Cost of a Bare-Bones Box?

[David O'Brien]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 10:43:04AM -0500, Chris BeHanna wrote:
>     Is it possible to build an Opteron-based box for under a grand, if
> I re-use my existing NIC, hard disks, and video board (will they even
> work?):
> 
>     Adaptec 3950U2B hosting a pair of LVD drives
>     Adaptec 2400A IDE RAID hosting a quartet of WD 120GB Sp. Editions
>     ATI Radeon 7200 (aka Radeon VIVO)
>     Netgear FA310TX serving the outside world
>     Netgear FA302T serving the inside LAN

All of this will work.

>     Can I re-use my 500W ATX power supply?  

Depends.  What power connections does it have?  At least the normal
20-pin power + 4-pin secondary power?  That is the mininum requirement.

> What about my 1GB stick of registered PC2100 ECC?

Yes.

> Can I get an SMP mobo and just stick one CPU on it for now?

Yes.  Also note that not all opteron mobos are SMP.  I quite like the 1P
Tyan Tomcat K8S s2850.

>     Can I re-use my tower ATX case?

Yes (depending on which board you get).

You can also build an Athlon64 machine, which would be cheaper and let
you use un-registered/buffered RAM.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)