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It had to happen eventually, but I've finally succumbed to the retail therapy that will cause some major changes at Chez Magman. I blame it all on Folding@Home as getting me interested in crunching again.
First change - Magman's main PC :-
This is currently a Dual Opteron 242 in a Gigabyte motherboard with 1 gig of RAM connected to a lovely Dell 2405 Monitor. To do the monitor more justice I've now picked up a Supermicro H8DCE with 4 gig of PC3200 RAM off eBay, this will be populated with a pair of 265 Dual Core Opterons. For storage, the existing 74 Meg Raptor boot drive will stay as it is, but a second 200 Meg drive will be added so that I can RAID-1 the data storage drive for resilience. I'm also going to look at some mild overclocking of this system using Clockgen.
The motherboard will be departing Chez Magman, probably via eBay.
2nd Change - HTPC :-
I've ordered an Iwill ZMAXdp in Black from a firm in the states that was selling new kits for $299, this should land at Chez Magman in a couple of weeks with a bit of luck. This will be fed with the 242's and memory from the PC above and a spare 120 meg disk drive for my stores. Added to this will be a new Hauppage HVR1300 TV Tuner and Windows XP MCE.
This will then replace the Shuttle system that sits in my AV Rack in the living room. The Shuttle (with a non HT P4 2.8) will of course still be crunching FAH, probably in my study eventually.
Media Server PC :-
This is currently an Athlon XP2500M in an Abit NForce 2 mobo, these parts are being relegated to the garage as a barebones cruncher and replace with the following:
Core 2 Duo E6300 Processor
Zalman Super Flower CU Heatsink
Gigabyte GA 965P DQ6 Motherboard
Corsair XMS2-6400 CL5 Memory
Asus GeForce 7600GT Graphics card
2 x WD Caviar SE 320Gb Disc Drives
The disk drives will be housed in an Intel Hot-Plug 4 drive SATA chassis that I picked up at a computer fair, giving me easy space for expansion in the future. I will be looking to see what kind of overclock I can get from this system as well.
I will then be ripping all of my CD's to this server with no compression - what the hell, storage is cheap nowadays, why bother compressing the music when you don't have to.
Backup Server:-
This is currently the slowest computer up and running in my study. It is a Tualatin P3 Celeron 1000, clocked to 1200. This will be upgraded to another Opteron Based system as I've picked up an Opteron 852 of eBay for £90, not bad for a 2.6 GHz processor (this processor is currently running quite nicely in the H8DCE whilst I wait for the 265's). This will hopefully go into an Asus SK8N when I can pick one up at a reasonable price. The old Motherboard and CPU will be retired.
Other Cruncher Changes:-
I've picked up a S939 X2 3800, that will be replacing an XP3000 in one of my barebones crunchers.
My main server, a Dell 6450 has gained another pair of 900Meg Xeon's via eBay (less than £50 all told), giving a total of 4 processors ,3.6 GHz of crunching power and 8 Meg's of processor Cache
I will be retiring 3 or 4 of my older crunchers, mainly the Athlon XP1600 and XP1700 based systems with PC-Chips motherboards, making sure that I only keep the fastest processor and motherboard combinations in the barebones portion of my farm.
I will be looking to put a couple of these retired systems up as prizes for competitions, but that's a discussion for another thread.
All told, I will be spending about £2300 over the month of August. Some of the retired bits will probably appear on eBay or MM to recoup some of these costs, so I'm expecting a bill closer to £2000 when all is said and done. Not a bad upgrade overall and all the fun of unpacking it (a very early Christmas) and building them as well.
Methinks Lemonman will have to get a move on with the borgs he mentioned if he doesn't want to get stomped good and proper in the very near future.
This thread is brought to you by eBay, a retailer in America and unfortunately a competitor to OcUK in the UK.
First change - Magman's main PC :-
This is currently a Dual Opteron 242 in a Gigabyte motherboard with 1 gig of RAM connected to a lovely Dell 2405 Monitor. To do the monitor more justice I've now picked up a Supermicro H8DCE with 4 gig of PC3200 RAM off eBay, this will be populated with a pair of 265 Dual Core Opterons. For storage, the existing 74 Meg Raptor boot drive will stay as it is, but a second 200 Meg drive will be added so that I can RAID-1 the data storage drive for resilience. I'm also going to look at some mild overclocking of this system using Clockgen.
The motherboard will be departing Chez Magman, probably via eBay.
2nd Change - HTPC :-
I've ordered an Iwill ZMAXdp in Black from a firm in the states that was selling new kits for $299, this should land at Chez Magman in a couple of weeks with a bit of luck. This will be fed with the 242's and memory from the PC above and a spare 120 meg disk drive for my stores. Added to this will be a new Hauppage HVR1300 TV Tuner and Windows XP MCE.
This will then replace the Shuttle system that sits in my AV Rack in the living room. The Shuttle (with a non HT P4 2.8) will of course still be crunching FAH, probably in my study eventually.
Media Server PC :-
This is currently an Athlon XP2500M in an Abit NForce 2 mobo, these parts are being relegated to the garage as a barebones cruncher and replace with the following:
Core 2 Duo E6300 Processor
Zalman Super Flower CU Heatsink
Gigabyte GA 965P DQ6 Motherboard
Corsair XMS2-6400 CL5 Memory
Asus GeForce 7600GT Graphics card
2 x WD Caviar SE 320Gb Disc Drives
The disk drives will be housed in an Intel Hot-Plug 4 drive SATA chassis that I picked up at a computer fair, giving me easy space for expansion in the future. I will be looking to see what kind of overclock I can get from this system as well.
I will then be ripping all of my CD's to this server with no compression - what the hell, storage is cheap nowadays, why bother compressing the music when you don't have to.
Backup Server:-
This is currently the slowest computer up and running in my study. It is a Tualatin P3 Celeron 1000, clocked to 1200. This will be upgraded to another Opteron Based system as I've picked up an Opteron 852 of eBay for £90, not bad for a 2.6 GHz processor (this processor is currently running quite nicely in the H8DCE whilst I wait for the 265's). This will hopefully go into an Asus SK8N when I can pick one up at a reasonable price. The old Motherboard and CPU will be retired.
Other Cruncher Changes:-
I've picked up a S939 X2 3800, that will be replacing an XP3000 in one of my barebones crunchers.
My main server, a Dell 6450 has gained another pair of 900Meg Xeon's via eBay (less than £50 all told), giving a total of 4 processors ,3.6 GHz of crunching power and 8 Meg's of processor Cache
I will be retiring 3 or 4 of my older crunchers, mainly the Athlon XP1600 and XP1700 based systems with PC-Chips motherboards, making sure that I only keep the fastest processor and motherboard combinations in the barebones portion of my farm.
I will be looking to put a couple of these retired systems up as prizes for competitions, but that's a discussion for another thread.
All told, I will be spending about £2300 over the month of August. Some of the retired bits will probably appear on eBay or MM to recoup some of these costs, so I'm expecting a bill closer to £2000 when all is said and done. Not a bad upgrade overall and all the fun of unpacking it (a very early Christmas) and building them as well.
Methinks Lemonman will have to get a move on with the borgs he mentioned if he doesn't want to get stomped good and proper in the very near future.
This thread is brought to you by eBay, a retailer in America and unfortunately a competitor to OcUK in the UK.
Can't wait for all this gear to arrive and be set up!
