Chosing a new PC

[John Stumbles]

Looks like my current PC has some weird hardware problem that's behind the problems I've been moaning about with my graphics resolution. (I tried a brand new ATI card and the PC wouldn't even POST-beep; took it back to Novatech who said it worked fine on their rig. Coupled with other strangeness I think it's new PC time.)

Novatech have a variety of 'bare bones' units (just add HDD and DVD) from about £120 up, and ebuyer, dabs and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all are in the market too; and there's a bewildering variety of kit to choose from.

One thing I'm wondering is if it's worth going for a machine with a lot of RAM - which AIUI requires a 64 bit CPU to access if it's over

2^ bytes - and running some sort of virtualisation s/w so I can run different OSes or versions of an OS simultaneously rather than multi- booting. That way I can try out a new distro or version of my current distro without sawing off the branch I'm currently sitting on. Am I right in thinking xen is the virtualisation code du jour for Linux distros? (I can live without running windoze on this machine.) So would an AMD64 be the CPU to go for?

In terms of tin and copper, I'd like a machine that can house at least 3 HDDs (as well as a DVD drive, natch), and that runs quietly and uses as little power as possible (since the machine will run 24*7). I gather the ones with variable-speed fans in the PSUs are quieter (when not running at full load, presumably).

My typical use of the machine is

• web browsing (currently I have several dozen pages open in different windows and tabs in firefox/iceweasel and usually have a dozen or so more in chrome)

• office (OOo) apps - about half a dozen docs open

• maybe a few PDFs

• some images in a viewer (gwenview)

• file browsing - say a dozen konqueror/dolphin windows/tabs

• text file editing - few dozen files open in kate, some in kwrite

• jpilot, xsane, gimp, maybe a music player and other odds & sods

So altogether a lot of apps eating up memory. Maybe another reason for loadsa RAM and 64bits?

And occasionally I'll do some video or audio file conversion e.g. editing and then converting a DV video to H264 or FLV; or suchlike.

Graphics-wise I've a 19" CRT which I like to cram as much onto as possible and within the life of the machine I expect to replace it with a similar-sized or larger LCD. So I want some high-resolution modes. And I watch and edit videos, but I don't do gaming, so I guess I don't need fancy 3-D acceleration or whatever.

On that basis I'm thinking this one from Novatech might be OK

note that it can do 8G RAM but only comes with 2, as 2*2G modules using up both slots, so if I wanted more I'd have to see if they'd do it at time of sale otherwise I'd be throwing away the existing 2G modules to install 4G ones.

Comments? Especially from a Linux perspective?

[Tabby]

- and running some sort of virtualisation s/w so I can

I just try them using a live disc, and if that goes ok then putting it on a secondary pc. It avoids any muckabout with the main machine.

One thing I've conistently noticed is that its RAM limits that usually make PCs past their sell by dates. Lacking the ability to fit 8x the amount of RAM required on day 1 shortens its life, so that suggests a

64 bit machine would last longer.

I cant see that being a problem. You can always put dvd on PATA if needed.

In practice no, fan design characteristics make far more difference than speed control. Better to look at dB specs or listen to the units.

Even a basic 128M card should manage enough resolution to run a 19" monitor in native res.

Looks like an impressive deal for the money, and novatech are a pretty reliable company. RAM expandability limits are poor on most new boards, 8G limit isnt too bad.

NT

[Andy Burns]

Upgraded my WinXP 32bit laptop to Win7 64bit, for a start that means it can use all 4 GB rather than 3.whatever GB, partly offset by all code being larger due to 64 bit address space, but with Win7 it does seem to actually make use of all memory better than WinXP.

I'm using VirtualBox it's free and more flexible than MS Virtual PC

I use Xen both at home and at work, but can't help thinking that KVM is the really the hypervisor of choice nowadays.

Yes look for 4-pin fans and connectors.

[Bernard Peek]

It looks to be a perfectly adequate PC for today's requirements. The 8Gb memory limit could be a problem in the near future. Bear in mind that to expand it to 8Gb you probably have to throw away the 2Gb sticks it already has. If you get a MB with 4 memory slots you can start with

2x2Gb then expand it by adding 2x4Gb. That's what I did although I used an Intel i5 based board.

[Adrian]

John Stumbles gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

4Gb, and it's 64bit OS rather than CPU.

Probably not, but double-check that Compiz supports the graphics. I love Compiz.

[Tim Watts]

Andy Burns ( [e-mail]) wibbled on Saturday 12 March 2011

07:26:

It's going that way - I find KVM a lot nicer to work with.

But Sun/Oracle VirtualBox is very nice too, free for personal use.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The Gimp chews ram video conversion chews CPU

Sounds like you want what I have times about ten...

That's what I said till I discovered Eternal Lands on Linux..sigh..

Still the £30 graffix card was cheaper than having to BUY a game or a subscription.

I go here:

arrived at a similar spec but different layout.

1/. ALL my data of any importance live on a separate server. This changes every 5 years or so.. Currently its a linux engine on a cheap low power ATOM bard with no video, no screen, no CD-ROM bugger all RAM and tow of the biggest disks I could get in. Half of one is my data, and my wife's, the other half is full of videos we record off air. The other is a backup of our data mirrored every night plus backups of any other desktop machines or other machines I add to the list. I think it cost me £200 or so.

2/. The current desktop is short of CPU, short of RAM and less than two years old. It's an entry level INTEL dual core board, 4GB or RAM and an NVidia graffix card. Cheapest I could get. It runs Debian Lenny 64 bit, with a virtual box for windows XP for the legacy shit I still need. Today I'd go for 8, or 16 Gigs or RAM and as much power as I could afford. It has the smallest disk I could buy, and a DVD burner. And put a later installation - squeeze? on it.

3/. Problems I have had have been:-

- in getting suitable drivers for the scanner and printers.

- Running out of RAM especially when running a virtual XP AND the Gimp.

- getting anything more than barely adequate performance out of inboard Intel chipset, solved with Nvidia graphics card.

- running out of cycles when doing BIG graphics or video manipulations.

What I found was that things never thought I would be doing, became things I now do a lot. Like multimedia manipulations.

Things I thought I would be doing - using old windows stuff on a virtual machine - I hardly do at all now. Windows is simply a program launcher for two Programs - Corel Draw and Rhino CAD.

DO consider - however you arrange things - some sort of backup policy. Even if it's not a total crash, I have found the 'oh bugger I didn't mean to delete that' - followed by 'oh well I'll just fetch last nights backup copy' to be a useful boon.

Likewise the ability to totally restore windows in seconds,if as often happens it gets buggered beyond repair, is wonderful. Virtual box worked better than VMware for me - screen driver is local, not a browser plugin, so its faster..

And, if the server is tucked away..if some tea leaf nicks your shiny desktop machine, chances are its only money, not invaluable data..happened to me that way once, hence my decision to put everything important in a boring looking cheap box.

So as far as the desktop goes - 64 bit, as fast as you can afford, and with RAM as cheap as it is, stuff it full.

Put a cheap Nvidia card in it. You wont regret that.

Don't buy printers and scanners till you check the CUPS and SANE driver situation first.

Either put in twin disks and mirror them, or a separate server crammed full of disk. Videos take space!

Most useful addition has been DVB dongle (hauppage) to watch TV whilst wittering on Usenet ;-) Does need a decent aerial tho:-).

[Tom Anderson]

fails to mention PAE, which is still highly relevant for the amounts of memory we have today. PAE adds four bits to the hardware memory address on a 32-bit machine, meaning a chip with it can address 16 times more memory than a purely 32-bit machine, ie 64 GB. 64 GB should be enough for anyone.

Individual processes can still only address 32 bits' worth, but you can fit more of them in memory at once, and keep them away from video memory, etc.

What i don't know is that it's still possible to buy chips with PAE. As Alex says, it's hard to find a chip that isn't 64-bit these days. Unless you're buying a netbook.

This is annoying - a system with a 64-bit chip pays the 64-bit tax of having to have pointers be twice as large (mostly - if you run 64-bit software at least; an honourable mention goes to Java, which can use

32-bit pointers on a 64-bit system to address up to 32 GB), which means it makes less efficient use of the memory it has. In the 4 - 64 GB range, a 32-bit CPU with PAE makes better use of memory and memory bandwidth than a 64-bit one (as long as you can live with the 4 GB limit on processes). On the flip side, the 64-bitness of the registers only gives a speed boost to code that specifically needs to manipulate wide operands - cryptography, scientific computing, perhaps some SIMD-based graphics operations. For most use today, 32-bit+PAE should be faster than 64-bit. And yet, the market has moved almost entirely over to 64-bit. Grr.

No, i think Xen is a bit of an also-ran now. At work, we use:

- VMWare ESX; only the infrastructure guys use it directly, and seem to like it, but everything they tell me makes me think it's complete crap (we occasionally have the virtual DNS server lock up because we're doing a complex query on the virtual Oracle server; it takes hours to clone an image even on a RAID array; management is through some runty cut-down version of Linux running underneath everything)

- VirtualBox; works nicely for simple uses, is awkward for more complex uses, nicely interoperable with the Mac (ie we can make an image on Linux and run it on a Mac)

- QEMU/KVM; works nicely, simple and so powerful to manage, does require unixy skills to make the most of it (last time i used it - the GUIs might be pretty good now), doesn't have the nice networking options that VirtualBox does (QEMU pretty much requires a bridged network, which is a minor nightmare; VirtualBox will do its own virtual network with NAT, which is lovely)

I prefer the userland-based options (VirtualBox and QEMU) to the hypervisor-based ones (Xen and VMWare) because they don't involve having some random dwarf operating system in control of your hardware. The userland options use a perfectly normal OS as the host, which will mean less trouble finding drivers, configuring things, etc.

If i was in your position, i would install a sensible middle-of-the-road Linux on the physical machine, then install QEMU/KVM, and run things on top of that. I'd use Fedora for the host, because it's solid enough, gets updates at a good rate, and benefits from Red Hat's ownership of KVM.

Although to be honest, i would probably actually *not* run things on top of that, because i'm a confirmed Fedora fan!

tom

[Bruce Stephens]

[...]

IIUC the 64 bit instruction set has lots more registers (not just bigger ones), and that's a significant benefit for lots of applications.

[...]

[Daniel James]

Barebones setups can be cost-effective (but compare with the prices of the individual components to be sure) and should have been competently assembled and have received a basic burn-in test from the dealer, which is all to the good.

However, you get more control over the actual selection of components if you build yourself, and PC assembly these days is almost as easy as Lego. Barebones bundles tend to be built to a price, so you may prefer to choose your own components ... particularly as you say you're concerned about power consumption.

It's always worth having the ability to expand to a lot of RAM, even if you don't need/use it straight away.

32-bit CPUs can handle 2^32 bytes (4GB) of address space at a time. Some of the address space is mapped to video, network, PCI, etc., so you'll find that typically 3.5GB or less is available for RAM. Some Intel CPUs/chipsets support a feature called PAE (Physical Address Extension) which allows them to support more physical RAM which can be mapped by the OS so that the 2^32 limit applies per-process and not to the system overall (server versions of Windows support this, as does Linux (but you may need to rebuild the kernel)).

If you have a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit OS you can support more RAM ... IIRC current x86-64 chips only support a 2^48 byte physical address space, but that's 256TB which is thousands of times more than any current motherboard supports.

"Consumer" motherboards usually have 2 or 4 RAM slots that may hold DIMMs of 2GB or 4GB (the largest DIMM I've seen is 16GB, which costs a bomb and not all boards can use it). Motherboards with 3-channel memory support (e.g. Intel socket 1366 boards) may have 6 RAM slots for up to

24GB (at sensible cost) with a 64-bit OS.

The other way to do it is to have removable hard drives in bays, so that you can always try out a new distro on a clean drive without having dual-boot partitioning. Virtualization is nice though (I still have to pinch myself when I cat/paste data between applications running under different OSes).

I use VirtualBox on Debian AMD64 ... I think it's a bit less /du jour/ now that Oracle own it, but it works well.

I run Win7 and XP in VMs.

Just about every current x86 CPU I can think of (except some Atoms and VIA CPUs) runs the AMD64 instruction set, whether it's from AMD or Intel (who call it EMT64, but it's the same thing). It's more usually called x86-64 nowadays.

If you meant "Would a 64-bit AMD CPU be the CPU to go for" then it depends. AMD chips are good value at the low end of the range and tend to be more power-economical, the fastest CPUs are Intel, but tend to be power-hungry.

Have you seen the HP Microserver box, which is currently available for between £200 and £250 (depending on configuration and where you buy it) and is eligible for a £100 cashback from HP until the end of the month? It's discussed in more detail in another thread here.

comes without an OS -- just add $DISTRO of choice (and a USB keyboard and mouse, and a monitor, and maybe a DVD drive).

It has limited expansion but it's incredibly cheap, for what it is, and ticks a number of your boxes. Only two memory slots for up to 4GB of DDR3 ECC memory each, but with 2x4GB would have plenty of memory for your proposed usage (even in a VM or two).

I gather it will work with non-ECC memory, but as the board supports ECC I'd recommend using it ... it pays to be safe.

I've been spoiled by a client who provided 24" monitors for all developers, and had to buy one myself. I have a Dell U240 (IPS panel) which is lovely, but I've also been very impressed by a Nec EA241WM 24", that I bought for SWMBO, which is cheaper and also provides a very good image.

Most 24" monitors are now 1920x1080 (16:9 ratio) but these two are both

1920:1200 (16:10) which will give a little more vertical height, which is useful for text editing. Both have USB hubs built in, the Dell also has an SD card reader while the Nec has (rather tinny) speakers.

[Invisible Man]

>> - and running some sort of virtualisation s/w so I can

OK

> I note that it can do 8G RAM but only comes with 2, as 2*2G modules using

I had a couple of PCs and a laptop from Novatec but after some research my latest PC came from Chillblast about 14 months ago and has had absolutely no problems whatsoever. I opted for the "Quiet cooling fans Upgrade Pack" and it is pretty quiet. I have had no reason to investigate what is on the market since I bought it. I tend to go for a high spec with heaps of RAM because previously I have found that updating odd bits tends to cause bottlenecks in other places. I have little experience of Linux which I only use on an ageing laptop. Windows 7 is not bad once you have tweaked it to do things the way you want them done. Some software did not like 64 bit.

[The Natural Philosopher]

64 bit code is a bit larger, because it carries 64 bit entities...but that's usually more than made up for by the faster speed of computation.

Linux wise the only real downside is dealing with legacy 32 bit code which doesn't always work, especially if its a 3rd party kernel module :-(

[Theo Markettos]

When I looked at the market about 6 months ago, the sweet spot on power/performance was the Intel i3 (530 at that time). The then-current AMD chips were all on a 45nm process which took more power, while the i-series are on 32nm. The i3 also brings in the video controller to the same package (at 45nm). The H55/H57 motherboard chipsets allow the use of the integrated graphics, so you don't need to spend 20-30W on a graphics card if you're not doing any gaming - but you can add a separate graphics card later if you want. The P55 motherboards require an additional video card.

The only difficulty is that most of the H55 boards are micro-ATX, so don't have many PCI/PCI-E or memory slots for expansion.

Some of the i5s also have integrated graphics as well, though I haven't looked at those so much for price reasons.

It seems that all large panels are now 1920x1080, and there isn't much of a price difference between 21" and 26", so just pick whichever size you prefer.

Theo

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not normally a problem since most stuff tends to be USB these days..or already built n..

IIRC in X windows you CAN rotate the display 90 degrees, if you can prop the monitor on edge..

[John Stumbles]

Heh, yes: BTDTGTTS

I have a home-brewed rsync snapshot backup/archive system to an external

2TB HDD. I've lost count of the number of times I've smugly trawled through the daily/weekly/yearly backups to find a version of the file I wanted before it got deleted or corrupted from the main drive ...

... until a week ago when my OS (Debian in this case) got thoroughly shagged up and I had to ask myself why, with an almost entire backup of my 1.5TB home drive, I'd skimped on the OS drive and only backed up its config files :-(

[geoff]

Near future ?

[Tony Houghton]

I heard the 64-bit ISA is especially beneficial to video processing, which the OP did mention as one of his uses for the new PC. I presume one of the major advantages is that the "lowest common denominator" of FP/SSE/MMX is a lot newer for 64-bit than 32-bit.

Also, nearly all Linux software is compiled with gcc. This is a lot of conjecture on my part, but gcc was originally designed for Unix workstations with better architectures with more registers, and it used to generate quite poor IA32 code because of the lack of registers. I think that was one of the things that egcs aimed to improve, but AIUI gcc's IA32 code generation still isn't great, while the greater number of registers in amd64 should help it generate better code. So what I'm saying is that 64-bit should be a bigger win for Windows (where there are still very few 64-bit applications anyway) than Linux.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Okk..

So what I'm

Surely you mean the exact opposite?

[Tony Houghton]

Oops, yes.

[Bruce Stephens]

[...]

That's my guess. It's worth mentioning that (I suspect) 64 bit code spends most of its time handling 32 bit data (the benefits being the saner instruction set and the extra registers).

In C-terms int is still 32 bit (and on Windows so is long). It's only longs (on Windows long longs) and pointers that are 64 bit. So it's certainly not the case that a 64 bit program will take twice as much memory as a 32 bit equivalent; an array of 1000 ints is the same size in both.

Yes, but how often does that happen? It's worth stressing that 64-bit linux kernels can (unless you deliberately disable the feature) run

32-bit binaries (presuming that the necessary 32-bit libraries are available, and distros make that easy to arrange).

My guess is that nowadays most people will be better off running 64-bit for the most part (with the occasional 32-bit app). (I think the only

32-bit GNU/Linux application I have now is google earth, now that 64-bit flash is available.)