On Mon, 20 Sep 2010, David McLean wrote:

> Hi,
> Just looking for any recommendations for computer hardware to use or to stay
> away from. I'm looking to build a reasonably fast, dual/multi processor system
> but can't afford to end up with a system that is so cutting edge that it is not
> supported. Our institution gets good deals through Dell so I'm sure they will
> purchase a Dell system as opposed to specifying individual components, but I'm
> still concerned with SATA support and various graphics device support.

For fairly cheap desktops the Dell optiplex (intel at least) ones work 
fine with sl55, we have mainly been buying optiplex 760 machines for the 
last year and the 780 also works with our standard sl install.  We always 
add (cheap) Nvidia cards to desktop machines since I still don't trust the 
onboard graphics chipsets to be supported...

The optiplex boxes take a single CPU but it can be dual or quad core, 
there is no ECC and they can only take up to 8GB of ram...

We have a few Dell Precision workstations which work fine with sl55 but 
havn't tested any of the latest models yet.

Pretty much all the Dell servers seem to work with sl55 (we have several 
PE-2900 and PE-T610 rackmount models), we just borrowed a PE-R510 with the 
new H700 raid card (driving 12 x 2TB SAS disks) to run some tests on and 
it worked with sl55 out of the box...

Having said that our purchasing people now prefer us to buy HP desktops, 
and we are trying to get hold of one (an Elite 8000) to run some tests on.
The specs of the HP and Dells look pretty similar but there may be things 
which arn't obvious.

Our 'preferred' HP dealer doesn't seem to want to make it easy for us to 
buy from them.

  -- Jon