Cheap amd64 system?

Gary Jennejohn garyj at jennejohn.org
Tue Jan 27 13:03:08 PST 2004


Marc van Woerkom writes:
> I would love to join development, is there cheap hardware
> available already?
> 

Depends on what you buy. Cheap is a socket 754 box with an AMD64 3000+
(only 512MB of cache and 2GHz clock).

> E.g. is it possible to take my old amd-k7 box and
> just replace mainboard and perhaps ram to have
> a usable amd64 system?
> 

That's what I did. In fact, I'm still using some of my old
PC2100 RAM in the box since the Infineon DDR400 DIMM I bought
runs at CL3 and is slow as molasses. I did some tests and noticed
only a few percentage points speed increase using the Infineon DIMM
by itself. Since I wanted more memory I just stuck an old DIMM in
with the new one.

> How much money must I save at least?
> 

I also had to buy a new power supply since my old one didn't have
the funky 4-pole connector on it which all modern motherboards seem
to require (AFAIK mostly to support the ridiculously power-hungry
graphics cards which no normal person would want to use anyway).

I payed about 450 Euros a few weeks ago for mobo, CPU and PSU.
YMMV.

> Is it necessary to put in more than 4gigs of RAM,
> to test the system adequatley?
> 

No. What really needs work, like 32 bit emulation, doesn't require
a lot of memory.

---
Gary Jennejohn / garyj[at]jennejohn.org gj[at]freebsd.org gj[at]denx.de



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