I decided to build my first desktop PC this side of the millennium, mostly by buying cheap parts from eBay. With my job type of being on rotation, I can wait patiently for the next item if my bid failed or the item I want isn’t on eBay yet. One or two things are brought first hand as they are newly released.
So far, I’ve put together quite a high-end spec for the price of a normal high end desktop. Not the most simple of things, and certainly not simple even in computing terms. Needless to say, it runs like a bat out of hell, even with a 2560×1920 resolution to drive.
Precision T5400 Tower Chassis for main system
Unbranded 18 5.12″ bays wide Tower Chassis for hard drives
2* Quad Core Xeon 2.5GHz CPU
8* 2GB 667MHz FB-DIMMS, total 16GB RAM
2 * SAS RAID Controllers, 16 and 8 ports each and both with 256MB of cache total
4* 72GB 2.5″ 15,000RPM SAS, RAID-0
4* 72GB 3.5″ 15,000RPM SAS, RAID-0
8* 146GB 3.5″ 15,000RPM SAS, RAID-0
1* 1TB 3.5″ 7,200 RPM SATAII
PCIe 16x GeForce 8800 Ultra, 768MB Superclocked Graphics Card
PCIe 1x Xonar D2X Sound Card
PCIe 1x 54g Wireless Card
USB Mini Flush Bluetooth Adapter
Blu-Ray RW/HD-DVD ROM/DVD RW/CD RW SATAII 5.12″ Drive
DVD-ROM SATAII 5.12″ Drive
30″ Dell 2560×1920 Monitor
Windows XP 64bit Edition
2* Belkin 1200VA UPS units
I just got to figure out how to keep the kit cool…
Comments
RAID-0? I sure hope you have a good backup plan in action then!
Pretty powerful…what do you need all that power for? Do a lot of video editing at home or what?
Cheers
Running VMs and going to try out various stuff such as trying my hands at 3D. Also to run seismic stuff I do at work so I can learn in my own time which pretty much hog the CPUs and memory for hours on end. The graphics card, aside from powering the massive resolution for the monitor, is for games too of course
And of course, learning more about hardware and OS as its time for me to stop relying on laptops!
The backup plan is backing up the stripped 146GB drives on the LSI controller to the TB drive. The LSI controller isn’t a good controller and probably be the bottleneck, but for storage is ok. The 72GB drives are for the system and software (in two separate RAIDs) and don’t need backing up as I’ve slipstreamed the OS installation with patches, drivers, software and custom settings.
Maybe in future, if I’m feeling adventurous, build a RAID-0+1 system – but have to investigate whether it’s feasible using cheap high capacity but slow speed SATAII drives for the RAID1 portion without bottlenecking the high speed SAS drives. Or I might just sacrifice SAS capacity for a RAID5 or 6.
And then you go and spoil it by installing “Windows XP 64bit Edition”
Don’t worry Mr Gaughan – I run various *nix flavours in VMs.
What about running Xen or something similar? (you can run Windows in that…although I do not know if this allows for 3D access to graphics hardware in order to allow you to play a game mind you)
What games do you play out of interest?
I also use VM’s myself, but all on a laptop with 2GB of RAM and a dual core – memory not an issue at moment since most distro I run are in command line only but I’m looking at a desktop next for in office.
I probably will do in the future, but rather get the stuff up in running on a OS that I know, so I have something to fall back onto when I go onto *nix variants as the hardware setup is not the simplest. I do need to learn more about *nix in a desktop environment as most of my experience has been sys admin of remote systems cmd line only.
I’ll give a go at running Xen in a VM environment – makes for a nice sandboxed windows
At the moment, I’m quite enjoying World in Conflict and Call of Duty 4. This is the first time I’ve played computer games since the days of Worms and Cannon Fodder on my Amiga 1200T! Anything that allow you to think strategically – Sim City I liked, as well as Transport Tycoon, but The Sims is rubbish I think.
Got my hands on a second hand package of Flight Simulator, and will give that a go when I find the time!
You might like the latest Civilization games (although Civ2 is still one of the best – however the more recent version aren’t too bad….they make better use of resources – ie to get some units you need oil etc and if it’s not in your control or traded…then you gotta find another way
)
Myself – Team Fortress 2 – it’s sheer fun for a quick blast around. Get Portal too…it’s short but an awesome puzzle FPS game.
Have downloaded a demo of Quake: Enemy Terrority for linux (obviously the games I play are what works on Linux – Half Life 2 games work very well under Wine for one without any issues whatsoever) – It’s supposed to be quite good – like Call of Duty but with aliens(!)
Still I’ll be keen to chinwag with you about virtualised systems in future…I’m planning on making large use of this for the company I work for – they have extremely powerful servers that’s hugely underused but need more “servers”….
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