The Perpetual Upgrade Thread

[Anti-Trend]

Originally Posted by Big B

I swapped out my Abit BP6 and the dual 466 Celerons for an Asus A8V-MX and paired it with the Athlon64 3700+ and the two PC2700 sticks of generic RAM (Samsung chips, though). I put Kubuntu 6.06 on it, and that really seems to work well so far. Now, I just need to finish the mesh cover on the cover (it's a desktop ATX casemod I've had in various stages of progress over the past 2-3 years).

Wow, that's a pretty major upgrade from a dual celly! Any pics of the mod'ed chassis?

[Big B]

Yeah. Well, if I hadn't misdiagnosed my main box, I'd have kept the BP6 in there. I paid a lot for that Asus board because of a local purchase, but I'm really not in the mood to play catch the delivery driver. Linux seems to do well with VIA chipsets anyway. But, yeah, I'll have to pop up some pics here.

[Anti-Trend]

Originally Posted by Big B

...Linux seems to do well with VIA chipsets anyway. But, yeah, I'll have to pop up some pics here.

Yeah, I've had nothing but good experience with VIA since switching to Linux, though I do remember some driver headaches in Windows. As for pics, here's one of that "new" SMP board I threw in my webserver. As you can see, it's a full-ATX server board from Intel, so it just barely fits in the mid-ATX server chassis I already had.

[Big B]

Yeah, VIA's drivers haven't been the best, but for all the gripes put out by people, I've had less trouble with the hardware itself than even Intel chipsets. There's definitely something drool-worthy about an SMP box. I think that's part of the reason I still drop by 2CPU.

[Big B]

Uhh, let's see...

I got:
-LG Flatron 19" Widescreen (L196WTQ)
-HP F4140 All-in-One Printer/Scanner/Copier
-Corsair HX520 modular PSU (on the way)

My scanner died, or rather would scan nothing when I tried scanning and scanners were at least $60-70, and all-in-one's were starting around that price point.
I must have a bum Toughpower. My system has a nasty tendency to shut down all of a sudden, which it did once with the Enermax, but that was when that unit released the magic smoke. I'm gonna RMA the Toughpower, but in the meantime, Newegg has the Corsair's with free UPS 3-day shipping and mail-in-rebates, so I dropped the cash for the HX520.

Hopefully, this will be the last upgrades I do for awhile. Well, at least until I get a better job. (Hello tax return!)

[Anti-Trend]

Did a round of upgrades over here too, especially justified since I build all the kernels for my work, and now HWF as well.

Crow.SOL.local
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz Socket AM2
Mobo:ABIT AN52 AM2 NVIDIA nForce 520 MCP
RAM: G.SKILL 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Video: eVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 512mb DDR3
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s (x2 in Linux RAID-1)
OS: Debian "Lenny"

My wife got an upgrade as well, cost about $150 to basically rebuild her whole rig:

Gypsy.SOL.local
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane 2.1GHz Socket AM2
Mobo: MSI K9VGM-V
RAM: CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Video: MSI G71 [GeForce 7900 GT/GTO] (rev a1)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
OS: Debian "Lenny"

The laptop:

Pearl.SOL.local
Model: Sony VGN-N365E
Upgrades: 2GB Kingston PC6400
OS: Debian "Lenny"



The webserver:

Forrester.DMZ.SOL.local
CPU: Pentium III (Coppermine) @ 800MHz (x2)
Mobo: Unknown Intel 440GX
RAM: 2GB Kingston ECC Registered PC133
Video: Cirrus Logic GD 5480 (integrated, unused)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Ultra ATA/100 160-GB (x2 in software RAID-1)
OS: CentOS 5.1 (no GUI installed)

The fileserver:

Tomservo.SOL.local
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2400+ (x2)
Mobo: Tyan Tiger MPX
RAM: 2GB Kingston ECC Registered PC2100
Video: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (integrated, unused)
HDD: Seagate ST3300822AS 300GB SATA 3.0Gb/s (x3 in Linux RAID-5)
OS: CentOS 5.1 (no GUI installed)