I've talked about the mobo being blown out on my rig and the xeon box is a pile and draws too much energy for what it puts out. Currently I have..... Laptops. Lots and lots of laptops. And a 2006 imac but I don't find that one very useful ATM. Does anyone have an idea for me to set something up with:
an Asus G50VT-X5 A netbook A lenovo B575 A 2006 imac (i guess why not) An IBM 600X an HP NW8000 And a small form factor machine that has less power draw but still has a pentium 4.
Any idea that does not involving breaking my things with a hammer or related equivalents is appreciated.
It depends. What is the nature of the work you need to accomplish? Many of us overestimate the computing power required to complete certain tasks. Speed is always nice, but resurrecting an old dusty computer can be a rewarding experience.
I would say the Asus G50 is probably your best bet. Like @Sihastru said though, we often end up with a lot more power than we really need so a C2D might be enough. There's also some pretty inexpensive upgrade options for that as well.
You could always sell the G50, the seem to go for around the $200-$300 mark on eBay as of right now, and then just use the funds from that to replace the motherboard for your original rig.
Could, though the problem is I have an APU that is just as powerful as a pentium M and then Pentium M's and all that old shit.
My main goal is a setup that I can Game, Edit Video, Watch Youtube, do some Code, and have the OS be snappy. I'm looking at options for my Xeon box and I'm looking at upgrades for another machine that I have. If my main rig didn't crap out this wouldn't be an issue :P I was thinking use Unity for mouse and keyboard control on many machines and have all the monitors be just separate boxes? I dunno yet. Its brewing.
Sell everything and put together a Dual Lga 1366 machine. These really are a better deal than those 2670's that everyone has been running around talking about. You can get 2 * 6 cores (which DO overclock) and a motherboard for ~$300. If you have any ddr3 you can throw that in or just buy registered ECC off of eBay for pennies.
You would probably want a sound card and a usb card to throw in, but otherwise this is a really powerful solution. I've seen people get these six cores close to 1500 points in Cinebench R15 with some overclocking and tuning. That is a hell of a lot of power for the price. The motherboard being so much cheaper than the LGA 2011 stuff really keeps costs down.
You can only get six cores on the 5600 series over the 5500. The motherboard costs of a Dual GA 1366 are far lower than 2011. Really you can get them for less than $100 if you want a board with less features. You can't get a standard form factor Dual 2011 board for less than $250, and the one you get at $250 is going to have way less than the $100 1366 board. There's been a craze around those 2011 boards and the prices have undoubtedly risen a good bit because of it.
Ah. Makes sense. I've been eyeing the 2011 setup for a while, but it's just too expensive to justify right now, so that's why I'm asking about the 1366 stuff. Sounds like a pretty damn good setup.
The cpu's cost about as much, but the boards really are just a lot cheaper. The only thing that sucks which is specific to the 1366 over the 2011 is the lack of Sata 3. The 1366 boards only sport Sata 2 which is 3.0Gbps, which means that it would be worth it to some to grab a cheapo hba off of ebay or amazon
I've got SSD's in all my rigs, but that's just for OS. The user data and games is all connected by 10G copper from my zfs array. ssd cached 8x4TB raidz2
Strip the Lenovo or the least shitty and obsolete laptop to bare MB, slap one of this things http://ebay.to/2bZE70E, slap a RX4XX or any fancy GPU of your liking that can't bottheneck your machine, max out the ram, slap some SSD's and put all inside a nice package like a cardboard box with spiderman stickers, or the SFF pc :) . You can reuse any of the laptop screens with something like this http://ebay.to/2chHSAT and slap it to the side of the pc case, and have the ultimate kickass ultraportable DIY lanparty PC :D
About the mac, yeaaahhh, if it's a PowerPC there's barely nothing you can do with that, at least store crap & make it a "cybervault" of some sort.
If you're lazy and don't want to do crazy things, you can sell it all and fund a cheap PC.
I have my asus AM3+ board that I'm not going to be using anymore, it's destined for e-recycling atm. The audio doesn't work, there's some cooling fluid that needs to be cleaned off and a shorted out pci-e slot that you definitely want to remove. But it was working just fine before I shut it down to take apart. ( - burning smell) If you want it it's yours.
