After a few months of gear lust, I bit the bullet and bought a new workstation. It isn’t so much that I really needed it, but more that I wanted something that’d sit under my desk and be silent; working away and keeping me content.
You see, my last workstation, while well spec’d, had an annoying habit of eating itself, particularly in the RAID department. I’d shutdown the machine at night, boot up the next morning, and find out that one of the drives in the array had magically died. Physically, it was fine – I just had to use the Intel management tool to disconnect, reconnect, and rebuild the array. This was time consuming and annoying, however.
For posterity, here is a picture of the old machine, sitting at the desk to my left. Also for posterity, the specs:
Dual Xeon 5520
Noctual HSFs
Tyan S7025 Motherboard
16GB DDR3-1333
Two ATI Radeon 5850s, CrossFire’d
240GB OCZ RevoDrive SSD
Lian Li Tyr PC-X2000 Case
PC Power and Cooling 1200W PSU
For comparison, here’s a picture of the new beast! Please note that it doesn’t actually fit underneath my desk. On the plus side, it is dead quiet – I can leave it on overnight and not hear a thing. For those of you that are curious, here is what you can see:
Xeon 5650
Corsair H70 Water Cooler
EVGA SR-2 Motherboard
24GB DDR3-1600
ATI Radeon 5970
Two Crucial RealSSD C300s, RAID1
MountainMods U2-UFO Extended Case
EVGA SR-2 1200W PSU
There are some bits that are still coming in:
Second Xeon 5650
Full KooLance Watercooling System
Another 24GB DDR3-1600
Another ATI Radeon 5970
With that in place, I should be good to go for a goodly while.