First post, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
I had this one apart to do a "quick" CPU upgrade and it turned into a bit of a project, so I figured I'd make a thread about it. This is the closest thing I have to a "tweener" but it's also my main workstation and one of the most powerful and modern machines I have in regular use. It doesn't have any specific purpose, just a machine I get a lot of stuff done on including some of my actual work when I'm doing it from home. Work, music production, video editing, gaming, coding, software preservation, interfacing with retro gear, etc. You name it, it Does That.
Here it is, a beastly ex-server-room 4U rack case with a bunch of parts I mostly found in disposal piles inside:
From right to left: parallel port (PCI card), Audigy 2 ZS, SCSI card, DB15 MIDI (/game-) port, connected to the Audigy (& extra USB ports connected to the motherboard), Firewire & SATA header, video card, serial port header (onboard.) Everything is hooked up and fully supported by the OS.
Of course you wanna see the specs, so here they are:
Asus P5Q
Modded final BIOS from some overclocker's site
Xeon E5440 quad-core (12MB cache, 333*8.5=2833MHz, 1333MHz FSB)
8GB PC2-6400 (2x2 matched pairs) in dual-channel interleaved mode
Sapphire HD4670 1GB (best single-slot card I've gotten my hands on so far)
Audigy 2 ZS 5.1 (running all six channels independently into a mixer rather than an "actual" 5.1 setup)
Onboard 5.1 HDA audio w/SPDIF
PCI parallel port, onboard serial port
Onboard Firewire AND additional Firewire port on the Audigy 2
Adaptec 29160 UW SCSI (66MHz PCI-X card in a 32-bit slot)
USB wireless-G dongle (who needs fast wi-fi??)
1TB Western Digital boot drive
2 x 2TB Hitachi drives in RAID1 (my home backup storage for a bunch of machines)
SATA DVD+/-RW DL
IDE LS120
IDE Zip100
Front panel CF+SM+MSP+SD+XD+etc. reader
My goal for this system is maximum connectivity & capability, and I think I've achieved that pretty well. 😀
It's actually the case & some parts from Bringing Back Black, my first (now hopelessly broken) build thread on here a long time ago, but it's not nearly the same system anymore. That one was based on a Foxconn board with a single-core Sempron. I stalled halfway through the build and ended up taking it apart again & selling off some of the components. This current iteration is much more capable.
Here’s where it lives:
^^ this isn't even everything that's usually hooked up to it.
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