.lol. There was a time when I'd be right up there with you listing parts mother boards and chips, can't beat putting together your own computer thats why Apple will never take over from standard computer systems. Had my super computer all drawn up back in the day, would have cost me a good £5000 to put together, after a while of saving I fell behind on it, things got upgraded, new tech came out and within half a year my super computer was more of a Clark Kent or Bruce Banner than anything with muscle.

Still....

How you going to have seperate operating systems without partitioning the drive? And whats the point anyway... if you're turning you back on Microsoft why not do it properly? Let us be revolutionary in everything we do here, out with Microsoft... show that work can be done without it thus boosting your self esteem and commitance to the U.W (ultimate workstation). If anything perhaps have XP on a seperate hard drive for the sake of nogalstia... something to laugh at every now and then.

You gonna hve three hard drives in one unit or use externals? Portability should be a function here, pointless something being able if its not move-able, at least in my opinion. Don't want to weigh it all down with unessary bits and peices, no moving parts with externals either, going to need a heat fan with all that processing power and stuff going unless you're hoping it could double as a frier, bring it to BBQ's or something.... noise will also be an issue.

Graphics cards might be a thing of the past soon enough, OnLive should be out at the end of the year, if not then fine. Need a decent sound card to go with it though should be able to hook it up to you stero at home... oh yeah, you could split your screen and be able to use your Tv as a monitor or at least have the option to do so. Watch Tv through the net etc.

Too out of touch with the industry to go into hardware really but there you go... software wise it would be good to be able to acess it virtually from another unit always a neat function.

@Shemsi

Not sure if you know this or not, if so disregard, but you are going to need an OS for the VMWare desktop product.

VMWare will not go on baremetal on anything that is not server class. It will do Linux how ever.

You also need to make you have SATA drives running at 7200 rpm at least.

Remember you are going to lose a TB on a RAID 5 config w/ your setup for parity. Plus only one drive can fail before it blows up. You may want to look at raid 1+0, you will have to buy one more drive, but two striped mirrors is good unless you can afford to somehow find a way to put Raid 5+0 on a workstation. I never have tried or even looked it up to see if it was possible

Something that a lot of people do not look @ :

* Backup in case some one steals your PC
* LCDs, how are you going to have a killer PC and a 14 inch monochrome monitor? @ least have a dual setup, you will never go back.
* Possibly another HDD controller for faster access to your HDDs because with RAid 5 your reads are fast, but your writes will depend on the controller.
* A security device that anchors the PC in case someone tries to steal it.

Replacing your PC is one thing, but data is something that can be lost for ever.

Well I would suggest that if you have access or have a friend that has access to Windows 2003 64 bit get that and 64 bit processors.

You would really be ahead of the curve.

You could use VMware to switch between multiple operating systems. I don't know how well it deals with multiple cores though and how well it shares the workload among them.

VMware Virtualization - Optimize IT Resources with Virtual Technology

I have a Linux book from 2001 that talks about the planned obsolescence of computer software. Let's face it. Most people don't know how to do useful stuff with as much processing power as we have now besides play games. So how do the hardware and software companies keep people spending money on computers? They put razzle dazzle junk in the software like puttin fins on automobiles in the 50s. This requires more processing power so people have to upgrade their hardware. The hardware and software companies make money. They don't even actually have to collude because they can both figure out the obvious. One hand washes the other.

I have mostly lost interest in upgrading to the latest stuff. The BLEEDING EDGE doesn't stay sharp very long and it costs too much money. Buy a used 2 year old computer and replace the hard drive. Spend 1/3rd as much money and it is plenty powerful.

I am actually more interested in netbooks. What can these things do to education? The educators should be scared spitless.

Gateway LT3100 netbook features 11.6-inch screen, AMD processor

um

I actually presently do work with WMWare that emulates Windows XP. It is great, and have only few minor issues getting it working as I wanted. When you set up the VM, you specify how much of the HDD, memory, and other resources you want it to consume on the host machine. The reason I had to go with a VM is because the host machine runs 64-bit Vista (which is crap). The machine has an Intel Q6700 quad core processor and 6 GB of RAM, and runs slower than my XP machine that still has a 1.6 GHz Celeron and 1 GB of memory. I couldn't put XP on it because XP doesn't support memory beyond 4GB, and doesn't even work well when it approaches that limit or with multiple processing cores.

The solution I have come up with is to have a light server OS to run multiple VMs and have a NAS backup for important files.





You are quite right, which is why I am trying to build a machine that will allow me to actually utilize more of the hardware's capability. I figure I would be able to maintain the computer and it would still be far beyond the average on the market for at least a half of a decade.

Quote:

Originally Posted by umbrarchist I am actually more interested in netbooks. What can these things do to education? The educators should be scared spitless.

Yeah, netbooks are cool. I am currently getting one for my wife at least.

You should try to see if your machine can receive VMWare bare metal.

The ESX host has its own OS that it uses so you will not have to load anything but WMWare first and then you can build VMs using the OS of your choice.

I don't think that dual quad-core i7's are required for keeping your machine powerful enough for 5 years of use. Also, 16-32GB of RAM is way more than just about anyone in existence uses on a personal machine unless you are doing 1080p realtime video rendering full time while running massive simulations on the same hardware. I manage servers at work (web hosting provider) that aren't that powerful.

First things first... The Xeon processor you linked to is not an i7 processor. It is a much cheaper (and slower) 3360 processor. The W5580 (the 3.2GHz version if the i7 Xeon) currently exceeds US$1,600 each. A server-class motherboard to support it would also hit around US$500+ as well. (Any motherboard with more than 1 processor will be considered "server class" and automatically have a jump in price.) Not to mention the fact that since all of these parts are still newly released products, availability will be scare, stability is not proven, you may be required to use Window 2008 instead of Windows 2003, and the prices will be highly inflated due to what many people call the "bleeding-edge" tax. However, if you decide to jump that high...

As far as the RAM goes, I'd suggest waiting a while before maxing it out up front. You should start off with a low number such as 6GB (6x1GB sticks since the memory is triple-channel), maybe 12GB (6x2GB sticks). Going for the really big sticks of RAM today will incur an insane "bleeding-edge" premium. Unless you are absolutely sure you will need that RAM today, I'd suggest waiting.

I've always been of the mindset of leaving all of the storage centralized on a separate machine. However, if this is your only machine, and the only place you will need to access the data, then building the RAID5 (or RAID 10) into your computer won't be much of an issue as long as you get a large case with plenty of ventilation (I personally use an Antec 900 for my fileserver).

Also, just about any new motherboard you buy today will come with Gigabit, especially if it supports dual- or quad-core processor(s). Firewire is getting harder to come by, but it is still available on some boards. Worse case scenario you can just buy a firewire card. And don't forget to get at least 800W power supply to power all of this.

Any particular reason why you want HD-DVD instead of BluRay? BluRay burners are available today and aren't that expensive (the cheap ones are around $75 and the expensive ones are around $250).

Finally, if you have a dual i7, there will not be any significant issue with having enough resources unless you have like 6 separate OSes running with each maxing out the processor. On a side note... Running 4 Microsoft OSes on the same machine (2003, XP, Vista, and 7) doesn't really "liberate you from the control of Microsoft".

All in all, you are looking at well over US$5000+ for this setup. (It would probably be cheaper to buy 3 or 4 smaller computers and network them together.) I would never spend that kind of money for a single machine (and I have a small network of computers at home). It is much cheaper to just upgrade various parts every so often as needed.