[rescue] GX270s.

[Ray Arachelian]

On 09/04/2010 12:19 AM, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> My "group" has about 200+ GX270s in daily use around the public school district, as they die they are replaced with other GX270s in storage until they also die. We may run Win7 on them with 2 Gigs of RAM (they'll take up to 4 Gigs, and they have a (one) SATA port on the MB), and the onboard graphics will support Aero. The caps still blow-up, but until they do, these are solid workhorse computers.
>
> I didn't say I would buy one at $129, I said they were selling (as in being offered and I assume selling) - the value is in the eye of the buyer.
>   

Yeah, personally at $129, I'd look at buying a mobo/cpu combo instead. 
Perhaps some of the ATOM line.  Yes, I know, ATOMs are supposed to be
low end toys, but a 7 year old PC is unlikely to have more CPU power
than a brand new toy.  :-)

For example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856119025 is only
$129 right now, so throw in some RAM, a hard drive and maybe an optical
disk for another $100-$150, and you've got a really nice upgrade in a
very nice small form factor case.  Sure you wouldn't get all the PCI
slots, but then if price is the limiting factor, this isn't too bad, and
you'd get 64 bit support, gigabit ethernet, very low power consumption,
etc.  Of course there are other choices depending on the needs.

As a counter example:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=TCM52-MAR-3R&cat=SYS is only
$119 and is a Pentium 4 3.2GHz 1GB 80GB similar enough to that Dell, but
1GHz faster, and probably doesn't have the capacitor issue.

Sure, if you've got a closet full of GX270's for replacement, there's no
need to buy new, but if you've got no replacements and are looking to
buy, there's better options out there (the definition of better varies
depending on what your needs are of course.)

A few months ago, I bought two similar barebone Intel Atom boards, one
is in my living room as a Myth box, the other runs opensolaris as a file
server.  Both do a great job for what I need them for, and no exploding
caps. :)