[plug] Building new box. Best bang /$ ?

[Craig Ringer]

Garry wrote:

>I built a Athon 800 box 10 Months ago and have had no probs. Plenty fast
>for my uses at least.
>
>Used an Asus A7V, 256 Mb ram, LS120, IDE CDR.. No dramas.
>
All hail the A7V!
Got to say that the EPoX 8KTA133Pro is a great board too, thats what we 
use in all our servers here at work. No its not a server board - all our 
servers are duron based, believe it or not.

>
>
>A mate of mine built one a couple of weekends ago, with an Asus with
>Raid 0 and a Athlon 1Ghz, but his is only running Win2k. With the
>Athlons pushing 1k4 or 1k5, 1k or 1k2 chips are getting cheap.. He
>managed to spend $1600 on the parts, but that was new everything, incl
>two 20Gb ATA100 drives, and without checking prices, from Austin.
>
>Think Asus or Abit should suit..
>
>Memory is very cheap right now too. 8^)==
>
You're mad not to get 256mb of RAM. I'd consider going overboard and 
getting 512 on the theory that it can't hurt and its so awfully cheap 
(and isn't looking like staying that way). I just bought 512MB of RAM 
for $120 @austin - and I already had 128! As I do a *lot* of 
multitasking, graphics work, etc the difference is beyond belief as on 
average I have 256mb of RAM dedicated to disk caching :-)

>
>
>HTH
>
>Garry.
>