View Single Post - Out with the old, In with the new.

acruxksa · Rated XXX

After spending some time messing with my folding farm rack, I've decided it's time for a change. Along those lines, I have determined that I want to upgrade system capabilities while also reducing clutter and power consumption. I guess you could look at this upgrade as a "green" thing to do. Grin

I tried that line on my wife and she didn't buy it, but she did like the idea of me getting rid of a lot of the excess hardware in "The Closet" Wink

Anyway, UPS delivered the first stage of this new endeavor yesterday and now I am eagerly awaiting the heatsinks, 2 - 1.5TB hard drives and Radeon HD 5850.

Here's a picture of the first delivery, you can also see some of the stuff In the background that I plan to unload in the near future.

Basic Specs as ordered:

1 - Asus Z8NA-D6C Dual 1366 socket motherboard
2 - Xeon e5520 cpu's
6 - 2GB Crucial DDR3 10600 (board/cpu only support DDR3-8500, but the egg had a combo deal)
2 - 1.5TB WD Caviar Green drives (don't plan to run raid, these are for storage)
1 - 32GB Super Talent SSD drive (boot drive)
1 - MSI Radeon HD 5850 (This may end up in my gaming computer since this build is primarily for server duties)
1 - Asus MIO sound card
2 - Intel BXSTS100C coolers (can't overclock with this mobo, so nothing special needed here)

The Xeon e5520 cpu's are only 2.26Ghz, but I eventually plan to move up to something with a bit more oomph as prices drop. Apparently these cpu's can also be used in single 1366 socket motherboards and overclocked, so they may eventually find their way into other computers in the house as I upgrade.

The plan currently is to use the server to fold -bigadv units until stanford eliminates the bonus points for them, then switch it to a virtual server box to perform other duties as well. Media encoding, serving and data storage. Probably overkill for that, but it's the minimum needed for -bigadv work units.
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