Build a $150 Linux PC | Hacker News Reader

Build a $150 Linux PC

howto.wired.com

23 pointsczik17 comments

A PC like that mentioned in the article should be free. A 533 MHz Celeron, 512 MB of ram, 80 GB hard drive? Don't you have any family? I know of several old computers meeting or exceeding those specs that various acquaintances have sitting around.

Personally, I would spend another $150-200 and get a processor that was top-of-the-line a couple years ago (instead of nearly a decade ago), faster/more RAM (512 MB is solid for Linux, but with 1 GB you'll never have to worry about it), and a faster (if not bigger) hard drive.

In my opinion, advertising a crappy $150 PC is almost a disservice to the build-your-own crowd, when you could get a similar-quality one for free from someone you know or for cheaper from a used computer store. Noting that you can build a very solid computer for $300-400, though, is really something.

It's actually a 1200 MHz Celeron with the Core 2 Architecture (Conroe-L), with 533 MHz FSB

I guess I was in error, then, but I don't see that 1200 figure noted anywhere on that page, so I'm going to call it an honest mistake ;-).

But still, the machine mentioned is no better than the PC I bought 6 years ago before my freshman year of college (and currently have sitting in the closet because I have no use for it). It's a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB ram, 60 GB hard drive, CD-RW and DVD drives, and a GeForce2 graphics card, and it was far from top of the line when I bought it for somewhere between $600-800 (I don't remember). Oh, and it came with Windows XP, which served me well for four years before I replaced it with FreeBSD.

Fun (for a certain definition of fun) and economical, but not what you want to do if you need to PC to work every day when you sit down at it.

PC power supplies, in general, are ticking time bombs the day you buy one. Buying a used one just ensures your PC fails even sooner.

Used third party ram makes me queasy too. It is a good price, but consider that at the RAM factory the lots go through statistical process control, lots rejected at that point still contain mostly passable chips which are probably sold at a lower price to the third party RAM suppliers. But there is something about the lot that isn't quite right.

There was a time around 2000 that whenever a Mac user called me with a flakey machine I used to say "Take out the extra third party ram you bought cheap two years ago when you bought the machine." A near 100% fix rate without having to ask any questions. It would work fine for months or years then start flaking out. I don't need that in any machine for which I'm responsible.

One of our departments is building its own machines from low priced components to save money. I think by any measure, the time it takes to find and remove the flakey ram modules and replace the disk drives that start having bad sectors 3 months into service has more than offset the cost savings.

I'm not sure I buy all of those arguments. Power supplies (cheap ones, anyway) are, indeed, of pretty mixed quality. But their failure rates show (in my experience, anyway) a distinct "bathtub curve", essentially failing within the first few months or not for several years. For a part like that, a used one can actually be more reliable than a new one, because you're essentially getting the "burn-in" for free.

And while, again, it's true that off-brand memory has higher error rates than premium stuff (which, generally, is coming out of the same fabs but testing at higher tolerances), the error rate is (1) still very low, I've only seen one bad DIMM over the last 10 years or so, and (2) trivially easy to test with memtest86. Got a bad stick? Yeah, it sucks, but you just replace it (for $20 or whatever) and move on. It's not a reason to triple your memory cost, IMHO.

And disk drives, in my experience, simply don't have a premium/bargain distinction in quality at all. Instead, these things fail in batches. Some 4500 RPM clearance models will churn for years, while some models of 15k RPM SAS monsters like give up the ghost within a few months. You can't win with drives.

You might be underestimating the amount of bad ram you have. I have often had RAM that would pass memtest but the system still became far more stable after changing the ram.

I love those little intel boards. They actually have 1.33Ghz Celeron D cpus on them. The whole system with a hdd clocks in at about 48watts. About 8 watts while sleeping.

There is even a fanless version. Its nearly a complete working computer for $70. I often use a 4 gig CF card with an adapter instead of a hdd as well. One less power hungry moving part. They beat all but the fastest VIA mini-itx hands down at many 3x less the cost.

One sidenote. I had trouble getting Xorg/XFree86 to run accelerated at higher resolutions (than 1024x768) with this board. As of a month or two ago, they were still having driver issues. Windows XP worked like a champ.

Also their popularity has caught up with them. Everyone seems sold out lately. I've had trouble finding on the last few times I've looked

You're right, except for Celeron D part. Celeron D was the last step of NetBurst architecture, notorious for its high power consumptions and thus screaming stock fans. This is Core 2 architecture, which runs much cooler and has better perfomance/MHz

Also, for some reason the spec shows Celeron 220 CPU which is 1,2 MHz, not 1,33: http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d201gly2/configs.h...

Ahh. Makes sense now. The first one I got, more than a year ago had a big fan and ran quite hot. All the ones since then I've gotten without a fan. I checked a recent one. Not D.

Looks like there may have been a short lived D version thats not as nice. Good eye.

Also disregard my power measurements since I did them on the first one. The consumption on more recent ones may well be lower.

An interesting article, I never saw the mentioned motherboard. It's by Intel, but doesn't use the Intel chipset. And it has versions with passively-cooled CPU (this alone holds much value to some of us silence fans) CPU is of the latest Core 2 family (Conroe-L, 65nm process), but a lower-clocked Celeron, with a TDP of 19 W.

Here are the board's specs: http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d201gly2/

The chart of Intel Core 2 processors (search for "Celeron 220"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microproc...

That's an interesting approach to building a machine. I haven't built my own box in some years now, but I'm curious if the savings involved are still worth it?

Idea: Aggregate compatible configurations and prices/coupons to yield "complete system" pricing.

fatwallet.com does a lot of that. I used to spend a good amount of time on their "Hot Deals" forum.

I've found that it is actually cheaper to buy a prebuilt on sale strip out the crappy parts and sell them to pay for upgrades.

I hate to nitpick but I wrote a very similar series of how to posts detailing pretty much the same thing, with the same motherboard, a few months ago:

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/01/25/diy-200-dollar-pc http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/01/diy-200-dollar-pc-part-2 http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/09/diy-200-dollar-pc-part-3

Wait. He's treating Crucial like it's some unheard of offbrand of memory? Seriously?

I doubt the savings are that much, but it's still worthwhile to learn how the innards of a PC fit together.

at the $200 price point you can build one htat is 3 times as fast.

spend an extra $50 on a video card with VIVO and you have a home media server/mythTV box for recording and streaming.

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