Firstly let me update you I brought the final parts a SATA DVD R/W costing £16.98 and a brand new BFG 9800 GTX+OC 512MB costing £176.13, because I can only use one graphics card I wanted the GTX 260 H2OC but am going to wait for the price to come down.
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Conclusion
After installing all the parts – a bit a tight in the GMC small case (check the picture), I had to file down the SATA cable ends because the larger graphics card sits on top of them, but got there in the end.
That wasn’t the problem though, on installing window XP SP2 X86 it kept GPF’ing, all sort’s of random STOP errors, at first I thought it was the onboard raid controller, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t making any progress until to one of the suggestions I found on google said it could be the memory.
So I tried installing with only one stick and it worked. To work out which one was faulty, I thought i’d try again with the just the other stick and that worked too. After the XP installation I added the other stick and that worked. So what did I find out… although SP2 X86 supports 4GB, I would only use 2GB during installation, this worked perfectly for me and I have had no problems since.
BTW – why didn’t I install the X64 version of XP, most of my fav programs only run on the X86 platform. Why didn’t I install Vista, yeah right!
So that’s it I have fully working rig and it’s great, Visual Studio 2008 loads in seconds and I can play Crysis fine. I haven’t benchmarked it, but let me know if that is of interest. I don’t expect to be record breaking, but I expect it to fair well. I have decided to call her Scylla in dedication to one of my favorite shows prison break.
Here is what the final spec looks like:
Name: Scylla
Processor: AMD Opteron 1352
Hard drives: 2 X 80GB SATA 7200 RPM in RAID 0
Graphics Card: BFG 9800 GTX+OC 512MB
Optical: SATA DVD R/W
Case: GMC ATX R3 Corona
Power supply: 750W Hercules power supply
Memory: 4GB RAM @ 800MHz
Cooling: Stock case fans and heatsink
Total expenditure to date: £597.17
So what’s next I need to sell off the spare 4 GB RAM, motherboard, processor and barebones Poweredge T105, to recoup some of the costs. I’ll keep you posted.
