[LAU] Advice on hardwware components

[Michael Nelson]

Hi all,

I'm thinking of building a new workstation, aiming for a (very) low price and decent performance. So far, I have acquired an Athlon64 3200 and 2Gb of RAM, and bought an NVidia NForce4 board and Antec power supply on eBay. I've spent just under £35 Sterling so far!

I already have a couple of second-hand RME cards - a DIGI96/8 PAD and DIGI9636, which set me back £77 between them.

So, I still need some media to boot from, and a graphics card - which must be PCI Express.

I'm interested in using a CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter, and booting from a CF card. Does anyone know what the speed/reliability would be like? I imagine/hope that I'd be able to fit everything I need for a desktop and audio workstation onto 4GB or so? I can do without full-blown KDE or GNOME.

I'll probably get a SATA RAID card, and a couple of drives later for file storage.

Finally, the graphics card... What do you recommend? Is there anything to avoid? I'd much rather use open source drivers, but don't really have enough money to get a Matrox PCI-E card at the moment.

Thanks for any advice,
Michael Nelson
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