Ever since Scott Hanselman posted about the developer rig that Jeff Atwood built for him, I've been thinking about getting a new box. Over Christmas, my younger brother regaled us with the story of his new 8-way server, and how he pitted it against a much more expensive commercial server -- and won. So, of course, we sat down with my laptop, went to NewEgg and spec'ed out the new dev machine.
I'm looking at doing more and more work on parallel programming, so a quad-core was the minimum requirement. I selected the Intel Q9550 running at 2.83 GHz. I was looking at paving the box with Server 2008 so I can run Hyper-V images of a variety of operating systems -- including the beta of Windows 7. And, frankly, I'm getting tired of SystemOutOfmemoryExceptions being thrown by Visual Studio when I compile code. So, a 64-bit machine with 8GB of RAM was looking good.
I've come to appreciate the 1900x1200 resolution on 2 of my last 3 laptops, so I wanted a video card and monitor capable of supporting that resolution. I settled on a 512MB BFG video card with an NVidia GTX 9800+ driving an Acer 21.5" widescreen monitor.
This left the question of what to do about storage. Since Hyper-V and/or VPC images are certainly going to run on this box, I decided on a fast (10K rpm Velociraptor) primary drive for the host OS, and a couple of larger drives in RAID0 for performance. I found a great price ($80) on Hitachi 7200 rpm 1TB drives... such a great price that I decided to throw a third drive in for redundancy, and run RAID 5.
I dropped an ASUS P5Q in as the motherboard, partly because it supported RAID in software. The video card sucks power, so an OCZ 700W power supply was the order of the day. Putting the whole thing in an Antec Three Hundred case, with lots of room for extra drives, completed the package.
It's been quite a while since I've built my own system. I was very pleasantly surprised how far hardware has come. Gone are the days of messing with jumper configurations for bus speeds and CPU multipliers. Instead, I powered up the machine, went into BIOS and told the system about the RAID array. Going into the AI Tweaker menu let me tell the mobo that I was running DDR2 1066 instead of the standard DDR2 800 supported by the board.
Piece of cake. Total time to go from a collection of cardboard boxes to powering up the new box: 75 minutes, including spending some time making the wiring all pretty. The Antec case was really a pleasure to put together. Everything was perfect -- mobo mounting pegs were exactly right, the fit of all components (power supply, hard drives, motherboard ports) was precise, and there was lots of room to tuck cables out of the way.
Then came the challenge. In the process of putting the parts list together, I had briefly considered the notion of putting in an optical drive. Then I thought, "Nah... everything I need to install is available online." I had forgotten a critical piece of the puzzle. How exactly was I going to load the OS?
Well, several months ago, I picked up a 16GB USB drive. One of my coworkers pointed me to this blog entry. So, I spent a couple hours making the drive bootable, and putting Server 2008 onto that drive. A couple words to the wise: start this process before assembling the box... and follow the instructions. I thought I'd be able to just copy the contents of the OS DVD to make it bootable. Doesn't work that way.
Once I gave in and followed the directions, I had a bootable USB drive. Popped it in, powered up the box. Took roughly 15 minutes to run a full install of Server 2008. Very, very sweet.
So far, I'm still working on getting the machine completely built up as far as software packages go. However, I'm already loving this machine. Boot times under 60 seconds to have Server up and running. It takes me as long to type in my password as it does for Server to load. Quiet, quiet machine. Even with a couple fans running, the new box is quieter than my laptop. And my RAID5 array is nice and snappy; it benchmarked as 120MB/s for reads.
I could have probably done better on the price if I had been more patient. NewEgg prices fluctuate a fair bit. And, of course, the 1 TB drives I wanted were out of stock... until an hour after I ordered the system with 750GB drives.
So far, NewEgg has been great. Easy to order, parts shipped quickly, everything arrived on time. And I ended up with a great box, including a new monitor for under $1500. This thing will blow the doors of Scott's rig, for way less than he paid. Just as he predicted, prices have come way down in the past couple months.