Ok, I was a little frustrated on the specific hardware compatibility listing availability (I couldn't find much), so I sort of used the system that Ultraspec.us sells as a guide. Please alert me to any mistakes I may have made or recommendations, I can always return the stuff:

1. Pegasos-II Mainboard 1Ghz [Genesi-usa] $618.71
2. Hitachi/IBM Deskstar 7k250 UATA 72k 80GB [Hypermicro] $66.00
3. Crucial 184 Pin 256MB DDR400 PC-3200 32x64 Unbuffered CAS-3 - [newEgg] $75.83
4. Sapphire ATI Radeon 9200 128MB/DDR 128-bit AGP-8X VGA,Svideo,DVI out 2048x1536@85MHz - [newEgg] $77.84 (in retrospect I'd rather have gotten an ATI manuf by ATI or ABIT, oh well)

Total: 838.38

I have a ATX case that I am going to use (that currently has a poopy old celery in it) & I have a spare Pioneer ATA DVD-ROM. But I'd also like to use an external case that has a dual SCSI Plextor CD & CDRW in it, using a PCI Symbios (LSI Logic) 53c825 card. Does anyone know if SCSI, more specifically the Symbios cards, are supported by MorphOS & the Pegasos II? I'm sure x-86 Linux supports this setup cuz I used it b4, dunno whether the PPC Linux will.

So, if you can carefully check over my purchases, especially the memory, I'd appreciate it. For another $60 I could have gotten 512MB, but I've read that MorphOS is so efficient... but I can always fill the other moemory slot.

Also, does anyone know if there is such a thing as a DVI video switch? I have a Sony HDTV I use with my Intel box via the DVI input to watch movies on - I'd like to do the same thing with my Pegasos: like an A/B switch for DVI. I have a great Rotel Video preamp, but it only supports the three lead composite, svideo, & RCA inputs.
Thanks!

Dan

Sounds like a good setup.

3. I have a 3200 256 Dimm, and yes in morphos I have never come close to running out of Memory.

Scsi: I use a Symbios 895 ultra 2 scsi card with an Atlas 9gig drive. works Flawlessly

As for the 9200 I am interested in getting one, according to ultra2spec. the 9200 works well in Mos although no 3d is supported, and excellently in Linux (2D and 3D). the version Ultraspec sells is made by Crucial. I am not sure if that would make a difference?

Enjoy

katos1

If you are not going to compile realy big projects with gcc 256 should be ok - I've 256 and memory went low a few times, when, during normal work (irc, www, mp3, etc) I was compiling some big program in background.

Hi Katos. Thank you for posting that bit about the scsi controller... glad to hear it works.

We use Crucial DDR400 ram in the machines. 256MB is adequate; we haven't run into any problems with that. And yes, we also use Crucial-branded Radeon 9200 128MB.

The only "gotcha" we have found is with hard drives. Most of them will work. We use either Western Digital or Maxtor drives because the Seagate model we stock didn't work (however we have received another Seagate model recently which does work... so ymmv)

I got my RAM (though I got the Generic 512MB for $80) and the same "brand" Radeon (a 7000 though) all from egghead too. I would think your fine with it. The open firmware seems to work with a lot more memory types. The SCSI card should work well too. I havent tried anything larger then a 9GB drive, but so far its all good.

Thanks everyone for their comments - makes me relieved to find out that the choices seem to be OK. I guess the only question is whether the Hitachi/IBM Deskstar will work OK. I went to StorageReview to find out what was the best on the leaderboard and this model of Hitachi (7K250) was it. Plus the fact that it was very reasonably priced. I mean really. $70 for 80GB???

Not to bore people with a trip down memory lane, but I can't resist - my first computer (in 1980 at the age of 17) was a Heathkit H-8 (with literally thousands of solder joints all put down by yours truely, with liberal use of first a solder wick then a solder sucker) and my offline storage was a reel-to-reel tape recorder I stole from my Dad as the cassette tape drive I had tended to drop bits. Each 12KB board of static RAM cost $200 and I had to solder all the chips onto the board myself!!! So, I had 24KB of total RAM, no Basic ROM on this computer, so if I loaded the basic (it was 16KB), I had a total of 8KB to program in! So, naturally, I had to learn how to program in Assembler. It was then I learned to hate the 8080 machine code and later to respect how much better the 6809 then the 68000 in my Amiga 500 was in assembler than x86. To think we still have remnents of that old piece of junk 8080 still running today on the machine I am running at this moment. So, this is partially why I made the jump to invest in this PPC "programmer's dream machine", the Pegasos II!

Awesome story..and welcome to the sanitarium

I got a Peg II on the way also, even though I only pretend to code these days...

Steve

@Bolstad

The hard drive you chose will probably work, but not for long. People call those drives "Deathstar." I probably don't need to explain why.

I have a 60GB Seagate in my Peg2. It works great and it is so quiet that the first time I turned it on, I thought the drive was a DOA.

--Aaron

Actually, I've used "Deathstars" quite a bit over the years (and I've built many many boxes for myself and others), but this is the first time I've purchased one since they were taken over by Hitachi. As a matter of fact, I have a RAID-5 server with 4 IBM 40gb DeskStar's which has run 24/7 for I don't know how long with no errors - and I do a fair amount of video stuff which works them out. Of course, given an unlimited budget I would buy SCSI Seagate Cheetahs exclusively... I did have one 15GB Deskstar go bad - but I've had WD's and Maxtors keel over too. I guess I would have to see reliable MTBF figures to prove to me that IBM/Hitachi DS's are any better or any worse than the average commodity ATA drive.

I found a DVI switcher, takes two DVI & SPDIF inputs and switches between them to a single output display HDTV. A little spendy for me right now, but in case anyone was wondering... RamElectronics DVI A/B Switch