[ale] New system...

[Brian Pitts]

Robert L. Harris wrote:
> 
> Seems one of my systems is dying.  Can't complain since it's been 
> humming along for about
> 4-5 years without issue and about 5 house moves.
> 
> At any rate, I need to find a very cheap replacement.  It only needs to 
> run iptables, apache2
> and a couple little daemons.  I've looked at the bare bones systems from 
> newegg but they all
> seem to have great prices but again, being barebones, nothing in them.  
> I've got a very limited
> budget to get one or two systems up and running, but they have very 
> little requirements other
> than two drives to mirror(software) and run linux.

If you want to build rather than buy used, the AMD Athlon 64 LE-1600
2.2GHz 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor seems like a
steal at $35 [0]. You can find plenty of socket AM2 motherboards with
integrated video for less than $50. A 512mb stick of DDR2 RAM costs less
than $20. A case and power supply should cost less than $50. If you need
an optical drive, a DVD-RW is less than $25. The most expensive part of
building a new system might be the hard drives. Low capacity ones aren't
much cheaper than larger ones; e.g. a 160GB drive costs around $50 and a
500GB drive costs around $90.

So new is doable with two hard drives for around $250.

As others have pointed out, there are plenty of places that will sell
you older hardware for cheap. For example, Ginstar has Intel P3-1.0GHz
/256 /20GB for $80 [1].

[0] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103199
[1] http://www.ginstar.com/productList.aspx?category=40

-Brian