First, this is ALL Abunabi's fault for talking me into this
Last week, I assembled my MSI K7T motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU into a neat little system. I wanted to have some more high end parts (like a ATA 100 hard drive, a GeForce 4 4600 video card, more ram, etc etc)....but, as many of you can relate to, I took what I had available and at the end of the day had a mini tower case, the aforementioned CPU, 256mb ram, an ATA 66 12gb hard drive and the old Voodoo 5500 all slapped together. In Aces High, Im peaking out regularily at 76FPS with FSAA x2 enabled, and I can run FSAA x4 with no FPS loss. I'm running 1024 x 768 in the game, as if I go to 1280, the FPS is down in the 20s.
So, that seems all nice and dandy, right? Well, No....you see, Abunabi (Jim MacArthur) reminded me that I have a really cool server case (one of these:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?sku=C455-S201) that has oodles of room for cooling. These things were going to be for my new webserver, but those plans have been delayed, so we kinda said "Aww, what the f**k..." and wanted to make a totally obscene game computer out of what was on hand.
The server case, as you can see, is a nice little Borg Cube, but since it has nice wheels for rolling around, its been dubbed "R2D2". We maxxed the case out in fans...7 of em...3 intake, 4 output, make this little monster humm like its a little jet engine. Dual 300 watt power supplies provide lotsa power, and in case one goes na-night, the other is running in standby. Oh but wait, use morons are going for the gold...
Short the money for a nice ATA 100 hard disk drive, we remember I have a Mylex 960 PU-1 RAID card, and the card has 32mb on it as well! We re-locate the 5 IBM Ultra Wide SCSI drives (9gb each) and begin mounting the drives, and then program the RAID controller for a RAID 5 config. What's REALLY cool is the case has 6 hard disk drive LEDs, so we plug the 5 IBM hard drives LED outputs in, and its some cool seeing 5 hard drive lights chattering away.
In goes the internal ZIP drive, the venerable Voodoo 5500 and install Windows 2000 Professional. After all the service packs are installed, we download 3DMark 2001 from MadOnion.Com. In my old P3 550 system, I scored a whopping 300 points. My system, chimed in with a 2550.
As money comes along, the Voodoo 5500 goes and the GeForce 4 goes in. More RAM shortly after that
The system runs like a raped ape, the motherboard temperature is very low, and my little R2D2 sounds, and runs, like a jet
Abunabi took some pics while we were building this thingy...those are forthcoming.
