On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 08:52:05PM +0100, AG wrote: > If I was to plan to build the "perfect" system from scratch, using a > motherboard bundle (with up to 8GB DDR RAM), top line graphics card, > ditto sound card that would allow connection with an external amp to > jive up the sound quality - what might this thing of technological > beauty be?
Obsolete by the time you build it? Top-line sound card isn't a sound card at all. They are usually a card connected to an external box (better sound quality, all the analog stuff outside of the noisy computer case). Two years ago, I build a box: Asus M2M-SLI MB (built-in sound), 8 SATA ports, two gigabit ethernet ports, 10 USB, yada, yada. Athlon 3800+ 1 GB ram. never had the need to expand. Asus EN7300GT silent 256 MB video (nvidia). Two Seagate SATA drives. LG DVD burner. Hooked up to my 21" Intergraph drafting monitor. --- The sound was great through the stereo. The video was great with the nVidia kernel module (etch non-free) and the dvd codecs from debian-multimedia.org. VLC was able to have the hardware resize the image from a 1024x768 box to 1600x1...@75hz with hardware smoothing. In short, it did everything I wanted it to do. ---- I had the 3800+ because the X2 wasn't quite available yet. Now everything has muliple cores, 8GB ram is common, terabytes of storage are near and dear to many (yet backing that much data up to something reliable is an issue, as is software raid sync time). ---- Determine what you want the box to do. If its only watching movies, most new computers with a decent video card will do that as is and isn't anything special. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org