memory for budget machine

[paulunderwood]

I have several of these, running with no problems. Just think: "I can run Debian 8"

[wildrabbitt]

I can get a flash drive for about £2 that'll run tinycore. I don't see that I aught to get a £38 HD and run debian.

[paulunderwood]

Running Tinycore is fine. I have run Debian from 1 GB sticks, but every now and then -- especially after repeated power cuts -- I had corruption problems. If recovering from such issues is not a PITA then go ahead with your plan

[xilman]

Originally Posted by wildrabbitt

The trouble is all Sata HD's these days are huge memory wise. The only cheap ones I can find are second hand. That's okay though I
guess.

If you're not going to do any significant disk IO then, in my view, performance is irrelevant. You should get one which is big enough and the cheapest available. Works well enough for me on my compute engines.

[axn]

Here is a Pentium that is currently available for GBP 41. This is a dual core Haswell part supporting 1333 MHz RAM in dual channel.

PS:- In theory, it should have equivalent performance of an i3, but mersenne.org benchmarks list it as 2.5x slower. Does anyone know why? [EDIT:- This one actually doesn't support AVX. Bummer]

[fivemack]

Originally Posted by wildrabbitt

1. A £120 intel CPU and 4GB of ram running tiny core linux of a flash drive. Bad idea?

2. Why does P95 use floating point numbers for doing a test which only involves integers?

1. Perfectly reasonable idea, I've done it in the past; keep an image of the flash drive somewhere convenient so you can restore it onto a new £8 flash drive in the quite likely event that the flash drive stops working in a year or so.

The smallest new actual-SSDs are cheaper than the smallest new hard drives, but for this application USB sticks are entirely adequate.

2.
a) Because the best way of doing integer multiplication is by doing fast Fourier transforms of the input numbers, multiplying pointwise in Fourier space to convolve the signals (which is equivalent to integer multiplication), and FFT back again. FFT works over a field, and it's much quicker to use the real numbers than to do all the integer-divisions required to work over a finite field, because
b) Current CPUs can do eight floating-point multiplies per cycle and only about one integer multiply.

[wildrabbitt]

Thanks for that. Something to look into.

I've been looking at 2GB memory sticks. The only ones I can find are 1333MHz. Does having memory at that speed cause
a significant disadvantage?

If not, I'd be happy with 2 of them. Otherwise I'll just have to cut down on smoking and go for 2 * 4GB sticks.

Advices?

[Batalov]

Yes; memory is bottleneck as it is, so making it faster will help a lot.
2Gb are being phased out from mainstream, that's why their choice is limited and they are simply N-year old leftovers (and they are 1333MHz).

Once a thing become near obsolete, they become more expensive than better current things.
For comparison - if you would try to get some DDR2 memory now, it would be more expensive (and slower!) rated than any DDR3.

[wildrabbitt]

Right thanks.

[wildrabbitt]

Does this motherboard look good for an i5-4590 (that's what I've gone and bought) :


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...=afc-Skimlinks


?

[sdbardwick]

Verify that there are Linux drivers available for the "Killer E2205 Gigabit LAN controller".