However, as much as I want to do everything at amazon I still feel the need for a powerful workstation at home.
So what are some worthy alternatives? Preferably, it comes installed with ubuntu and is quiet.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182... (SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O Socket G34 motherboard for $244.99) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105... (AMD Opteron 6168 Socket G34 115W 12-Core Server Processor for $769.00)
Total: $1013.99
That motherboard comes with onboard video and dual gigabit ethernet. The only other things required are a case, power supply, some RAM, and some sort of storage. All of this will be a lot less than $4000.
The build quality of Dell is not worth money against the likes of Lenovo Thinkpads which seem to never get old and are sturdy enough to last years.
The case is pretty well-designed, and it's quiet.
I got a Core-i7 (quad core with hyper threading, the OS sees 8 CPUs), 8GB of RAM, 164GB SSD, for about $2000
Yes, it comes with Ubuntu pre-installed.
You can get it a bit cheaper with a regular hard drive, but if you're craving the performance, go for the SSD.
I got the Pangolin model, it's not slim, it's probably thicker than a typical Macbook.
Performance wise, it's great. Although my judgement is probably not reliable because the only thing I have to compare against is a 4 year old laptop with a dual core centrino processor.
Usability-wise, there are a few things:
* Keys like ctrl-pageup aren't easily accessible. That's common to all laptops > 14", which is unfortunate. I got around that by configuring the terminal emulator to switch tabs with Ctrl-Shift-H and Ctrl-Shift-L. (On the other hand, none of the macbooks I've seen has the home/end/page-up/page-down readily accessible either).
* The trackpad goes crazy sometimes. This is a given for most laptops (well, except Macbooks). I use touchfreeze to mitigate that.
* The microphone is right next to the trackpad, not good for recording a live streamcast, unless you have an external wireless mouse.
* The proprietry ATI driver is not that good, the open-source driver is better. (I found it somewhat ironic). Nvidia would've probably been better. HD videos don't necessarily play as smoothly as I'd imagined they would. You'll see some tearing on xfce, but gnome on compiz looks fine.
It does generate a lot of heat so I try not to put it on my lap a lot.
But don't let that discourage you.
It's a great laptop, it's not too heavy and it's got a LED screen, which means the picture will look good regardless of your viewing angle.
While not as pretty as a Macbook, it does have a clean and elegant design.
I wouldn't exactly recommend it as an entertainment platform, but that's not why I bought it. I bought it because I wanted a powerful machine that's not too bulky. I wanted a machine that I can move around, get work done on it, and have it be powerful so that it doesn't slow me down.
It can run virtual machines without sacrificing performance (that's a big one).
It can apt-get install stuff without taking too long to read the database (my old laptop used to spend a long time in "(Reading database ....").
It can run tons of programs without ever slowing down. In fact I can't remember it ever slowing down or becoming unresponsive, which is something that I'm not used to.
The SSD really does make a difference. Say goodbye to the sound of the spinning hard disk. (Although you still can't say goodbye to the sound of the fan)
Actually, I'm in the market for a new Mac, as I need to do some iPhone dev. Does anyone find the non-replaceable battery to be an issue? That seemed like a real turn-off to me.
Anyone have Hackintosh experience? If I have >2 cores on a Hackintosh, will OS X recognize do proper thread scheduling? How stable are Hackintosh builds?
Actually, I guess that answers my question about threading in Hackintoshes too.
For our general testing and development purposes a Intel Mac Mini does a great job. Maybe get a couple of those and cluster them? Much cheaper and more CPU for your money.