Upgrading bertha

lenagh · 22 Mar 2011 at 08:48

Hi all,

Just looking for some advice as I've been out of the loop so long (this unit was built in 2006 and has been topped up in between). I don't think there is much that can be salvaged but would love to know peoples thoughts.

Budget wise not really looking to set limits but I am a tight wad

I'd like something that is fit for purpose rather than necessarily setting the world on fire. The rig can be built over a period of several months as well. I think the critical area to get right is the mobo, CPU and ram at this point.

Gaming will not be on the list of requirements. Purpose of the machine at the moment is to run esx, workstation and a ton of virtual machines. I also use it to maintain and run a business from which requires a lot of basic video editing. Its more volume than quality.

Current equipment is as follows

MSI N1996 AM2 board with a lowly x2 5600+
4GB PC2-6400 ram
2 x 320GB Hitachi deathstars in RAID 0
1 x 500GB seagate as a data drive
Backing up to an external USB drive currently.
EVGA 8800GTS card its the cut down version with 768mb from memory
The power supply might be salvagable ? its a hiper type-m 670W
The case is made out of Meccanno and best forgotten.

Screen, keyboard etc I can carry over also.

Many thanks in advance, appreciate she is old but in all honesty she's only just starting to show her age and mainly in the speed of the CPU and disk access. (running multiple vm's batters storage

)

lenagh · 22 Mar 2011 at 09:14

Thanks hybrid, I'll be honest and admit I had no idea there are longevity issues with drives in RAID0 ? luckily only the OS and some unimportant bits sit on that drive, the vm's are kept separately and are backed up.

SSD was something I was looking into, however only the intel elmcrest tickles my interest at the moment so it would be a secondary purchase I suspect a few months down the line. I would be interested to hear if my assumption re: this unit being rather good is ill informed however.

The 1055t does indeed seem to be the best value option out there with the hex core for workstation. Thanks for the input

lenagh · 22 Mar 2011 at 09:36

Re: the motherboard, clockers state its a 6GB version on sata but everywhere else in the world intimates its 3GB could anyone confirm

lenagh · 22 Mar 2011 at 09:57

Thank you nkata appreciate it

lenagh · 22 Mar 2011 at 17:30

hybrid572 said:
The issues to do with RAID0 are simple: it is set up such that if either drive fails, both drives fail and become unusable. That, and the fact that many studies show performance increases under RAID0 to be not as high as often stated, mean one may as well simply use separate drives.

Ah sorry understand your point now, yep took raid 0 specifically for the speed increase it yielded back in 2006 :eek:

Raid 10 or 50 one day when I get a lotto win

it did yield great results at the time must confess with the obvious trade off being resilience.

I'm going to aim for 8GB across 2 sticks and leave two spare for future expansion. ESXi's hypervisor is very good at memory management so if I'm running that many machines I'll be doing it through that rather than workstation. I tend to use workstation for trialling individual machines rather than for running an environment.

lenagh · 24 Mar 2011 at 10:50

I seem to have narrowed it down to grabbing a 95W edition of the 1055t which will allow some room for clocking to boost performance.

Motherboard wise I'm impressed with this MSI unit

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-134-MS

Anyone got an opinion ? also with the vengeance ram is there likely to be an issue with the raised heat spreaders fouling against an A50 cooler? just aware of this little pit fall from a previous build in work on a video editing machine I did. Ooops...