My company is getting rid of some old Penguin servers and some old desktops. I was going to pick up one or two to install RedHat 9.0 and do some learning and perhaps some games.

System A:
Penguin Server (White):
4 Xenon 450Mhz CPU's
4 Gig Ram
5 x 18 Gig RAID drives


System B:
Penguin Server (Black):
2 Xenon 800 Mhz CPU's
2 Gig Ram
3 x 18 Gig RAID Drives

System C:
Dell Precision 410
Pentium III speed unknown
Ram: unknown
HD: unknown (Likely a single 10 Gig drive)

They are asking about $50 more for System A so I am leaning towards one of the System B's.

I'm afraid I dont know much about the Xenon processors so I cannot judge if a 800 Mhz is that much better than a 450 Mhz or if the 4 Gig ram would make that much of a difference.

Or should I just go for the much smaller footprint Dell?

Please advise. The scrap sale is tomorrow (Friday).

Hi,

Unless you are running something highly multi-threaded (like a web/file/database server) you are better going for fewer, faster processors.

2 gig of RAM is plenty for anyone, surely?

You know what you need in terms of hard drive space, but I reckon B is the one to go for, unless the Dell turns out to be a killer spec.

Can anyone suggest a live distro which does system benchmarking?

TIM

I think I may go with the cheaper system.

What is a Xenon 800 Mhz in Pentium units? P2/P3? Any ideas?

Go with system B

-Joey