We're going to be doing NT development shortly and I'm trying to figure out the best way to equip ourselves with NT machines. One of the first decisions to make is whether to buy or build. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
Buying a system has the distinct advantage that you can place an order, receive and unbox the machine, and get to work. This has a disadvantage of costing slightly more, having to capitalize the equipment, and probably not being able to incrementally upgrade the components over time.
Building a system has the advantage of costing less, allowing you to configure a machine specifically as you need, and enabling you to incrementally upgrade components. It also gives you more flexibility in trying different components, such as graphics cards. Building has the clear disadvantage of taking more time and necessitating internal maintenance.
In order to gain some experience and data on this decision, I decided to build a high-end (see below) NT-only PC. The goal is to make a system that will be a good Maya developer machine; I am not trying to make a high-end multimedia box. Processor&memory speed, disk speed and capacity, main memory size, and good graphics are the leaders in requirements.
I gathered together components from various sources (mostly purchased on my credit card and through SGI purchasing) and built a system. Here are the components I selected:
Cost so far is
| Pentium II 266MHz | $550 | SGI Pruchasing |
| Asustek P2L97 mainboard | $265 | SGI Purchasing |
| 128MB SDRAM | $638 | Central Computer |
| Diamond Viper 330 | $199 | Fry's |
| Adaptec 2940UW | $245 | Central Computer (OEM) |
| Disk drive | ??? | SGI |
| CD-ROM EIDE 24x | $90 | Fry's |
| AWE64 | $99 | SGI purchasing |
| 3COM N905B | $75 | Central Computer (OEM) |
| floppy | $27 | Fry's |
| ATX case | $119 | Central Computer |
| Microsoft Natural keyboard | $50 | SGI purchasing |
| Intellimouse | $50 | Central Computer (OEM) |
| Windows NT | $284 | Fry's |
| TOTAL | $2691 |
I purchased a copy of NT Workstation from Fry's and began the installation. This motherboard supports the El Torito protocol for booting directly from CD-ROM, so after properly setting up the BIOS to look for a bootable CD, I popped in the NT CD and turned it on.
The biggest problem was in getting NT to create a 9GB NTFS partition on the disk. The biggest it wanted to create was 2GB and I didn't want two partitions. It appears that the NT setup program is DOS-based, and that will only address 2GB because (I think) the setup program creates a FAT16 file system which, if you say you wanted NTFS, gets converted to NTFS the first time NT comes up after installation.
I bought a copy of "Partition Magic" from PowerQuest and tried to use it to create one large NTFS file system. It wouldn't do it. I called PowerQuest and we exchanged some notes, resulting in this, which did solve the problem:
From neily@powerquest.com Thu Oct 30 10:02:29 1997
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 11:02:15 -0700
From: Neil Yerkes <neily@powerquest.com>
Subject: Re: Case #44182
Bob - The problem that you're are experiencing is that the info reported in
the BIOS is not recognizing over 1gb. As you start the PQMAGICT Program start with a /IIS
/IEB Switch. This should allow you to see the entire extent of the drive.s
About $500 could be saved by using an Ultra DMA/33 ATA disk; I should have done this; it would elimintate the $245 SCSI controller and reduce the cost of the disk significantly. I wanted the speed of the Ultra SCSI and the flexibility of the Adaptec controller.
I configured a system from Dell the same way this system is. This link may still work: http://commerce.us.dell.com/DellStore/config.asp?order_code=900014
It points to an identically configured system (no monitor) that lists for $4441. The system above is $2700, but that doesn't include the 9GB disk, which is probably about $900. So the savings is on the order at 20%. Worth it?
From Dave Youatt:
Nice work.
You don't want IDE drives of any flavor. The peak numbers they quote ignore the highly non-trivial overhead of the ATA-2 protocol. They also ignore the fact that the bus-mastering DMA drivers usually cause more problems. This is bad since you definitely want BM/DMA, unless you like to wait.
The only advantage of Adaptec is that they're just about ubiquitous(sp?). Buslogic958 is faster and has more parallelism. Advansys is better still. Both are comparably priced or cheaper than 2940UW.
Also, EDO DRAM seems to be going on fire sale and is only ~15% slower than SDRAM. For the short term, it may be a better value than SDRAM DIMMS that are larger than 32MB.
Also, if you buy Dell or Compaq, upgrading is much harder. Dell makes their own mobos so upgrading them is a little harder. Compaq makes even more proprietary parts, so ever harder there. Micron a bit easier and they also sell mobos as components.
But, ... every SW company that I've been exposed to has found a way to bully HW vendors in to GIVING them systems, or buying them for cost or less.
From Warren Brown:
You may want to consider some less expensive mail order sources than Dell:
Matching your system configuration at Aberdeen, Inc. (www.aberdeeninc.com) came up with a system price of $3868. (Used a 9.1GB Cheetah disk; everything else identical components.)
Changing to an Ultra DMA disk (8.4GB Maxtor) dropped the price to $2905. I haven't broken out the line item cost to figure why it dropped quite so much.
Since the mail order machines come assembled, burned-in and with software installed they save a good bit of your time.