Charlie’s Server finally bit the dust. In the midst of some hardware upgrades (namely, adding more hard drives for the FTP), the server’s motherboard apparently decided that it’s high time to quit. In the interim, the essential Charlie’s Server services (including this blog) have been moved to a temporary server.
Sparing the gory technical details, I’m fairly sure that Charlie’s Server cannot be revived in its current state. As a result, I’ve gone ahead and bought some replacement hardware. I’m sick of dealing with ancient hardware and want to move on into the New Age. That’s right — Charlie’s Server will break the Ghz boundary!
I couldn’t claim to know anything about modern hardware, so I had to go to other sources for some quick advice. Having hardware-crazy friends is always a good thing in times like these. I also waded through a few AnandTech articles and even some forum posts and miscellaneous informational pages here and there. I think I got a fairly good idea for what’s out there, how it works, and what I should buy for my uses.
Down to the replacement hardware, then. I’ve ordered a K8N Neo4-F motherboard from MSI as per recommendation from several friends. It’s a PCI Express board, which should be nice once we get some faster storage options out on the market (yes, I really do plan on keeping this board for a long time), and it has four of the regular 32-bit PCI slots on there as well, which is perfect for expanding my current FTP with more IDE controller cards. Most importantly, though, it carries the 1Ghz Hypertransport bus with four slots for Dual-Channel DDR400 RAM and a Socket 939 CPU slot.
The CPU I ordered, then, is the Athlon 64 3200+ (Rev. E Venice 90nm Socket 939) from AMD. Why just the 3200+ and not something faster? Simple: I had a price limit. Spending less than $250 on a motherboard/cpu combo, I think I did a good job in splitting the benefit down the middle between good motherboard and good CPU. Deciding on the Socket 939 above any other socket limited my options somewhat, but probably in a good way.
So I placed the order at BzBoyz.com and got a call the next day telling me that the CPU in the motherboard/CPU combo above was back-ordered, and would take an additional 4-5 days to ship. I decided against getting the retail box CPU that they offered for an additional $15, so I’ll just wait it out. On a related note, I have yet to purchase RAM for the new machine, but there’s no particular rush for that given the back-ordered CPU.
During this whole process, and until the new Charlie’s Server is online, I’ll be hosting the essential services of Charlie’s Server on Lina’s development machine. Thanks Lina for saving my butt!
In the end, the death of Charlie’s Server as we know it is not all bad. The good news is that (a) I won’t waste any more time trying to revive shady hardware, and (b) I’ll have a nice fast server out of it, and not have to feel guilty about spending money on replacement hardware for a machine that already works fine.
Updates will follow as new articles on this blog. Stay tuned over the next few weeks.
Hey man. From my experience with buying RAM so far, Kingston and Corsair seem to blow the competition out of the water. I personally got Corsair because, at the time I was buying RAM, it just happened to be a bit cheaper than the Kingston equivilant. It hasn’t proven me wrong, and since it comes with heat-syncs built in it just makes you feel that much safer (although I don’t know if it helps or not :-p.
With that said, check these out. The top one is the cheaper of the two but the second is better quality and is the preferred model for your motherboard (as per claimed by Corsair). Both will work for your motherboard and is the cheapest that I could find in a timespan of less than 2 minutes.
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=80098-34&affiliate=pgcorsair
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145449&ATT=Memory+System+Memory&CMP=OTC-pricegrabbermerch
These two might be out of your price range (I’m not sure) but I’d recommend them and (I already checked) they will both work for your board. But what the hell do I know anyway! In fact, stop listening to me right now! What am I even doing typing all this much, I should be WORKING right now {slaps self in face}
Jon: Thanks for the suggestions. I have already looked into the RAM I’ll be buying, and have settled on Corsair’s ValueSelect 512Mb chips. I can get a bundle of two of them for around $90 shipped (thanks ZipZoomfly!), and that allows me to take advantage of the dual-channel capabilities of my motherboard.
I see that you decided on the AMD64 939 pin board/cpu. Good choice. Glad I was of some assistance in your decision making. With regards to RAM; I compared all the major manufacturers out there, and decided to go with the Ballistic RAM from Crucial. Don’t read much into that. Corsair is very good RAM, but for the money, the Ballistic 1G jobbers were the ticket.
Good luck with the build, and I am sure things will go as planned. Tell j4 hi!!
kepe