[vermaden]

Originally Posted by Snoop1990

Hey,
I am quite new to the freebsd business so sorry for this stupid question.

But I am just reading the hardware thread and I am wondering what is all this power for. As far as I know FreeBSD it runs faster on a 1 Ghz P3 than Windows on a 3 Ghz P4. But what are you looking for ?

I for my needs am a web developer so the only thing my machine needs to do is processing my code editor, maybe emulate a webserver (so it is divided from the main systme) and do some general stuff, fetching mails maybe write some text but that is not a lot of work to do. There is no video processing no 3d rendering nothing (no gaming on a workstation) so what do I need these fast processors for ?

Depends what you use your machine for.

I for example interest in virtualization (Xen/QEMU/VirtualBox) which you cannot do on some old P3, you need some horsepower 2-4 cores expesially for Xen and (propably more important) extensions that are avialable only in new CPUs, like Intel VT or AMD V to make hypervisor work.

If you do much stuff on your box, like graphics in GIMP and Inkscape its pain to do that even on dual Athlon XP 1.6GHz, I have had such system and I can tell you that now I can breath and just do my job instead of watching the progress bar.

3D may not be that useful on the workstation at the first place, but processing windows/screen content CAN and SHOULD be graphics accelrated, not Compiz or other 3D candy stuff, RAW graphics, toolkits like GTK, all the 2D math should be accelrated by drivers for GFX card, unfortunelly FreeBSD does not cope very well here, even on open source Intel graphics.

You can check gtkperf bemchmark to see the diffrence between vesa and accelrated GFX driver.

Also if you do many things at a time with some tasks in backgound dual core or just old plain SMP with dual P2/P3 or even SPARC system makes a lot of sense, much better comfort for the work.

Also (Open)Solaris likes memory and horsepower much more then FreeBSD which I recently ofter use..

Originally Posted by Snoop1990

I am just wondering about those hardware notes, nearly all dual core, what for ? Ok I have a dual core at the moment as well and it is quite nice but for general work I never reach 25 % so why not buy a processor that is about a quarter of what I have at the moment ? sure compiling would be slower, but to be honest I do not compile all the time ...

I have 4 cores @ 3GHz each and I can make them crawl in some circumstances, but of course most of the systems are idle for most of the time, but when the workload comes you have horsepower to cope with it and do not disturb your work waiting for some tasks to finish. but of course not so many people need a lot of horsepower, for most of the time its just waste of power.

Originally Posted by Snoop1990

To make a long story short ? Do you think I would be fine with a 1,5 Ghz processor for a mobile web development ! add about 1 GB and a 80 Gb harddisc enough ?

I am just wondering as I can not imagine what to use these power for ...

You can get VIA NANO (Isaiah) or Atom (with HT) Intel CPU, they have TDP at about 1-5W, get 1GB RAM + some HDD or even 4GB flash and do you job, you will also be able to work in silence since these CPUs can be colled passively. At the same time VIA NANO is so powerful that it can run Crysis with decent playable freme rate with decent graphics card.