
Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 - pius
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/2008/03/20/Building-a-quad-core-server.aspx
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maximilian
I always keep an eye on the Arstechnica.com hardware guides. If I'm ever
building a server I'll probably just get whatever they put in their hotrod
minus the fast video card and double the ram. Or just keep the video card and
play HL2 while I serve pages :)

Its amazing what you can put together for <$1000 these days. I'm sure I'll be
saying that every year hence forth, but it never ceases to amaze me.

~~~
mattculbreth
I did that last month for a dev server. Read their budget guide and bought
most of the components. Spent about $500 and got a nice 4GB dual core box
built.

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wmf
That's not what I'd call a server. Not even ECC RAM.

~~~
gscott
I agree it is not a good idea to make a home computer a server... unless if
you can't afford anything more and you are going to host it at home. At which
point it would make sense, but for something that goes into a datacenter the
author would want a more robust solution.

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bigtoga
Is this is a total ripoff of Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood's post, "Build
the Ultimate Developer Rig"
([http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheCodingHorrorUltimateDevelop...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheCodingHorrorUltimateDeveloperRigThrowdownPart2.aspx)),
or did he pick almost the identical components by himself? Maybe he did pick
this all by himself but I find it suspect at least that there are so many
similarities. He's passing it off as original content but I don't know...

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gustavo_duarte
Hi,

I did read their post when it came out a while back, but I did not use their
parts list for this computer or look at it recently. Looking at it now, the 3
common parts were the CPU, motherboard, and case.

Both the motherboard and the CPU are customer choice award items at newegg,
with tons of sales and positive reviews. I imagine 90% of people building
Intel quad cores use this CPU, and the MB selection is narrow. The case was
the big coincidence, but it was $30 off when I bought it, which is why I did.

The "algorithm" I used to pick the parts was:

1\. Go to new egg 2\. Sort by # of ratings 3\. Find the top-rated, high-
selling stuff. 4\. Look at the % of low ratings, and read a few of the low-
rating reviews to see if something is wrong with the component (everything has
a few one-egg reviews, but their kind matters) 5\. Google the part to see if
it's ok in the main reviews or if no major problems are around. 6\. Done

cheers

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xirium
For another US$700 you could buy a cheap RAID card and another six disks. That
would quadruple the storage and only cost a total of US$1600.

~~~
sadiq
If you're running Linux then it's probably worth steering clear of cheap RAID
cards (if you're using them for RAID).

Linux's software RAID performance is ridiculously fast these days, it left all
the cheap cards we had standing and even gives mid-range cards a good run for
their money. Another added bonus is there's no crazy proprietary on-disk
format, you can rebuild the array on any Linux machine and in most
configurations, pull out a disk, drop it in any other Linux machine and read
it.

<http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~gelb/castle_raid.html> has some benchmarks
those guys did a little while back but Google's filled with stuff on Linux's
software RAID performance.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
Amen for Linux software RAID.

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Tichy
I can't believe the tiny CPU fan. Maybe there have been some technological
advances since I last assembled my own system.

~~~
reitzensteinm
You should see the 45nm dual core chip fans then... it's great to be moving on
the other direction for once! Nehalem is natively quad core, too, so when that
comes out 8 execution threads will be had for ridiculously low wattage.

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malbiniak
Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900*

*bandwidth not included. good luck colo'ing that bad boy.

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aggieben
Eh...you can build something as good and cheaper than this if you carefully
monitor Fry's ads.

~~~
aggieben
Here we go: today's Fry's ad in _The Dallas Morning News_ :

    
    
      $230 for Q6600 + ECS GF7100PVT-M
      $200 for 1TB Seagate SATA300/32MB, 7200RPM
      $60  for 4GB PC6400 DDR2
      $70  for Antec uATX Minuet 350 case
      --------
      $560
    

Throw in another $60 for 4 more GB of memory, and you've got what he's got,
but with a bigger disk and much, much smaller case (it probably won't be as
quiet) and for only $620 instead of $900.

~~~
subwindow
4 GB of RAM is $60? When the hell did that happen?

~~~
henning
Fry's sells defective components back to customers in the hope they'll be too
lazy to return it (they do have an extremely liberal return policy, though --
it'll just go back on the shelf for someone else to buy).

~~~
aggieben
I've never had a problem with components from Fry's. Just gotta choose the
right brands. Patriot and Kingston are decent brands that usually gets sold in
good sales (I think I got a couple of nice Kingston 2 GB sticks of for $35
each recently). Sometimes you'll see a great deal on Crucial as well.

I should also add, that your theory doesn't even make sense - the kind of
people who buy components from Fry's are exactly the kind of people who will
return stuff. What they are doing is just typical retail loss-leading sales in
hopes that you'll buy that new DVD-burner* with a higher markup while you're
in there.

* or whatever

