New System – Completely Unnecessary, Totally Justifiable… done!
As the title implies, sometimes in life you can do the completely unnecessary as long as it is somehow justified. My latest upgrade was from an AMD Athlon XP 2600 and self-modded case to a new motherboard and AMD Athlon 64 @ 3200 and a new case. I decided on the Biostar Motherboard to the left. It had many qualifying factors including 4 ram slots, pci express (even though I don’t own a card for it yet), Nvidia chipset with decent onboard video (first one I’m trying out) which is actually better than the card in my previous box which was an MX440. Onboard everything else including ethernet and sound. It was a decent deal from Tigerdirect. My main system nicely planted in my living room acts as my server holding nearly a terabyte of disk space. It occured to me that it actually would benefit me to have a more powerful system elsewhere as my main system is typically used for holding data and not processor intensive tasks. I will use it to check email and enter boring blogs like this one that no one will read anyway 
So, it helped justify the upgrade. Otherwise, it was because I wanted another 64 bit system. I had wanted to try out many different 64 bit OS’s but if I set up a multiple boot system on my server, it would require a reboot into the other distro which would need to have my filesharing set up as well or booted back to the primary server OS. Hence more justification. It was also a good deal as well.
I built the system tonight which didn’t take long. The CPU and motherboard were separate even though it was purchased as a combo set. Affixing the cpu with some thermal paste was straight forward as usual. The case itself looks very nice, having a gamer type element but not to an unsightly degree. I ended up getting the Aspire X-Cruiser which is pictured below.
The X-Cruiser has several drive bays to accommodate for years to come. It can fit a Micro ATX Board like the Biostar that I purchased or a regular ATX board as well. I almost bought a mini tower or a shuttle case, but with 3 hard drives, it may have been difficult to fit everything in and allow for adequate cooling. The case was around $130 but ever since I bought the Chen-ming case pictured in the ELG Gallery, I learned the value of having a nice case if you can afford to spare a few extra dollars. The case came with 2 blue led fans. I replaced the one in the back with a 120mm fan instead of the smaller one provided. There is also a fan pointing through the top of the case as well. The front guages were very easy to get working with the included power cables that can be attached the power supply. I have yet to get the volt meter working, but that is not a concern at all at this point.
In terms of software, I had 5 different Operating Systems on the hard drives I transplanted into the new system. It contained my only Windows install which is almost entirely useless other than being something I have around in case I feel like getting infected with viruses or spyware. Upon bootup, as expected, Windows XP self destructed. I will almost surely have to reinstall, although I am contemplating just eradicating it entirely as usage is very infrequent. I had 4 versions of Linux installed as well including Arch, Frugalware, Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.06. Arch was using a custom kernel which required an upgrade to 2.6.18 (all done using a Linux live cd) to ensure the newer drivers were available for this board, otherwise all other distros load modules during boot using a default kernel so they automagically worked. The next step is to slowly migrate to 64 bit distros on that box including the customized Arch install. I will also have to decide on the necessity of having 3 hard drives in that system. Once the hard drives start piling up, it starts to feel more like it should be a server.
The payoff… I immediately noticed a difference in speed. Once into the Gnome desktop, all applications were more responsive using the same 1GB of DDR ram as the previous configuation. A kernel compile takes about 5 minutes which is about the same as my server which contains an Athlon 64 3000. So, I have a case, motherboard, cpu, some fans, a geforce mx440 video card, usb 2.0 card left over. This will have a dvd writer and hard drive added to it shortly and will be customized and sold to a set buyer. Again, justification.