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geeky So, the weather forecast in NC for this weekend is mid-70s. The weather should be beautiful, aside from the occasional scattered thunderstorm. Perfect weather for me to lock myself in my office. For you see, I ordered a new computer system last weekend, and the last pieces of it arrived yesterday. So now I get to start putting it all together. Yea!
Here are some of the specs. I ordered it piece-meal from newegg.com:
1) AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ dual core CPU
2) 2GB PC3200 RAM
3) 74GB 10k RPM SATA Western Digital Raptor HDD (x2 - in a Striped RAID configuration)
4) 250GB SATA2 Western Digital Caviar HDD (Why? Just b/c I could)
5) ATI Radeon X1800XT PCI-Express x16 video card w/ 512MB RAM
6) ASUS A8N SLI-Deluxe Motherboard (Lots of connections for above + room for more)
7) 550W Antec Power Supply (Need lots of power for the above)
8) Antec SONATA II Enclosure (Quiet PC... I hope.)
9) Wireless Keyboard/Mouse, DVD Burner, DVD-ROM, Floppy, etc.
Total Price: Approx. $2,300 after shipping
Not too bad, if I do say so myself. Now I just have to find some time to actually put it all together and get it up and running, at the same time that I have a 3 year old little girl running around demanding near-constant attention. :) I'll just be happy if a toy doesn't somehow make it into the enclosure without my noticing it. :)
March 12 2006, 06:27:04 UTC 6 years ago
(Specs are surprisingly similar to yours, but two years ago and sans high-end-video : AMD XP2400+ proc, 1GB RAM, 2 70GB Maxtor Atlas 10K SCSI, 1 10GB Seagate SCSI, ASUS mobo, 550W Antec power supply, Antec Sonata enclosure, extra thermal fan to attach behind the drive bays, etc...)
Yes, I know that just because the power supply is rated for 550W doesn't mean the computer is drawing that constantly. But at $0.12/kWh (which was roughly our elec price over the last year), running a 500W device half the time will add about $20 a month to your electricity bill. Which means that if the computer is only averaging 250W but you leave it on all the time, your monthly bill will still increase $20.
This only really mattered to me since my machine was being put together to serve as an always-on file and print and internet server for the house. Since then, I have decided that future always-on machines will be based on specialty low power systems or old laptops, and I will only get an uber-machine specifically for gaming (and it won't be on all the time).
March 13 2006, 00:10:24 UTC 6 years ago
I've actually been on the fence about this for quite some time now, anyway. The Mac Mini is perfect for a server machine. Small, compact, low power... yet contains everything a server would need (decent RAM and HDD capacity, Ethernet, OS X with Apache, FTP Server, MySQL, PHP, etc). The only thing keeping me from moving all of my servers to it before now was mostly laziness. I had everything set up on my Windows machine long before I got the Mac Mini (using Windows versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc). And I just sorta never got around to completely configuring the Mini and moving everything over to it. I think that might need to change now... :) Thanks for the heads up!
PS. If you are planning on going to Drak's party at the end of this month, I'll see you there! I decided to fly up for the party. Seemed like a good time for a visit and to get to see a lot of the old gang all at once.