[rescue] Looking to rescue a PC

[Mark Benson]

On 20 Feb 2010, at 15:10, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> On Feb 19, 2010, at 8:06 PM, Scott Newell <newell at cei.net> wrote:
>
>> Servers worry me a bit; are the non-rackmount boxes noisy, and do they have
parallel ports?
>
> Non-rackmount servers "tend" to be quiet, designed for office areas, not
server rooms (typically)... Airflow is much easier to manage in a tower case.
Dell is the brand I know, I have laid hands on SC1600, SC1425, SC400-series,
and others, they were reasonably quiet - the T605 dual-quad Opteron is loud.
Get out of the room, you can still hear it in the hallway loud - but mine will
live in the basement.
>
> The machine I wrote about is a precision D420 I think - it has AGP graphics,
which may be fine for your desired 2-D graphics. Also, it takes only
accomodates the thinnest of HDs internally, but it has a couple 5 1/4" bays
for normal height HDs.

If you are looking at tower servers and Dell (probably applies across the
board) then avoid the ones with P4era Xeons in the upper speed brackets. We
have a single CPU HT 3.0 Poweredge 1800 at work, it's not loud by server
standards but sure as hell I wouldn't want to work next to it. In comparison
the new T610 I installed in December is as quite as a mouse, the sound of the
disks and fans on that is drowned out by the fan on the LTO3 Tape drive sat on
top of it ;)

--
Mark Benson

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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."