"INFINITY" - A tale of many fans.
I've been working with computer hardware for over twenty years, and even though
some people would gladly flee the wretched things at the end of the day, I have
always been happy to come home to more. I've never been able to afford what I'd
choose in an off-the-shelf system, and so for the last ten years I've built all
my home systems from whatever components I could beg, borrow, swap or even (as a
last resort) pay for.
The plan was that this would be my last big PC, and one modelled as
closely as I could manage on the Compaq/NT big-iron I build for a living - I
wanted server levels of performance and reliability, but on much tighter
purse-strings than I enjoy at work.. although the original £1000 budgeted has
probably doubled or trebled with later upgrades, and with hindsight I could have
bought a small Proliant if I'd saved up instead…
I
usually manage to eke every last month of useful lifespan from my homebrew
systems, so was still using a tweaked 486/100 when most had moved to Pentiums,
and a slightly-overclocked Pentium 200 when IIs and IIIs were the norm. So, I
hoped that this system would last around three or four years with careful
upgrades, until some of the promised integration technology appeared: I
envisioned a featureless cube hidden under the desk, with wireless interfaces to
network, storage, display and I/O… Well, most of that is still a few years away
yet, but with an occasional wave of upgrades I think it might possibly last the
distance.
In the spring of 2000, when I was pondering over the hardware spec, twin CPUs
seemed to be the way I wanted to go. Nearly all of the servers I've built and
managed in the last few years have been duals or quads at least, and I was
getting very used to the responsiveness and even performance under load. I'm an
occasional (but impatient!) Photoshop user,
too, and as one of the few SMP-aware apps at the time it also nudged me towards
a dual system.
This limited my choice of motherboards straight away, but I'd recently installed
a new board in Ros's PC and we'd chosen a SuperMicro as having a good
specification for it's relatively modest price - having installed it, I was
impressed with it's performance and quality, and their
P6DBE
SMP board was getting equally good reviews online.
The dual processor approach was a threat to the budget, though, and in the end I
chose to compromise on clock speed and hope that, as intimated, the motherboard
would support most or all subsequent PIII CPUs - and this does seem to be the
case, with a recent addendum on the manufacturer's site stating that the new
gigahertz chips are now supported. [Update] The older
Slot format CPUs are rare and unappealingly expensive at these fast clock
speeds, unfortunately, but the upgrade would really bring a noticeable
performance boost - especially with DirectX games, where a single 500MHz CPU is
certainly not feeding coordinate pairs to the Radeon nearly as fast as the
latter can cope with.
I
was determined that the case would be capacious enough to hold not only the
over-sized dual slot motherboard, but a full I/O subsystems's worth of drives,
extras, add-ons, upgrades, expansions and whatnots. The demands of a limited
hardware budget mean that usually have to add extra hard disks rather than
replacing them with larger ones, for example, and my PCs are usually decidedly
overcrowded by the time they reach the end of their lifespan. The
SuperMicro SC-750a
was getting excellent reviews as a capacious overclocker's or power-user's case,
and it seemed wise to mate motherboard and case from the same manufacturer. In
the end, of course, there were just as many installation quirks and
poorly-fitting hardware oddments as with my previous mix-and-match systems.
The first incarnation - Spring 2000.
Click here for the current system specs
Update Summer 2002 - INFINITY2, The Emperor's New Clothes