VIA Unveils Nano E-Series at ESC 2010, Readies Embedded Industry for Next-Generation 64-bit Computing
Via: Nano E-Series
PCMag: Via unveils 64-bit Nano E-Series CPUs
Via 64-bit processors
25 April 2010
24 April 2010
Building a new powerful but efficient PC
I've decided to build a new PC. The last time I did that was about 10 years ago maybe, when I built a dual CPU Pentium III with 512MB of RAM and 2x 20GB hard drives. Obviously, things have moved on a lot since then. I normally use a variety of CPU architectures and manufacturers at work, and work have settle for Intel CPU for desktop workstations. At home, for desktop PCs, my last two were HP AMD 64-bit Athlon machines. First the Athlon 64, then the Athlon X2.
I have been searching around for about 2 months online, checking out configurations and prices. But I struggled to find the exact specification that I wanted and struggled to find GNU/Linux only machines. It is probably my fault for being fussy, because I wanted efficiency to play a huge part. Why buy a CPU eating 125 watts of power when a 45W or 65W will be almost as quick?
I decided that I was either going for a really low power 45-65W machine, like the Dell Inspiron Zino HD, i.e. a small case and lower power but packing a punch with lots of RAM. Or, I was going to make a really powerful workstation that still did not require a local power station to run it. Well I opted for the powerful workstation because I wanted to make it last a while and run lots of virtualised guests.
After not finding what I wanted in the pre-built PC world, I decided to build one myself.
So far, I've only bought 3 parts, I'll buy the rest over the next weeks/months.
CPU: AMD Phenom II 905e
Motherboard: Gigabyte 785G chipset MA785GT-UD3H
and a nice case.
The reasoning behind the CPU, is that it is very powerful & has great virtualisation features, having 4 cores will future proof me a little. It is a very lower power consuming chip, it requires 65W, vs. the 125W of the Black editions and the fastest i7 from Intel. It has lots of cache also.
The 785G chipset seems very fast and has that great feature of having fast on-board graphics. I'll probably just stick with on-board graphics for a while. The board has some great eco-friendly features to keep it cool and running reliably. There is a slightly newer chipset but I thought this one was great and implemented well and should be very compatible with Linux.
Next step might be choosing a good quality PSU, hard drives or SSD, RAM, etc. etc.
I have been searching around for about 2 months online, checking out configurations and prices. But I struggled to find the exact specification that I wanted and struggled to find GNU/Linux only machines. It is probably my fault for being fussy, because I wanted efficiency to play a huge part. Why buy a CPU eating 125 watts of power when a 45W or 65W will be almost as quick?
I decided that I was either going for a really low power 45-65W machine, like the Dell Inspiron Zino HD, i.e. a small case and lower power but packing a punch with lots of RAM. Or, I was going to make a really powerful workstation that still did not require a local power station to run it. Well I opted for the powerful workstation because I wanted to make it last a while and run lots of virtualised guests.
After not finding what I wanted in the pre-built PC world, I decided to build one myself.
So far, I've only bought 3 parts, I'll buy the rest over the next weeks/months.
CPU: AMD Phenom II 905e
Motherboard: Gigabyte 785G chipset MA785GT-UD3H
and a nice case.
The reasoning behind the CPU, is that it is very powerful & has great virtualisation features, having 4 cores will future proof me a little. It is a very lower power consuming chip, it requires 65W, vs. the 125W of the Black editions and the fastest i7 from Intel. It has lots of cache also.
The 785G chipset seems very fast and has that great feature of having fast on-board graphics. I'll probably just stick with on-board graphics for a while. The board has some great eco-friendly features to keep it cool and running reliably. There is a slightly newer chipset but I thought this one was great and implemented well and should be very compatible with Linux.
Next step might be choosing a good quality PSU, hard drives or SSD, RAM, etc. etc.
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