Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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. --------------------------------------------------------------- Please remember to trim your replies (including this sentence and everything below it) and adjust the subject line as necessary. To subscribe, unsubscribe or modify your email settings: //www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk OR To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email to pctechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject. To unsubscribe send email to pctechtalk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject. To access our Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ //www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/ To contact only the PCTT Mod Squad, write to: pctechtalk-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To join our separate PCTableTalk off-topic group, send a blank email to: pctabletalk+subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---------------------------------------------------------------