Spare Parts
I was looking around my oh so messy office at home and I noticed that I had a couple of AMD Athlon XP processors, motherboards and memory left over from various upgrades over the years. Digging deeper I found a 17 Gig harddrive I got at Nebraska Bookstore for $15 during a close out and a DVD Rom that I had pulled from my computer at home when I got my DVD Dual Layer burner. What to do...what to do?
I've decided that I need (ed: 'need' is such an interesting word to use here) to build a small cluster out of these processors and my workstation at my work office. (I'm not going to rewire my house just for the cycles of a couple of aging Athlon XPs.)
There were still some parts missing that I needed. Not to fear, Tigerdirect and Overstock.com are here! I ordered some more memory from Tigerdirect (which I ended up ordering incorrectly and had to send back...correct memory on the way, 2x256 Megs at $22 each) and some network adapters from Overstock. Overstock had Intel GigE cards with Boot Agent for under $30 each, which I thought was a good deal. You can never have too many GigE cards. An 8 port switch (I could only justify a 100 Mbit switch, $19 -- I recall a time when these were $100+) and two of the crappiest cases (with power supplies) you've ever laid eyes on ($29 each from Tigerdirect) and I'm almost ready to go.
I had orginally planned to build some FrankenCase out of plexiglass and bailing twine, but who has time for that? Besides I couldn't find powersupplies cheaper than what I paid for these craptacular cases. The extra screws will be helpful if nothing else.
So far I've installed the first motherboard into its case. The second will have to wait. Its amazing what little things you need to get this stuff going. I need a dang IDE cable. Scrounging time since I refuse to pay $4 for a cable that I should be able to find in any geeks junk drawer.
A quick raid on my former office netted me two IDE cables and a 4 Gig Harddrive. The machine they came out of hasn't been used in over a year. :)
I'll keep everyone updated on my progress and a final budget. I'll also invite suggestions as to what I should do with my new found CPU cycles. I was hoping to do some DVD encoding since that takes forever, but I'm open to intelligent suggestions.
Cheers,
Carl
I've decided that I need (ed: 'need' is such an interesting word to use here) to build a small cluster out of these processors and my workstation at my work office. (I'm not going to rewire my house just for the cycles of a couple of aging Athlon XPs.)
There were still some parts missing that I needed. Not to fear, Tigerdirect and Overstock.com are here! I ordered some more memory from Tigerdirect (which I ended up ordering incorrectly and had to send back...correct memory on the way, 2x256 Megs at $22 each) and some network adapters from Overstock. Overstock had Intel GigE cards with Boot Agent for under $30 each, which I thought was a good deal. You can never have too many GigE cards. An 8 port switch (I could only justify a 100 Mbit switch, $19 -- I recall a time when these were $100+) and two of the crappiest cases (with power supplies) you've ever laid eyes on ($29 each from Tigerdirect) and I'm almost ready to go.
I had orginally planned to build some FrankenCase out of plexiglass and bailing twine, but who has time for that? Besides I couldn't find powersupplies cheaper than what I paid for these craptacular cases. The extra screws will be helpful if nothing else.
So far I've installed the first motherboard into its case. The second will have to wait. Its amazing what little things you need to get this stuff going. I need a dang IDE cable. Scrounging time since I refuse to pay $4 for a cable that I should be able to find in any geeks junk drawer.
A quick raid on my former office netted me two IDE cables and a 4 Gig Harddrive. The machine they came out of hasn't been used in over a year. :)
I'll keep everyone updated on my progress and a final budget. I'll also invite suggestions as to what I should do with my new found CPU cycles. I was hoping to do some DVD encoding since that takes forever, but I'm open to intelligent suggestions.
Cheers,
Carl
posted by Carl at 2:00 PM
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