Cheap, integrated, 64-bit, 4 GB RAM computer hardware?

[Jack Bates]

Hello Hackspace, do you know about any cheap, integrated, and widely
available computer hardware that you can recommend? I need 64-bit, and
at least 4 GB of RAM. Low(ish) power consumption would be a bonus

Here at the village in Rwanda, we currently have three Asus EeeBox B202
machines: One is a monitoring server (Nagios, ntop, Cacti, and
SmokePing), one is a caching proxy (Apache Traffic Server), and one is
running Apache, Samba, and OpenLDAP. The nice thing about these EeeBox
machines is that we have a bunch of spare units on hand. When hardware
breaks, there isn't always the technical capacity to open, diagnose, and
repair it, or replacement parts aren't cost effective, or the repaired
equipment works unreliably. But swapping a failing unit for an
identical, working spare is simpler (which is why I'm looking for other
cheap, integrated hardware)

The caching proxy in particular badly needs to be upgraded (which is why
I'm looking for 64-bit and 4 GB of RAM)

--
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[Jimmy Chen]

The closest thing I would say would be the Parallela board, but considering it's a 13Ghz ARM board and 1GB RAM in total, it probably wouldn't be of much help. You theoretically could assemble a network of Raspberry Pi's for parallel computing (beowulf cluster), but I don't think anyone's written the code for a caching proxy on one of those things.

[breathe]

Ive been stoked on stuff from Zotac, most of their systems are 2GB but
I just came across this mini 4GB unit on ncix

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=76937&vpn=ZBOXNXS-AD11-U&manufacture=Zotac

Otherwise most of there 2GB units can easily have their stick swapped
out for 4GB

alternatively you could find a place that lets you build your own bare
bones mini-itx

ie: http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/barebones/via_barebones

gl

On 12-11-04 02:36 AM, Jimmy Chen wrote:
> The closest thing I would say would be the Parallela board

> <http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone>,

> <mailto:vhs-g...@lists.hackspace.ca>
> http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/__wp/mailing-lists/
> <http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp/mailing-lists/>

[marco tozzini]

I would stay with ASUS or some other well known manufacturer
In my career I had the chance to create some industrial computers for
different reason and I discovered that the amount of crap memory,
processors, and IC in general is huge out there.
Silicon companies build a lot of ICs and some of those are not coming
out very good (they are not compliant to specification); they definitely
do not trash all of those but instead they mark each with what is the
issue and resell for cheaper price.
So it happens, for example, that for a DRAM the specs state that a R/W
cycle must be 100% PASS for the full temp range (let's say 0 Cels. deg
to +60 Cels. deg) but it happens that for some memory locations at 60
deg (ambient) the R/W cycle goes through only 90% of times.
The RAM manufacturer will mark the memory with the issue and resell the
IC as "non branded" into the market.
Cheap PC manufacturer to keep the cost low will use those IC and take
the risk that usually PC are not running at 60deg (ambient) all the time
and at that time still 90% of read/write are going through...

ASUS like any other known manufacturer cannot afford to use "too many"
of those cheap device or their lose their brand.

In your case (Rwanda) the climate is quite hot and (looking on
wikipedia) the elevation is very high (min. is 950mt asl - air
efficiency to dissipate is lower) if you chose cheap and unknown
hardware you are going to experience a lot of failures that will cost
you more money than what you saved.

Just my 2 cents.

Ciao
Marco

[Colin Fitzgerald]

I've been buying industrial computers from LogicSupply.com

See what they have. Might work very well for your application.

[befl...@gmail.com]

I agree with Marco, a lot of cheap is cheap for all the wrong reasons.

I would suggest that you consider the Mac mini as a benchmark.  It may be too expensive, but it is powerful, power efficient, swappable and small.  Being natively a UNIX machine, it also easily runs all the server software you may like, and MacPorts makes it easy to install stuff that doesn't come with it.  Of course you can swap out the OS for Windows or some other UNIX flavour too, if you want.

You can probably do better for cost with equivalent quality hardware, but it is easy to get duped with garbage if you're not careful.  Also, if compactness matters it isn't quite as easy to match the hardware in a similarly small form factor, or at least it wasn't last I looked.  Admittedly, that was a while ago.

Good luck,

- Bruce

[Jack Bates]

Hey, thanks a lot for these tips! I'm checking out the options from
Zotac. I heard that the Atom processors are a poor choice for servers
because they lack cache (apparently cache is important for caching proxy
performance). Do you know about any similar machines with an Intel Core
i3 or i5?

Also thanks for the tip on Logic Supply. It's great that I can configure
a system with an Intel Core i5 and 4 GB of RAM, but unfortunately it
costs $976. Getting several cheap and widely available spare units is
more important to me than is rugged hardware. Any thoughts where to look
for cheap, mass produced machines with these specs?

Thanks again!