New Workstation Hardware Advice

Hi I am thinking about getting a new workstation for study/development. It will be a beast. Apart form the favourable reviews of NVidia graphics cards here, are there any preferences to motherboards? IDE RAID controllers? I have been living in laptop land for a while now and have lost contact with desktop options and hardware. Ideally, the desktop will have 3GHz Processor or thereabouts 4GB RAM 2x120GB hard drives (one for mirror / backup) DVD Writer The machine will primarily be used for VMs, so throughput would be nice and the RAM _needs_ to be big. Also, as I am a struggling NetWare engineer, a nice place that sells this and helps with finance would be a plus. Any thoughts in this direction, assume I am ignorant please. Many thanks Gund

Apart form the favourable reviews of NVidia graphics cards here, are there any preferences to motherboards? IDE RAID controllers? I have been living in laptop land for a while now and have lost contact with desktop options and hardware.
Ideally, the desktop will have
3GHz Processor or thereabouts 4GB RAM 2x120GB hard drives (one for mirror / backup) DVD Writer
Perhaps you would be best with an Athlon 64 based system? Not sure how well nVidia works with 64bit Linux though. From what I know (which is little) they have a very fast FSB etc. If you only want to go 32bit then 800Mhz FSB P4's are quite nice. I have a P4 2.6Ghz Intel i865 based system under my desk. It performs quite nicely.
The machine will primarily be used for VMs, so throughput would be nice and the RAM _needs_ to be big.
By VMs I take it you mean Virtual Machines. Are you planning on using User Model Linux or VMWare? Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com
participants (2)
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Gund Wehsling
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Oliver Jones