I was cleaning my basement the other day which meant I had to power down my servers so that I could move the shelves around. That part of the day went fairly well, but returning things to normal wasn’t so easy.
While powering up the servers, my UPS decided it couldn’t handle the load from two computers anymore and instead of just beeping about it, it cut the power. It took 30 minutes for the active directory box to get up and running again after all the chkdsk’s.
My database box wasn’t so easy though. Apparently that half second of power before the UPS blew seemed to also blow the power supply in the computer. I wasn’t sure if it also took the mother board with it.
So, the first plan was to get a new power supply. But I started thinking about it. This machine is my oldest and slowest. It was a first generation dual core AMD processor. About 5 years old or more. It might make sense to see about modernizing the box to catch up with my other ones. So I started spec’ing out a new quad AMD board with the latest chips and memory. Surprisingly, about $750. Back with the AM2 and PC800 RAM it was about $300 less.
Then I started thinking again… I’m a greedy guy and I don’t like the idea of having two computers in the basement that are faster than the desktop I spend 10 hours a day sitting in front of. So, I’d put the new board in my desktop and move the desktop one downstairs to the server. Sounded like a lot of work, but a simple plan.
But then, I started thinking again. If I’m going to upgrade my development desktop, why not get even more modern and get something that will fit the position for at least another four years. So I started looking at the Intel I7 processors.
I planned on getting the i7 870 processor and 16GB of memory on an ASUS board. This would be a 3GHz chip and double the memory I had now. With virtual machines, iTunes, Firefox, and some other apps, I had used the 8GB memory before.
So I took the list to Memory Express to pick up. But then I started talking with their sales guy. Apparently, I could upgrade the chip to the i7-950 which was cheaper and faster. It needed a different board though with triple channel memory. But that meant I couldn’t easily get the 16GB of memory. This board needed memory in sets of 3 for a total of 6 DIMM’s. So, my options were now 12GB or … 24GB. Guess what I chose….
So, yes it cost a little more than I planned, but this will really last a lot longer.
It wasn’t so easy though. Memory Express has this wonderful service where they will install the processor and memory on the board and do a quick test to make sure things work well. Saves them a lot of returns and service calls I imagine. After about 90 minutes, I was asking about the status and they were apparently having an issue.
Apparently the board would not accept 24GB of memory. It could see 20GB just fine, but when the sixth DIMM was installed, the board would then stop seeing two DIMMs and drop the total down to 16GB. We tried downgrading the RAM to 1330MHz from 1600MHz, we tried using different CAS ratings, different vendors, no help.
Finally, we decided to try a different motherboard (same model) and then it actually worked! They were highly surprised it was the board; I guess bad boards are very rare these days.
So, after about four days, it’s still running wonderfully. I’ve re-installed Windows 7 and almost all my applications. I applied the registry hack to disable CPU parking on the I7 so all 8 cores are working. With 24GB of memory, I can actually configure VMware to keep entire machines in memory instead of allowing them to be swapped out. This thing flies!
And, the benefit of re-installing Windows, I got rid of a lot of crap on this machine.