I am sure this has been touched somewhere else here, but I didn't (immediately) find it doing a search. Plus, if the post were more than two months old, the answer might be different now.

I have been using my laptop (that I purchased) for my work and it needs to get repaired. The desktop I did have is now being used by a new employee (and it was a damn Compaq anyway).

Short of the long of it, I get to build my new computer for work. It is definitely going to be Linux-run. I don't want to purchase a pre-made box because, quite frankly, I've never liked retail computers.

So, I am going to piece together a PC of my own -- and I want it to be as robust as possible. I have about $1500 to do this with and I don't need to buy a monitor -- all of it can go into the actual computer.

What do you recommend?

Intel or AMD? (I've always used AMD).
Motherboard (I have a Gigabit at home).
Good HD (I've had bad luck with WD, just lost my half-done LFS system to mechanical failure).
Sound Card (No clue).
Video Card (Riva TNT2 at home).
Ethernet Card (Linksys (tulip driver) at home)

Here is what I have owned or currently own.

I have owned both Abit and ASUS boards, and both are good.

My sound cards are SB Live and Value. They work well.

My network cards are 3Com and Linksys

My hard drives are all Maxtors, and are very reliable.

AMD processors is all I have ever bought, and dang the things are sturdy. When I first built my own computer, I installed the CPU fan wrong, so it was running at around 140 degrees at low load. It spiked here-and-there to about 150 or so. Never once had a problem. That was about 1.5 years ago, and I still use the processor in my other computer.

Of course, the fan is on right this time

My Dream Machine:

Abit VP6 Dual Processing Motherboard $125.00
2 1GHz Intel Processors $250.00
4 40 Gig 7200rpm Harddrives RAID 0 $375.00
Creative Live 5.1 Sound card $ 50.00
NVidia G-Force2 MX-400 64MB Video $100.00
Case 400 watt $ 50.00
1.5 Gig RAM $350.00
Cdrom + Floppy $ 50.00
2 linksys network cards $ 20.00

All These are real, on-line prices. Contact me and I'll tell you where I got mine.

qwip@bellsouth.net

Jon

actually my dream machine would be a solaris workstation.. way out of my price range as of now.. i can't even afford a cheap used one off ebay right now..

here's my hardware opinion:

AMDs are alright, but you have to remember that AMD does a lot to optimize their chips for windows (athlon xp, hello!). i've found that pentiums consistantly out perform AMDs when it comes to linux. (that and i don't like how the Athlon XP 1800 runs at 1.53 GHz. can we say misleading?)

Abits SUCK!!!! i honestly can't say enough bad things about abits. i've built probably close to 70 machines over the past 5 years and have never gotten an abit board to work as well as a gigabyte or an asus. my opinion, go with asus.

3com, of course, makes the best nics... and they're most likely to be supported by linux. but i use linksys since they're a LOT cheaper, and i've never had a problem with them.

i have a creative sound blaster live in two of my machines, works great.

hard drives don't get any better than the IBM Deskstar. it might be a little more expensive than maxtor or even WD, but well worth the money. i'm not sure about current benchmarks, but back when i bought my first deskstar 2 years ago the benchmarks on it had the deskstar nearly outperforming wide SCSI. doesn't get much faster than that with ide. :-)

as for video cards, i'm not a gamer... so i usually just go with what will work in X without too much hastle. :-)