Now the thing is I like nice holidays as well as a powerful enough workstation to run a number of virtual machines and since the more up to date hardware with enough cores and RAM was going to be painfully expensive and perhaps costing me a holiday I figured let's have some fun and try and use some older hardware.
Noisy machines are just annoying so a near silent build was the second requirement so after some research ended up getting a mix of old and new parts:
| Supermicro X8DTL-6F | €150 | Second Hand |
| 2 x Intel Xeon X5660 | €300 | Second Hand |
| 6 x Samsung 8GB DDR3-1333 REG-ECC 240-Pin DIMM | €300 | Second Hand |
| MSI Radeon R9 270 | €180 | New |
| Antec P180 v3 | €130 | New |
| PC Sound Card Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS SB0350 | €5 | Second Hand |
| Super Flower Golden King SF-550P14PE - 550W | €150 | New |
| Asus PCE-AC68 Wifi Card | €70 | New |
| StarTech.com 4 Port USB 2.0 Connector Backplate | €10 | New |
| Orico Desktop PCI-E USB 3.0 (2+2) Port Express Card | €20 | New |
| 2 x Noctua NF-B9 | €40 | New |
| Noctua NF-S12A | €20 | New |
| 2 X Supermicro SNK-P0040AP4 Heatsink | €70 | New |
| Icy Dock FlexCage MB975SP-B | €100 | New |
| Total | €1410 |
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The Supermicro board has an Intel ICH10R SATA 3.0 Gbps Controller but to be honest there really isn't a huge slowdown when using SSD's. It also has a SATA 3 SAS controller more about that later.
I have used exclusively Samsung Consumer grade SSD's:
Samsung SSD 840 128 GB for the System OS drive
The following are combined in to a spanned volume to form the 1.02 TB Data D: Drive:
Samsung SSD 840 128 GB
Samsung SSD 840 250 GB
Samsung SSD 840 750 GB
All the SSD's are hooked up to the Intel ICH10R controller.
4 2 TB HDD's are installed within the Icy Dock which are hooked up to the LSI 2008 8-Port 6Gb/s SAS Controller (which has been flashed with IT firmware). These drives are usually not turned on and are only done so when the storage is needed. A neat feature of the Icy Dock.
The build is virtually silent due to the usage of:
The MSI is running in a PCI-E 2.0 slot and the actual difference in running in a gen. 2 slot compared to gen. 3 is not huge.
Since I am not hardcore gamer and just needed a reasonable card that could be harnessed when needed for use in Adobe Lightroom this silent solution is fine and will also play games OK when needed.
I have recently decided to replace the Asus ac wifi card due to the lousy bit rate I was getting and instead picked up a second hand
Intel Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T4 for €80.
All networking will be wired up to a Linksys WUM710 wireless-ac bridge.
I have used exclusively Samsung Consumer grade SSD's:
Samsung SSD 840 128 GB for the System OS drive
The following are combined in to a spanned volume to form the 1.02 TB Data D: Drive:
Samsung SSD 840 128 GB
Samsung SSD 840 250 GB
Samsung SSD 840 750 GB
All the SSD's are hooked up to the Intel ICH10R controller.
4 2 TB HDD's are installed within the Icy Dock which are hooked up to the LSI 2008 8-Port 6Gb/s SAS Controller (which has been flashed with IT firmware). These drives are usually not turned on and are only done so when the storage is needed. A neat feature of the Icy Dock.
The build is virtually silent due to the usage of:
- Noctua fans
- super-stealthy MSI 270
- Super Flower Golden King PSU
- and of course the famously quiet Antec P180 case
The MSI is running in a PCI-E 2.0 slot and the actual difference in running in a gen. 2 slot compared to gen. 3 is not huge.
Since I am not hardcore gamer and just needed a reasonable card that could be harnessed when needed for use in Adobe Lightroom this silent solution is fine and will also play games OK when needed.
I have recently decided to replace the Asus ac wifi card due to the lousy bit rate I was getting and instead picked up a second hand
Intel Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T4 for €80.
All networking will be wired up to a Linksys WUM710 wireless-ac bridge.
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