Mark77

For $500, are you willing to go used? You could build yourself a pretty nice Haswell rig from used parts for that kind of money, with cash left over towards a full-spec video card.

I think in the US people can do AT&T unlimited plans for $80 a month or something, which is 22gb of unthrottled, and then, only throttling under certain circumstances. An extremely viable situation for those who live in a rural area. Just a warning though, latency is terrible though with 4G. So don't plan on playing FPS. In rural areas as well, the MC7455 may very well be overkill -- the extra bands it supports compared to the cheap MC7700's are only of interest in the cities mainly. Look up the specs, find out what you have. You can get a MC7700 for $20 which, on its supported LTE bands, performs just as well as the MC7455.

You will need a miniPCI-E to PCI-E converter board. With one caveat, and that is, it *must* support USB pass-through. Such board must also support the SIM card. My personal suggestion is the Mikrotik RB14eu. You can find 'em on eBay for about $56, shipped from Latvia. Make sure you get the one that suppors the SIM cards. Shipping is remarkably quick, a week or two. The MC7455 is not a PCI-E card, but rather, is a USB card. You must wire the USB from the card, to an on-board USB header. Once you wire the MC7455 to the USB, and set the antennas up, download the drivers from the Sierra Wireless website. Install them. When you've done this, Windows 10 should recognize it as a Cell modem, and act accordingly. I have such a device, actually a MC7700 on my laptop, works great. I also have a RB14eU in my server. Also, you may need to purchase a microSIM to full-size SIM adapter if you use the RB14eu, as the RB14eu's SIM slots are full-sized, not microSIM as is very common these days. These are a dollar or two online, and probably available at your local cell accessories shop as well. Also, you'll need antennas to connect the MC7455 to the outside world. Leads, and actual antennas. The MC7455 uses u.FL. Holes are pre-drilled for the standard u.FL connectors. Your leads need to have sufficient length. So probably $60-$80 worth of kit, + the cost of the MC7455 card. BTW, while you're at, may as well pick up another set of antennas, and a cheap WiFi card that can be put in host/AP mode, such as the Atheros AR9280, and use such to share the wireless Internet connection through the Windows 10 facility that allows for such, "Mobile Hotspot".

Dell Latitude if you're going to go for a Dell. Avoid the consumer stuff like the XPS.

Get a Latitude, like an E7480 or even an E7470 off of refurb. XPS is definitely not in Dell's professional line.

I still use a PCI-E SCSI setup for my scanners (slide scanner and flatbed optical scanner). But other than that, the other posters are right, the interface is basically dead. It was a bus topology, so very sensitive to things such as termination and even malfunctioning of an individual device or the cabling itself. SAS has fully superceded it.

Same machine as I had 5 years ago -- an i7-2600. I replaced the sorta-buggy and sometimes-didn't-reboot-properly Asus Sandy Bridge motherboard with a very nice Supermicro with lots of extra PCI-E slots and remote KVM console access. Added a second TV tuner board. Installed a proper hot-swap tray system for 2.5" hard drives (in addition to the 3.5" hot-swap system I already had). Cable management with cables that were specially the exact length I needed ordered from China. Used to have an external USRobotics Courier 56k fax/modem that I bought in 1993 hooked up. That finally died, so I found a 56k faxmodem that was from 1998 or so in the junk bin that I replaced it with. Added an extra 2TB hard drive and finally built a 4-drive + 1 spare RAID-10 array. Incredibly fast. Phased out the last of my PATA/IDE drives with the motherboard swap. My SCSI scanner from the 1990s *finally* works properly. Had to buy a PCI-E U320 SCSI board *and* some appropriate physical adapters to make that happen. Amazing how I can have such a modern machine, and still attach "stuff" based on 1980s technology to it.

I'll probably buy a pair of 27" 4K LCDs, probably Dell P2718Q's or similar to mount on my dual arms in place of the existing Dell U2410's. And I will probably buy a 14" Ultrabook such as a Dell Latitude E7450 or E7470 along the way. In 5 years, my server's fleet of 5 2TB hard drives probably will be at end of life (one is almost 9 years old right now!), and they'll be replaced with larger models to support the probability of needing to store video content when/if I travel more and have kids. Don't anticipate replacing the server's motherboard unless I can pick up an Xeon E5 + Supermicro IPMI capable motherboard combo inexpensively that supports a faster than an i7-2600 CPU. Will see about upgrading to 32gb RAM (the maximum for Panther Point C232) when/if 8gb DDR3 DIMMS return to sanity price wise. Doubt there will be a pressing need for 10gig-E. Don't know what the 'killer app' will be going forward. Might downsize from a 600W PSU to a 450W PSU that I have sitting on the shelf simply because running a 14-year-old PSU continuously might be a bit of an issue. But then again, I run a 17-year-old PSU on an Ivy Bridge machine without issue right now. Laser printer might need replacement, its 22 years old this year, and parts are scarce on eBay now. Don't know if its realistic to use the same laser printer for 27 years.

Did something interesting this night. Put a Watts Up! .NET meter on a server: i7-2600 4x4gb DDR3 RAM (not DDR3L) 5 x 7200rpm Hitachi HDDs (in RAID-10) 3 fans 2 x 7200rpm Seagate 2.5" HDDs (RAID-1) Silicon Image 3114 4-port PCI SATA RAID LSI Logic PCI-E U320 SCSI card Supermicro X9SAE-V motherboard w/dual Ethernet (both utilized!) 2 Hauppauge TV tuner cards 2 Atheros AR9280 WiFi radios TSST CD/DVD-RW Antec 600W PSU Guess the idle consumption? Only 81W! Power factor was 0.98.

The Slot-1 version of the 300A wasn't very popular. It was the socket370 version of the chip that sold bigly. And of course, slockets went from a socket 370 CPU to a slot 1 motherboard. Perhaps my wording was confusing.

The 300A was only interesting because you could run a pair of them with slockets (Slot-1 to Socket370 adapters) on a dual CPU board with the i440BX chipset. Or use a somewhat junky board from Abit called the BP6 ) which had dual Socket-370 sockets. It gave a lot of people their first introduction to multiple processor / core computing as (at least in Canadian money), a pair of P3-450's were $300 a piece, and a dual Slot-1 board was $400 (Asus P2B-D). The Celeron 300A's were available for $100 or so a piece, and BP6's were $250 for ~$450 CPU/mobo combo. Dual processors for most 'enthusiast' types really didn't become feasible again until 2004-2005 with the Athlon64 X2 CPU's, or the Intel Core2duos (LGA775). The 32-bit AMD architecture dual CPU platforms required special steppings of CPU and the boards were expensive not to mention somewhat finicky.

I'd look for something like a Dell Latitude E6440, maybe an E7450, etc. Try to get a 1080p screen. SSD is mandatory. Pick up a Dell E-Port docking station, and hook some external LCDs up to it for multi-monitor programming. i7 isn't needed for Computer Science at all. Nor is a fancy GPU or even a GPU at all other than what Intel embeds on their chips. Of course, if everyone in the program is using a Mac, unfortunately, you'll probably have to buy one too. But the assumption here is that you need a good quality, but cheap business PC.

If you want to consider PCIe expanders, SAS expanders, etc., you could hook up literally tens of thousands of hard drives to a single PC. Only limited by proximity issues, power consumption, and RAID rebuild bandwidth/times.

Lexmark Optra Ethernet Laser printer -- 1995 SCSI Optical scanner -- 1999 Samsung 570V 15.4" LCD -- 2001 Enlight EN-7237 ATX case -- 1998 Enermax 365W PSU -- 2000 56k Fax/Modem -- 1998 IBM PS/2 Model M Keyboard -- 1987 All this stuff is plugged in, powered up connected and running daily on Windows 10 and Linux.

I used to say getting 4G on a tablet was a no-brainer because of T-Mobile's Free Data For Life. Even though it was 'just' 200mb/month, it was still useful for a little bit of use on the go, and you could add more on a pre-paid basis. But that's been cancelled now.

Wow that Ethereum bubble is quite the deal.

T7200 supporting boards generally won't even accept CPU's like the T9900. There's some limitations in the chipset surrounding this. The T9900 also needs faster RAM than the T7200-supporting boards support. So no, it won't work. You need to buy a new(er) laptop. Latitude E-Series laptops in Sandy, Ivy, or even Haswell flavor are pretty cheap these days on eBay.

Well moving from a 32nm chip to a 22nm chip without corresponding motherboard support may have fried the chip from overvoltage. Do you have another Sandy Bridge i5 mobile chip to test with? Other than that, I'm lost for ideas.

I don't know about Thinkpads, but with the Dells, you can't really upgrade a Sandy Bridge to an Ivy Bridge mobile CPU. So there's a chance that you might have 'bricked' it. In any event, even if you were successful, there would not have been any meaningful performance difference. My advice -- pull the "CMOS" battery for half an hour (in addition to the main battery and power, of course!), make sure the proper Sandy Bridge CPU is installed, and hope for the best. If not, I think you're the owner of a brick.

Since everyone basically uses the same chipsets these days (ie: Intel or AMD, respectively), the answer is "no". The benchmarks for a given processor will all be nearly identical on every motherboard for which there is support.

I'd address the lack of a good SSD first. Very important.

Not only that, but I think the platform of the T7200 is limited to 3gb RAM. So not terribly useful, especially not on a 11-year-old laptop.

Have you actually tried the processors? What's the issue you're experiencing?

You're going to have a few issues there. The T7200 is a Merom CPU, socket M. You need Socket P to support the quad cores, ie: the Q9x00 series. Plus you'd need firmware support and support for higher power dissipation. So basically its not going to happen. Your cheapest bet at this point is probably to find a Sandy/Ivy Bridge laptop, used, with an i7-xxxxQM processor.

How about reviewing some of the actual Business-Class laptops? Like the Latitude E7480? And maybe an after-3-years comparison? To see if one stands up to daily use better than another? I know, not scientific, but there's lots of people who wouldn't mind paying a little bit extra if "business class" quality means their laptop is going to last 4 years instead of 3.