About a month ago, the computer I was using as a server suffered a hardware failure. I guess you get what you pay for, and your mileage will vary when buying a cheap, used HP DL380 off E-Bay. Four of my six drives in my Raid-5 array failed and I pretty much lost everything. I decided I did not want to go thru that again, so I set out on my latest home IT project.

I decided to update my primary workstation with a new CPU, RAM, motherboard, and additional storage. Last November I purchased a NVidia 8800GT so I was pretty good on the video card front, and I have a 75GB Raptor as my system hard drive. The remaining components, a AMD Operton 165 dual core, 3GB of DDR Ram and my older hard drives are going to be moved to another case and serve as a media center PC which will also be running VMWare server so I can run some servers on there as well.

So if you haven't figured it out already, I am really trying to limit myself to two computers running 24/7. This is primary due to my electricity bill which at one point was getting out of hand when I had 4-6 machines running 24/7. Usually I use old hardware for my "servers" and my workstation has the most up to date hardware. While I'm not deviating from that, I will be running server VM's on my workstation for the first time, taking advantage of the new hardware.

I spent some time deciding what operating systems I wanted to go with. Since the second box was going to double as a media center PC, I decided to go with Vista Ultimate (64bit SP1). I will be going thru and turning off all the eye candy and other unnecessary services and components. For the main workstation I wasn't sure what to use. The idea of running Server 2008 and hyper visor was an idea, but I still do some PC gaming. A quick Google search yielded a site dedicated to running Server 2008 as a workstation, as well as some confirmation that the three games I currently play (WoW, UT3, COD4) will install and run. My assumption is that my VM's running on Hyper Visor will perform better then VM's running in VMWare's free server on Vista, or Virtual PC on Vista. Another benefit of running Server 2008 as it will give me some real hands on experience with it in a day to day environment. I think the new Terminal Services gateway will be an interesting feature to play around with, replacing my old port forwarding strategy to a computer running RDP on 3389.

So with my plan now set (if you can call it a plan) I set about acquiring some new hardware for the workstation. I knew that the new 45nm Intel processors were released, but these turned out to be hard to find. At one point I was all set of getting a Xeon X3350, which is the same chip as the Q9450, but I couldn't find any in stock without paying a huge premium. I settled on getting an OEM version of the Intel Q9300, which is a 2.4 Ghz quad core with 6 MB of cache built using the 45nnm fab process. I was somewhat disappointed when comparing the 6MB of cache in the Q9300 with the 12MB in the X3350/Q9450, but I just couldn't justify the extra $100. The performance comparison between the Q9300 and the Q6600 (previous generation quad core at a comparable price point) , shows that the Q9300 performs just as well with only 6MB of cache, while running cooler and using less power.

The motherboard I went with was the Gigabyte EX38-DQ6 for it's X38 chipset, on board raid, 45nm quad core support, lots of USB, FireWire, dual Ethernet. The board also boasts additional power saving features, beefed up capacitors and additional cooling features for the chipset. The box it came in is huge, but it's nice to see manufactures allowing enough room for safe shipment instead of cramming everything into a small box.

Rounding out the new hardware was a Zalman XNPS9700 heatsink/fan for the OEM processor, a 4GB kit (2x2GB) of OCZ Reaper PC2 6400, and 2 640 GB Western Digital hard drives which I will setup in a Raid 1 for my data drive.

I started tearing everything out of the two cases I was going to use. I transferred the motherboard from the primary workstation case to the HTPC case, and then discovered my first problem of the day. I only had one ATX version 2.2 power supply in the house. I decided to move the power supply I had to the HTPC and get a new power supply for the main workstation. So I jumped in the car, grabbed some McDonald's drive thru (#2 with a coke) and proceeded to Best By. I picked up an Antec 650 Watt EarthWatt power supply. It has 3 12 volt rails, and boasts 80% efficiency.

Back home I started getting the new motherboard ready for installation. The Gigabyte board comes with this CrazyCool heatsink on the back of the motherboard the prohibits the use of after market coolers like my Zalman that require a backplate. thankfully, this newer revision of the board includes hardware to remove the CrazyCool heatsink. I got the Zalman mounting brackets installed, installed the CPU and cleaned it off with so isopropyl alcohol and applied some Artic Silver 5.

It took some effort to get the Zalman installed onto the motherboard, and then mounted inside the case. After that I routed power cables for the fans, installed the ram, and my video card. Before going any further I plugged it in (power and video) to make sure all the mans were working, the Zalman was pointing in the correct direction, and that the system posted, and it did.

I got the rest of the components installed, wired and ready to go. As expected, the system posted and all drives were detected on POST. I enabled the mirroring for my new hard drives and proceeded to begin the Windows Server 2008 installation, which will be the topic of a follow-up post.