[rescue] PowerMac recommendations?

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Tuesday 20 April 2004 11:10, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Apr 20, 2004, at 11:36 AM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> > But seriously, what's wrong with using linux of Intel here?
>
>    Uhhhhhhhhh, because PCs suck?

... Which is why well over 50% of utilized Purdue (ITAP) supplied CPU 
cycles (even after weighting based on, say, LINPACK) come from Linux 
clusters, running on Compaq Deskpros and Gateway pieces-of-crap.  Right 
now, our SP is, as a coworker has described it, "a low-end computing 
resource".    That balance might change soon, as there's been a lot of 
talk about getting another "supercomputer," which would be fun (and 
probably help me get a staff position).  

He said he wanted to do it on a budget.  While it might not be "cool" to 
do it on a PC, I can almost guarantee it'll help save money, over 
something like a Mac.

What I'd recommend is:

1 Linux PC (700MHz+ should work)... cheap as dirt
A pair of ES1371 cards aka SoundBlaster PCI 128.  Work awesomely with 
	linux, my favorite sound card. $5 used, $20 new.
A DC10+ video capture card: hardware MJPEG encoding, which works
	well.  They've been around forever, you can probably get one
	for $50 or so off ebay.

If you want to do realtime conversion to DivX, you might want to bump up 
the clock speed to something in the 1GHz range (or more depending on 
what you want quality to be).

I see no reason why you can't do all of this on one single machine.

Pat
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