of 32-bit applications has improved, and the base system will be faster. This 32-bit issue only matters if you need to run 3rd-party binaries rather than the pre-built programs from the Linux distrbution.

[Ratsima]

^Thanks. Great post from which to begin.

[nomit76]

Or you could try installing Linux on your iMac, most PowerPC (PPC) distros should work fine on your G4.

If it's not fast enough at least you can try it out

[Ratsima]

I did run the Ubuntu "live" CD on my iMac. It was just fine....

[RigPig]

Try this mob for parts, they will deliver and I've had no trouble so far.....

Prices are good too and 1/2 of it is in English!

http://www.advice.co.th/