Standard Hardware Configurations

Minimum hardware configuration for new general-use workstations

• Not yet adopted 7/9/2003
• 1.5GHz Pentium 4 or AMD equivalent (clock speed and processing speed don't necessarily correlate across different architectures)
• .5GB RAM (1GB if it's not too expensive; all caches must handle the full amount of memory -- is this still a potential problem?) ECC? (Probably too expensive) Memory type? At least one free memory slot, for future use?
  
• 40GB, 7200RPM disk, ??ms average seek, ??ms worst-case seek, ??MB cache (8MB suggested), UDMA100 interface (what about UDMA133 or Serial ATA?)
  
• DVD reader, ??X
  
• CD reader/writer, ??X/??X/??X (what are all the formats it must support?)
• Should we get one combined DVD reader / CD reader/writer instead?
  
• 1.44MB floppy disk drive
• More than 2 USB 2.0 ports, with at least one accessible (e.g., on the front of the case)
  
• Firewire support, with at least one accessible port (e.g., on the front of the case)
• serial ports -- at least one
• parallel ports -- at least one
• 100baseT NIC
• Front-Side Bus speed? 333MHz for AMD, 533MHz for Pentium 4 have been suggested.
  
• at least one free and unencumbered PCI bus-master slot (for future use)?
• PCI bus speed? (Some of the newer, faster versions of PCI are rumored to not always be fully backward-compatible.)
  
• AGP slot for video? ??X
  
• SCSI? (Firewire, and possibly USB 2.0, will eventually eliminate all need for traditional SCSI.)
  
• case: suggestions so far include full tower, full or mini tower, and new small-format
  
• power supply: at least ???W
• "Energy Star" rated systems -- power-down when idle?
  
• what else?

Minimum hardware configuration for existing general-use workstations

• Not yet adopted 7/9/2003
• 512MB RAM?
• what else?