I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64, which I picked up from my university a few weeks ago, and I’m currently reinstalling all of my Steam games, many of which I picked up during the recent Steam holiday sales, but haven’t gotten a chance to play properly.

Currently, I’m going through my dual 1 TB hard drives, cleaning up files and deleting things I don’t need anymore. I’ll get to actually playing some games soon, I hope…

I’ve found a couple of nice Mini-ITX cases for server use, both made by a company named Chenbro.  One has two hot-swappable drive bays and a 150W power supply, and the other has four bays with a 180W PSU.  Besides the number of bays, the cases are otherwise very similar. What type of RAID I decide will influence the case selection.

When I first started putting this build together, my plan was to use the Intel Atom board with the 330 dual core processor.  Unfortunately, that board does not support hardware RAID, so I’d have to do RAID in software.  While the Atom should be able to handle that ok, it does mean that I’d need a separate boot disk.  The Atom board only has two SATA ports, so that boot disk would have to be on either IDE or USB, and I have found online some small flash-memory modules that can plug directly into those connectors on the motherboard.

When I ran into the hardware RAID issue on the Atom board, I also began to look at other Mini-ITX boards that DID support hardware RAID.  If I want to stick to an Atom CPU, I can get an ION board, which pairs the Atom CPU with an Nvidia chipset.  While I’d gain hardware RAID, the ION boards are considerably more expensive than the Intel boards, and most of the multimedia features of the board would go to waste.

The second alternative was to use a Mini-ITX Socket LGA 775 board, which are available with either a Q45 or G45 chipset.  The board feature four SATA ports as well as hardware RAID support on the motherboard.  I’d also be able to use a much more powerful CPU, though it brings up the question of whether the smaller power supplies in these cases would support them (In fact, a quick calculation confirms that the system would pull around 160W, just over the power provided by the smaller case, and a little close for confort on the larger).  I’d like to have a Core 2 Quad processor, as I do sometimes SSH into my server for development purposes.  The power issue could be remedied by replacing the included PSU with a larger one.  The two bay case uses a FLEX ATX power supply, and a quick Google turns up a 270W for sale, which would provide plenty of power.

Overall, I’m leaning towards the higher end build, due to both the hardware RAID and the better CPU for development, as well as the possibility of running virtual machines on top of it.

I’ve really only messed with two apps so far, Gimp and Evernote.  Gimp is, of course, preinstalled in Ubuntu and allows pen input just fine, although it doesn’t automatically map the eraser to the Erase tool.

Evernote doesn’t have a native Linux version, but it runs quite well in Wine.  The only issue I’ve come across so far is that I cannot drag and drop files from Nautilus into a notebook.  My plan is to use this to handwrite notes for school, and I’ve already been typing my notes into Evernote for the last few days.  Evernote is nice because it automatically keeps your notes synced between multiple installations (for me, that’s Evernote/Wine Evernote/VistaVM and Evernote/W7) and also has a web interface for when I’m not at one of my computers.  This syncing allows me to drag files to Evernote either by opening a VM or remoting to my desktop and then they will automatically be synced back to the copy of Evernote I’m running in Wine.

• Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz
• ASUS Rampage II Motherboard
• Corsair XMS 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3-1333
• 2x EVGA 1GB Nvidia Geforce GTS 250

• Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB 10k rpm
• SONY SATA DVD-RW DL

• Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 2250

• Lian Li PC-P60 Case
• Corsair 650W PSU
• Samsung 24″ WUXGA(1920×1200) LCD TV
• Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 (64bit)

So far, the machine is running great, and has no problems running Crysis at max settings at 1920×1200.  Of course, I’m not doing too much gaming, um, it’s for work, right? That’s what the video cards are there for, CUDA!  I do have it crunching through some distributed computing projects though, currently climateprediction and SETI@home (it looks like SETI@home puts my new rig at just over 2.6 GFLOPS).

I took a decent number of pictures, which I’m going to put online shortly, I’ll post a link when they’re up.

EDIT: Well, that GFLOPS number can’t be right, one of those GPUS alone should be doing ~470 from what I read… hrm, guess I need to run a real benchmark.

EDIT: And here are the pictures.

Link

Should be interesting to see how long I can hold out on sinking more money into a newer machine, but I’m hoping I can hold out at least past the release of Nehalem’s 32nm successor.

I recently helped my roommate shop for a small, personal web server.  We wound up basing it on Intel’s Atom platform, and I was amazed at how cheap it was.  The server (pictured above) came up to almost exactly $200, including shipping, and has a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 512MB of Memory, and an 80GB hard drive.  It runs Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition.

The motherboard is a Mini-ITX form factor board, so the whole server is pretty small.  It has a low power consumption, with the Atom CPU using only 4W of electricity.  For anyone looking to host their own web page, the Atom is a great way to do it.  So far, the box has handled everything we’ve thrown at it quite nicely.  It’s running a LAMP server to host a few personal sites.

If you’re willing to spend a bit more (close to $300 for the same specs) you can get the server down even smaller by using a slimmer case and laptop components.

With the cost of hardware dropping, I wonder if we’ll see devices like this mass marketed to the general public.  It’s mainly a matter of making a nice interface for it to easily allow setting up a photo or blog site. Imagine a desktop application that would allow a user to type up a blog post, upload photos, etc., then automatically upload that content to the server.

If anyone’s curious, the hardware we bought is here.  The motherboard is currently out of stock, however, as Intel has released a dual core version.  I’ll update the wishlist when Newegg gets the new board in.

On a completely unrelated note, I just downloaded Advent Rising from Steam.  I used to have it on the original XBox, but I’d been wanting to play through it again.