Cost of a Bare-Bones Box?

[James Van Artsdalen]

> From: Chris BeHanna
> Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 10:43:04 -0500
> 
>     Is it possible to build an Opteron-based box for under a grand, if
> I re-use my existing NIC, hard disks, and video board (will they even
> work?):
> 
>     Adaptec 3950U2B hosting a pair of LVD drives
>     Adaptec 2400A IDE RAID hosting a quartet of WD 120GB Sp. Editions
>     ATI Radeon 7200 (aka Radeon VIVO)
>     Netgear FA310TX serving the outside world
>     Netgear FA302T serving the inside LAN
> 
>     Can I re-use my 500W ATX power supply?  What about my 1GB stick of
> registered PC2100 ECC?  Can I get an SMP mobo and just stick one CPU
> on it for now?

The power supply pinout needs to match the pinout of the motherboard.
Not all flavors of ATX use electrically compatible power pinouts even
when the connector is mechanically compatible (i.e. "just because you
can plug it in doesn't mean it won't smoke").

500 W should be ample power; if not, that means you're generating half
a kilowatt of heat in the chassis and are probably going to have
cooling problems.  The drives and CPU should be enough to keep the
power stable (too little load is a problem sometimes).

>     Can I re-use my tower ATX case?

As long as the motherboard fits.  There are at least three different
form-factors for ATX.

You also need to make sure the heat sink on the CPU clears the
chassis.  I use a Tyan K8W S2885 motherboard in an Antec SX835II
chassis and the primary CPU's heat sink & fan just barely clears the
brace for the internal hard disk holder (which had to be removed).

You might be able to save some money by using an Athlon64 CPU and
motherboard instead of Opteron, but registered DIMM might not work.

A dual processor motherboard should work with only one CPU.
I'm not sure how closely matched CPUs must be to work together,
i.e. if you buy one CPU now and a different stepping next fall
it might not work.

An AMD64 price reduction may be coming soon with Intel's Prescott
introduction.  Also, AMD is getting ready to switch to a new fab
process and there may be a price cut associated with tha too, although
I suspect this is still a few months away.