Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Joerg wrote:
Hello Folks,

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?

My couple of cents...if you can build your own, do it.

One I built recently is working quite nicely for me; I bought
motherboard, CPU, video, RAM, PSU, and case for just under $500. The
only reason it's that much is because I sprung for the hot CPU, an Intel
E6600 for something like $175. I've read that for a lower-end machine
AMD is still more bang for the buck. The money you'd spare on a cheaper
processor and motherboard might buy you a hard drive or a Windows license.

Anyway, as long as you only have one hard drive and one optical drive on
your current system, you can use them both if you get a system with one
PATA channel. As for me, I already had a PCI PATA controller that came
with a drive I got, so I had no excuse to buy a new hard drive. It's
nice to know my rig can finally support SATA, though!

And why are we still using Windows? ;-) I'm sorry...I'm from a computer
science background and not an EE one, but Ubuntu is my thing of choice
these days. Anyway, I've read that pretty much all of what you needed
is covered in Linux-supported software, but it's just a thought.

M2C
PSM
.

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