Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Joerg <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:


Old iron horse here starts making creaking noises and it's tired. It only needs to do CAD, Gerber viewing, newsgroup, light SPICE sub-circuit sims (the kind that runs in a few seconds). IOW, I am replacing the grunt works PC.

Replacement should be <$500 sans monitor (won't give up my CRT, no way). And absolutely no Vista which excludes most lines. Anyone's got experiences with these lines?


Would you consider buying used hardware? I've been using Dell
Optiplex SX260 desktops for most everything. Not the fastest on the
planet, but the price is right. About $220 to $270 with XP Home,
delivered on eBay. Add about $80 to bring it up to 1.5GBytes RAM. I
use one for antenna modeling (4NEC2 etc), RF calcs, and some
schematic/PCB work (PCB123, CadSoft Eagle, etc). Not great, but good
enough. My box is a 2.6GHz P4 (which is not the fastest), has shared
memory video (which is not the fastest), and uses a laptop 40GB hard
disk (which is not the fastest). However, despite having two fans in
the base, it makes almost no noise. Gigabit ethernet NAS and 6ea USB
2.0 ports take care of the storage. I've bought 14 of these so far,
but most of them ended up as media players and web/email utility
machines, not CAD workstations.

Docs:
<http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/opsx260/en/index.htm>


Hmm, the first desktop I've seen that has an external power brick. Interesting. yes, I've considered used. But with that extra RAM it's almost as much as a new desktop and that one I don't have to scrub ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.

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