gwax's rumblings

I have finally decided, after 7 years of faith­ful ser­vice, that thevoid is due for decom­mis­sion­ing as my pri­mary desk­top. I love thevoid, she’s a great machine but at a 1.8GHz sin­gle core, 1GB of RAM, no USB2, no SATA, no PCI-E, no PCI-X and fans that are start­ing to make squealing/grinding noises, she’s fallen a lit­tle far behind the tech­nol­ogy curve. My gen­eral view on desk­tops is, and for a long time has been, to get a core setup with the most expand­abil­ity pos­si­ble and then incre­men­tally upgrade for as long as pos­si­ble; fol­low­ing that prin­ci­ple, I am replac­ing thevoid with abyss.

Abyss (cur­rent specs)

• Lian-Li PC-A77B case
• Tyan Tempest i5400PW (S5397) motherboard
• 2x Intel Xeon E5420 2.5GHz quad core CPUs
• 4x Kingston 1GB 667MHz FB-DIMM RAM
• 2x Western Digital 500GB SATA HD
• Lite-On SATA 20X DVD±R

Abyss (planned upgrades) (as funds are available)

• 4x Kingston 1GB 667MHz FB-DIMM RAM
• Some medium-to-high-end nVIDIA video card
• some medium-end multi-channel sound card
• Highpoint RocketRAID2240 16-channel SATA controller
• 3x Icy Dock 5-bay SATA backplane
• 15x 750GB HD

The hard­ware in abyss has been specif­i­cally cho­sen to have sup­port for Intel VT-x and VT-d vir­tu­al­iza­tion tech­nol­ogy so as to allow for as ver­sa­tile a machine as pos­si­ble. Abyss is already run­ning Xen with Gentoo Linux as the pri­mary, dom0, oper­at­ing sys­tem and Windows XP as a sec­ondary, domU, oper­at­ing sys­tem. My hope, after adding a video and sound card, is to install another Gentoo Linux and Windows XP oper­at­ing sys­tem, as well as a Windows Vista oper­at­ing sys­tem. Ultimately, the cur­rent Gentoo and Windows oper­at­ing sys­tems will always run in the back­ground, pri­mar­ily act­ing as head­less servers for under­ly­ing ser­vices, and for day to day usage I will be able to switch between Gentoo, XP and Vista domains based on my needs. In essence, I will have a dual-booting sys­tem of vir­tual hosts with direct access to my video and audio hardware.

Hopefully abyss, with some incre­men­tal upgrades, will serve my com­pu­ta­tion needs for the next five to ten years.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.