[geeks] Phenom (was Holy Cow! OpenSolaris on a retail laptop?!?!?!?!)

[Lionel Peterson]

On Dec 19, 2008, at 8:21 PM, Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>  
wrote:

> On Dec 19, 2008, at 12:27 , nate at portents.com wrote:
>
>>>  As a side note, anyone ever monkey with the AMD Phenom 9100e CPUs  
>>> (4x
>>>  core at 1.8 GHz)?
>>
>> Phenoms models which aren't a xx50 series means it's a pre-B3  
>> stepping
>> (i.e. has the TLB erratum, which is typically worked-around in the  
>> BIOS by
>> disabling the TLB, lowering performance).  I'd recommend avoiding  
>> any xx00
>> Phenoms.  A Phenom 9150e is at least 10% faster than a 9100e  
>> because it is
>> a B3 stepping without the TLB design flaw.
>>
>> The rest of the specs you list for the price are 'eh'.  (Personally  
>> I'd
>> always rather build a PC with exactly the parts I want, which comes  
>> out to
>> about the same price, but that's me.)
>
> Doing the math from newegg prices, I get a higher price for DIY.
>
> I would still prefer to do my own, but I wonder how you arrive at a  
> cheaper price than $400?

I can "DIY" a cheaper machine if I:

  - give up quad core
  - give up WiFi
  - give up modem(?)
  - give up Vista Home Premium O/S
  - and I don't care about being able to grow past 4 Gig RAM

The hard points on this system (to me) are:

  - small, quiet box
  - HDMI output
  - Gigabit NIC
  - supports over 4 Gigs of RAM
  - available PCIe 16x graphics slot
  - PCIe 1x and two PCI slots
  - SATA RAID
  - Supports Hyper-V/ESXi (not sure about disk controller support  
under ESXi, but a supported one could be added I assume)
  - includes O/S

I don't think this is the best deal ever, I think it is interesting.

Lionel