On Sunday 04 February 2007 06:34:56 am Stephen P. Molnar, Ph.D. wrote: > I am currently running SuSE v9.3 on an old, slow 32bit CPU and am > contemplating several upgrades in sequence. I would appreciate some > advise as I am definitely not a hardware person and primarily run other > folks scientific software (I have a research program in computational > chemistry) rather than write my own.
Are you keeping this older system intact? Are you adding an additional system? Why bother upgrading an old case if you have to swap out the power supply, mainboard, cpu, memory, SATA for IDE drives, DVD burner for CD, etc? May as well add a system and keep this old one as online backup space, music server, etc. The old memory won't do the new CPU justice and may cause nasty headaches because its too slow, aren't matched pairs, etc. Budget for new monitor? If not, get a 2-port KVM switch to run both systems. > The CPU I'm looking at is the AMD Athlon 64 3500+. The motherboard is a > MSI K9N Neo-F, MS-7260 Ver 1.0 K9N nForce 550 (I don't know anything > about hardware, but I can copy a label). Check at NewEgg.com for customer reviews on any of the new products you are considering. Should give you something to go on as far as possible issues you may run into, problems or successes others have had, etc. > The motherboard only has one PCI slot for a master and a slave. My > current linux box has 3 HD's, but I'm prepared to give one up (keep it as > a spare for my Win XP machine). There are 4 SATA connections, but I know > nothing about them. I presume that any hard drive connected to one of > those must be a SATA HD, or is there some sort of adapter? Also, what > about DC/DVD drive how would that be connected? I have an old CD drive > on the linux box now, but am willing to upgrade it to a DVD. May as well get a case and power supply for all this. As others mention go SATA for HDDs. A single IDE mainboard connector is good enough for optical devices such as a DVD burner. Lightscribe capable if that is of any interest. > Sorry to have asked so many low level questions, but, as I said, I'm not > a hardware person. No problem. You answer any newbie questions I have about computational chemistry and we'll call it even. > Thanks in advance. > Stephen P. Molnar, Ph.D. Stan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
