[ale] Is this a good deal

[Steve Litt]

On Sun, 03 Sep 2017 08:26:50 -0400
Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> It can probably have that steaming turd of an os wiped off.
> 
> I've had issues with dell and non-dell graphics cards not being
> recognized.
> 
> On September 2, 2017 8:29:00 PM EDT, Narahari 'n' Savitha
> <savithari at gmail.com> wrote:
> >https://goo.gl/uBQK8N  
> 

I wouldn't buy it. I priorize lots of RAM over a screaming fast
processor, and this thing has only 8GB of RAM.

A 1TB hard drive is pretty small for many activities today, including
storage of a lot of different qemu VM images.

And why the heck wifi on a tower case? It's not like it will move all
around the house: A network cable is more secure, and money spent on
the useless wifi receiver could have been spent on something more
needed (RAM, for instance).

Personally, I'd go to newegg.com (or a local vendor if you have one
that can let you see the merchandise), get a cheap, low power AMD AM4
socket processor for $50-$150, an AM4 mobo for $90-$150 (perhaps
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761), and
load it up with RAM. Check this out, although I'm not sure of its
ability to work with the particular mobo/cpu:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820232090. Get
32GB to run lots of big virtual machines, or 64GB to do anything
conceivable, fast, and the rest of the time just have lightning
diskcaching. The hard disk you can get separately. 

I don't know if any mobos still can boot to MBR, but what I do on my
desktop is boot MBR to  my / partition on a 256GB SSD, and have a
couple 4GB spinning disks formatted as guid or whatever it's called so
I get the full 4GB each. Whether this machine will be cheaper than the
Dell depends on how serious you are about things like ventilation,
power supply, and a good, strong case.

SteveT

Steve Litt
September 2017 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical
Troubleshooting Brand new, second edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr