-=PCTechTalk=- FrankenComputer

  • From: "Larry Southerland" <larrysoutherland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <Puters_N_Such@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:25:56 -0400

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=10909
<http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=10909&tag=nl.e550> &tag=nl.e550

 


August 12th, 2009 


Der <http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=10909>  Frankenputer: A Last Hurrah at
System Building


Posted by Jason Perlow @ 6:39 pm

 <http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/frankenputer-build.jpg> 

It all started with two extra Opteron <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron>
CPUs and RAM and a bunch of hard drives which I had lying around, that
mushroomed into a Build-Your-Own monster PC project. Like a modern day
Victor von Frankenstein, who digs up bodies in graveyards in order to bring
his creature to life, I was going to scour the Internet for component parts
to put this monster together: Der Frankenputer.

Several months ago I put up a blog post called
<http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9626> "Extreme PCs and Homebrewing: Rest
In Peace", which needless to say attracted a great deal of responses on both
side of the fence, those that agreed that due to the economy and the factors
surrounding the business of homebrewing and component sales, system building
is probably in its last days, and others who vehemently oppose the notion
that the practice of home-brewing your own computer is going away.

Click on the "Read the rest of this entry" link below for more.

In the article I explained that I am now more of a consumer of PC technology
than a tinkerer, at least when it comes to desktop systems. I buy a lot of
my computers from big box stores like COSTCO because I can get a very
inexpensive - or shall I say disposable - computer in the $500-$600 range
that addresses pretty much all of my home computing needs for at least a
year or two. I'm not a gamer so a lot of the tweaked-out features of most
"extreme" rigs would be pretty wasted on me. However, a situation came up
recently that caused me to build for what I think is probably my very last
powerful desktop/workstation-class homebrew box.

After upgrading the RAM and processors on two of my servers, I found myself
with two spare
<http://www.google.com/products?q=opteron%202384&oe=utf-8&rlz=1R1GGGL_en___U
S328&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf> Opteron Quad-Core
model 2384 "Shanghai" CPUs, 8GB of DDR2 667Mhz ECC RAM and a bunch of 500GB
SATA hard disks.  Any way you price that, it's about $1500.00-$2000.00 in
leftover parts depending on who you source it from. What to do, what to do.

Naturally, I thought, they would be best utilized in another system.  It
occurred to me that I'm probably going to be doing a lot more testing of
OSes and various resource-intensive enterprise software products this year
and it would be nice to be able to run them on my desk using a quieter
system, instead of running them on various loud and power-hungry servers on
my makeshift IKEA server rack-cum-home datacenter that sits behind me in my
basement. They're great to have around when I need to test something, but
leaving them on all day generates an awful lot of racket and they eat a
considerable amount of power.

I gave it some more thought. I can give my current Dell desktop $500.00
COSTCO Special to my wife, use her current system elsewhere, perhaps as a
Multimedia PC for the den, and use this thing as my primary desktop. The
problem is that you can't exactly call Dell or HP and ask them to send you a
Opteron-class workstation with no RAM and no CPUs. And while I am aware
there are custom system builders out there that do that sort of thing, with
the level of effort required, I might as well piece together this thing
myself.

It's been a while since I have had to piece together a system from
components, probably a good two or three years. So I started researching
parts. Originally, I tried to see if I could get it all from one vendor. I
thought  <http://www.tigerdirect.com> TigerDirect.com, who I've bought a
number things from this last year would have everything I needed, but it
turned out they didn't.

 




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