My desktop is currently a K8 Opteron 185 in a Tyan K8E-SLI; it's
developed an awkward fault, dropping all the on-board SATA devices
randomly and requiring a power cycle to get them back. It's getting
worse; I spent 50 minutes today poking at it before getting it back up.
So, it's time to push ahead with my new system; target machine is a
Xeon W3520 (ECC supporting equivilent of the i7 920), on a Supermicro
X8SAX motherboard (PCI-X \o/) with 12GB of ECC DDR3-1333 memory.
Sadly, Intel are dragging their feet with the Xeons in the UK, and so
they're not even listed for preorder at anywhere reputable; I'm either
stuck with getting a 920 to tide me over (in which case, I *hope* the
memory will work with it, obviously without the ECC features), or
ordering one from the US and hoping I can get it before my machine
becomes completely unusable.
So, has anyone used a bog standard i7 with ECC memory? I've found at
least one reference suggesting it should be OK:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=2299660
Secondly, I'm tempted to take this opportunity to get a new case; I have
a Lian-Li V1000 Plus, and while it's well built, it's not the most
practical of designs. I'm open to suggestions for nice, fairly quiet
cases with room for a decent number of disks and which won't turn into
cable-routing hell; this one has places for 6 disks, but you can only
really fit two in after cable routing, which is frankly ridiculous.
Graphics wise, I'm happy with my HD4870. OS is almost certainly going
to be the Windows 7 x64 RC, which I've heard nothing but good about.
I guess my other option is a Mac Pro, but I'm not sure I can bring
myself to buy such an overpriced machine
