The Dually PIII system was getting a little long in the tooth,
so I decided to replace it with a dually AMD system. I had a minimal
budget for this setup so I had to do it on the cheap, which included
many weeks getting outbid on eBay in order to collect the parts.
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Headcrash as it existed before the upgrade, with
the Tyan Tiger PIII Dually motherboard and six U-160 SCSI drives
on two channels. |
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Pulling out the motherboard tray. The Compaq 5304
board fits into a regular 32-bit 33MHz PCI slot, but really
dangles off the end, doesn't it? |
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The old Tyan motherboard, stripped of everything
except RAM and the processors prior to sale. Anyone want to
buy it? |
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The obligatory goodie stack shot. Motherboard,
processors, heat sinks and RAM. |
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Mmmmm.... shiny. |
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Mmmmm... goodies. |
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The new MSI K7D Master-L motherboard with integrated
AC97 audio, Intel 10/100 LAN and spiffy red PCB. The two long
slots are the 64-bit/66MHz PCI slots, the new home to the 5304
RAID controller. Running that thing at full speed instead of
on a 33MHz 32-bit PCI slot should do wonders for hard drive
performance. |
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The two MP 2000+ processors, acquired for pennies
on the dollar. Thank you eBay! |
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Processors in their sockets. |
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One stick of Kingston PC2100 Registered ECC DDR
SDRAM. I'm not overclocking this rig (SCSI controllers don't
like to be overclocked) so I went for solid error-correcting
RAM instead of overclockable PC2400 or PC2700. |
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The Speeze FalconRock CPU Cooler Model 5F286B.
$25 a pair off of newegg.
I posted a mini review of these units on The
Tech Zone Forums. Read it here. |
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The motherboard mounted in the HX08 motherboard
tray with RAM, processors and heatsinks installed. |
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Adding the ASUS v770 TNT2 video card. |
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The full-length Compaq
Smart Array 5304 controller with 128MB batter-backed cache.
It takes full advantage of 66MHz 64-bit extended PCI slots for
all kinds of disk I/O performance goodness. |
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The 5304 card installed in the full-length slot.
It still hangs over the end... |
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Another shot of the 5304. It almost perfectly
blocks access to the two IDE ports. |
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Adding the 4-port USB 2.0 expansion card. |
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A back shot of the motherboard tray installed
in the case. I left the empty PCI slots coverless to allow air
to flow past the cards and out of the case. |
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The new Headcrash. It still needs some wiring
and ribbon routing work, but it's up and running Wn2k3 server.
two drives for system and swap files, four drives for RAID-5
storage. |
