As some of you have noticed, the site has been down for the past few days. I've been tending to the long overdue task of upgrading my home server. (If you're here looking for my latest backcountry outing, you should probably skip down a post- this is going to get geeky)
The upgrade was more of a strip-and-rebuild, as I only kept my case, DVD drive, and one of the IDE drives from my current system. The remaining parts are going to be reassembled into a PC for my brother.
Here's the pile 'o parts prior to unpacking everything:
The new stuff included the following:
Asus P5N32-E SLI Motherboard: nVidia 680i chipset. The tagline on the box touts this product as "Heart Touching", witch seems a bit unlikely
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600: My first Intel chip this decade. Nice to see them finally producing something price/performance competitive with AMD
2×500mb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm SATA drives: Amazing how cheap a terabyte is these days. Arranged the disks in a RAID mirror, so the 2nd drive is effectivly a backup. Carried the 250mb IDE drive over from my old server
2×1G Corsair XMS 800mhz DDR26400 RAM: One of these sticks turned out to be bad and I'm having it replaced
PC Power Silencer 750w Power Supply: Old supply didn't have the SATA and SLI connectors and was a bit underpowered.
EVGA 8800 GTS Video Card
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 CPU Heatsink
Soundblaster XFi Fatal1ty Soundcard
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (System Builder Edition)
Logitech MX3200 wireless keyboard/mouse
Everything stripped out of the old system (including an alarming amount of dust) and the new power supply and motherboard mounted:
Getting ready to install the CPU and heatsink. SATA drives now installed. The SATA cables were much easier to run than the IDE connectors. I would have to remove one of the two IDE drives, as the motherboard only came with a single IDE port. I went and got a new cable so I could connect both the DVD drive and the remaining IDE drive to the single IDE connection- the standard cable wouldn't reach both at the same time.
First boot of the new system. Graphics card now installed
(initially forgot to run the SLI power line to the graphics card)
The Vista upgrade took a bit longer than the hardware- much of the software I'm running isn't quite compatible with Vista yet. (Not terribly impressed with Vista at the moment, and wondering if I should have just stuck with XP)
Anyhow, things should now be back up…