Fun building computers...
Had some fun last week building up my latest desktop. I've had the really bad habit the last 2 years of building a new PC every 6 months. Not like a really need a new PC that often, just I get the upgrade bug can never squash it. This latest round it has hit me pretty good, but I've been fairly smart and got everything at damn good prices.
So what am I working with now? Dual 2.66ghz Xeons with a Asus PC-DL Deluxe motherboard, 1gb Crucial PC2700 RAM, and still have my GeForce4 Ti4600 and my 36gb Western Digital 10krpm Raptor. The new stuff is just the Xeons and the motherboard. Still need to get a new power supply (borrowing a spare I was saving for my server). Got my new equipment for quite the steal. The Asus PC-DL normally sells for ~$215 and the 2.66ghz Xeons are normally $280 a pop. I got the motherboard for $150 (Newegg.com refurbished), one of the CPUs for $180 (Newegg.com refurbished), and the other CPU for $150 (Ebay).
The motherboard came bare board, no manual, CDs, I/O panel, or cables. That's ok though. Printed the manual off of the website at work, downloaded the drivers online, and only had to buy a Serial ATA cable ($6). I can live without the I/O shield. The CPUs came bare too, but easily bought the stock heatsinks for $10 from ComputerGeeks.com. The heatsinks are a little loud, so will probably get some ultra quiet ones soon (silence is golden). Overall, $500 for dual Xeons is not a bad upgrade. :)
Though this time, the bug was bad. I've been working on upgrading my home server as well. This is being more complicated, since I've been buying/trading stuff here and there. My server is currently a 1.3ghz AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) with 640mb SDRAM and an old motherboard. The server has been hurting a little lately, since it does quite a bit. Windows SBS 2003, SQL Server, IIS6, Exchange, filesharing, NAT, domain controller, etc. Sometimes when I'm on it, I can feel it choking a little, and since I plan on having it do even more, I've been wanting to upgrade it. I original got a dual AMD Athlon 2400+ system and was planning to upgrade to SCSI, gigabit ethernet, and eventually a Serial ATA RAID5 array for mass storage.
The problem? The AMD MPX platform is pagued by crappy write performance on the PCI bus. Its also limited to 64-bit/66mhz (no PCI-X). In order for it to work, I'd need 3 64-bit ports for it to perform well, but almost all the motherboard only have 2. So... selling those CPUs and motherboard and putting together dual 2.0ghz Xeons (400mhz FSB), Intel motherboard with built in U160 SCSU and gigabit ethernet, and 2gb PC1600 DDR. With this setup, the SCSI is on a 64-bit/66mhz bus and the gigabit ethernet is at 64-bit/100mhz and I have an open 64-bit/66 or 100mhz slot for the eventual addition of the RAID card. Still working on putting together this system... only have to get the motherboard, new PSU and new heatsinks for my main system... then it'll be ready to go.
Hopefully this time, I can fend off the upgrade bug for a while. I hadn't upgraded my server in nearly 3 years, so hopefully this one will last another 3 years. As for my desktop... I think I'll be satisfied for a while.