The cheap Solaris 64-bit box pending rebates

Since it is Fri, I figured that some of you might be spending your weekend working on some PC building projects. So, just to get you into the right mindset I have located a great article about one man’s journey into this realm of building a PC on the cheap - the AMD way.

I was on a quest 6 weeks ago to see how cheaply I could build a 64-bit Solaris 10 box that I could use in the office, and gave myself a 2 week period to hunt for deals. The quest wasn’t all that hard, and what I’ve ended up with wasn’t all that bad of a system for office use.

At the core is an ECS K8M800-M2 motherboard and AMD Sempron-64 cpu. I got this on sale for just $69 together at Fry’s on a one-day sale. I had to be careful that they didn’t switch a 32-bit BABOX processor on me, so I insisted they honour their ad for a 32- or 64-bit mode cpu which they did, and I got a 2600+ 64-bit BXBOX retail cpu (the box actually has 64-bit on the lower right front corner). It’s socket 754 which is probably going out of date soon, but for a functional system that I don’t plan to upgrade, it’ll get the job done and hold its own for a few years. The board has on-board LAN, Audio, and Graphics, so hopefully, this would make a pretty cheap system. And best of all, no rebates required.

Next was the case. I found the Antec 1650B black case w 350W power-supply on sale for $59.99 with $30 rebate. I’m not fond of rebates, but if I see a good deal and the rebate is from the manufacturer, like Antec, I usually go for it. Plus, this is a fairly quiet case, with easy-install and tool-less takedown. I have an identical white case in the office which ran my old ECS K7VTA3 mobo, and it was pretty reliable and quiet.

A few days after I found the case, I saw an ad for 200 GB WD SATA drive retail kit with cable for just $49.99 after a $30 + $20 dual rebate. And about the same time, I also found a dual stick 1GB of OCZ DDR400 (2 x 512MB) for just $75 with $25 rebate which ain’t bad for branded memory. And for optical drive, I found a black retail NEC 3550A 16x DVD burner online for $39 w/ free 3day shipping.

A few days later, I put the box together, and installed Solaris 10 1/06 on the system. First boot wasn’t very cheerful. The installer graphics couldn’t recognize the onboard Unichrome Pro graphics, and defaulted to text console install, which did complete, but still couldn’t get the Xorg to recognize the Unichrome Pro. The SATA controller for the mobo apparently runs the disks in IDE legacy mode so boot and install were transparent. I didn’t have to turn on any switches in BIOS even. But I was stuck with no X-graphics with the Unichrome Pro, so I exercised the AGP option, since the micro-ATX board DOES include an AGP 4x/8x slot. Source: James C. Liu’s Weblog

[tags]audio,cpu,processor,solaris,64-bit,on-board lan,graphics[/tags]