I'm building a new machine for fusor2 this weekend. It's coming along (lots of custom software to install and configure) nicely.
Basic specs:
I7-950 cpu
12 gigs DDR3
GTS-450 vid card (Fermi processor....about 25 gflops for double precision floats)
80 gb intel SSD
2- 500 gb seagate 7200 rpm drives
Asus P6X58-DE Mobo
Toughpower 600w power supply.
Boy is this thing ever fast, and what I'm used to isn't slow - a core II quad core with merely 4 gigs DDR2 and regular harddrives, and a non-fan NVidea card.
Boot time is a few seconds, most of that is the bios delay to allow you to hit del if you want to fool with the bios. Zowie! Since I had a ton of ram (and half the sockets are still empty!) I didn't even set up a swap partition. I've mounted the regular hard drives over /home and /tmp as that's where linux does most of it's writing, to save wear and tear on the SSD. I'm still leaning some tricks there, and might try to repartition one so as to also cover /var, or figure out some trick with a symbolic link. The idea is to just use the SSD for read-mostly things.
There are now a few neat things in the junkbox now...which might get used too.
As in another Nvidia card, this one a Tesla based GTX-285 -- faster and more cores and ram (for single precision floats). And an older asus with a core II -quad cpu and 8 gigs ram. Some of those parts might go into this machine, or another. The mobo had some flakey SATA ports, one of the reasons I pulled it. Seems that little problem intel had with those goes back farther in time than sandy bridge....
Of course, it's linux, in this case 10.04.2 - LTS, with virtualbox to run other opsys under that as needed or desired.
Gawd, this mobo even has 6 gbs SATA (hardware raid), firewire, tons of USB including USB-3, and a bunch of other features I'll probably not use -- I can't see needing tons of audio channels for example here. Hopefully it will be as rock solid as this machine I'm posting from -- that'd be nice. Should be fast enough to really pack away the data in MySQL for fusor runs.