'Puter rebuild - For the geeks.....

What's the intended use? That drives all the other decisions.

Dunno if I'd run a 5 year old consumer drive, when new drives are cheap and huge.

I wouldn't worry about overclocking, it's not like you're trying to boost the framerate in Duke Nukem 3D.

 

That's a 7 year old CPU....overclocking it isn't going to give you any kind of appreciable oomph. Overclocking can shorten lives of components, but those components are usually mainboards or RAM depending upon how far you push it, and pushing things that far usually involve setting CPU/RAM/Chipsets voltages far out of spec.

Then you have to cool it...best just to leave it stock otherwise you risk crashing...not really worth it for the small overclock you're likely to wring out of it.

Also, that board has 2 native SATA 150 ports hanging off the south bridge, the rest are on a 3rd party chip...not the best way to do things especially software raid (assuming you can even find drivers for it). SATA drives are much faster than PATA (ribbon cable) drives. Just remember to read the new drive's manual, some have a jumper to restrict them to SATA 150 mode since older chipsets may not even see the newer SATA 3.0 drives. This varies by hard drive manufacturer.

If I were you, I'd at very least grab an Intel dual core CPU based upon the Core 2 Duo architecture and a good socket 775 mainboard by Asus or Gigaybte that sports an Intel G 31/41 chipset...these are cheap and will dramatically increase compatibility and ease of use with modern operating systems not to mention will have more native SATA ports, will be easier to cool, easier to run quieter, and will be about 10000000x faster than an old single core P4.

 

Depends...any modern mainboard requires a power supply with a 24-pin main and a 4-pin square connect for the CPU. You're hosed if you don't have those.

 

Yep, yer hosed. Although you can use a 20-pin in a 24, it really isn't the way to go.

 

Korr has covered stuff quite well already... but honestly, there isn't much you are going to be able to do in terms of 'upgrading' it at this point. It's such an old system that compatible components such as RAM may not even be manufactured anymore.

Obviously the biggest thing would be a new hard-drive (or 2) on the native SATA ports.

My last tower was right around those specs, but only had 4 SATA... 2X Native, 2X additional chip. The Bios was also Pheonix Award and also had "Built-In" Raid, but only RAID 0 or RAID 1. Neither of which I had very much luck with. I wouldn't expect for you to really gain anything useful from setting it up as a RAID array, and it will only complicate matters.

10/100 Ethernet will be fine for use as a web server or similar, but is going to be seriously lacking for modern file sharing or streaming. Should be able to handle mp3s, but any type of video is going to bottleneck.

Along those lines, you will most likely want to remove the heatsink and CPU from the motherboard, clean them thoroughly, dry them, and re-apply some thermal paste, as the current stuff is probably useless.

BUT, if it doesn't come off with very little effort, DON'T force it (unless you built the machine). Back then some companies thought that stuff called "Thermal Tape" was a good idea. It wasn't. Awful stuff. If you pull the heatsink off to find thermal tape was used instead of paste, you are screwed.

In fact, if you really wanted to use this as a web server, you could actually look into *under*clocking your CPU to reduce heat creation.

Obviously an additional gig of RAM will help everything immensely in the case of using it as a server, but I wouldn't expect to see much improvement for anything beyond that (in fact that motherboard may not support anything higher than 2gig.) If you buy more RAM, make sure the individual chips aren't any bigger than what the BIOS can address.

 

I don't fiddle with Linux based HTPC/back up boxes/etc but I imagine there's bound to something out there that's mature enough - and might have good Time Machine support - to justify tinkering up a new box.

I recommend the LGA 775 products based solely upon widespread driver availability and maturity...Intel's G 31/33/35 and G 41/43/45 are supported by everything from Hackintosh to Linux to Winders.

 

Based on your requirements your current rig would do everything you need. My only concern is that if you are planning to be using this as a reliable backup server you'd want to run raid1 (if you're not going to buy a real dedicated raid controller use the software raid in linux, not from the bios) which will require a second drive which is going to be difficult to find and probably just as expensive as a newer and much larger drive.

You mentioned that all of your other devices are wireless. In my experience I've never seen a consumer grade wlan network achieve more than 25 megabits per second of throughput which means that will be your bottle neck, not the legacy drives.

As far as a htpc, you can use MythTV http://www.mythtv.org/

Running apache, mysql, and php dev environment won't give the box any problems either.

You should consider running vmware server, kvm, or xen so you can sandbox another install to learn/experiment in without worrying about hosing your backup/htpc/web server in the process. This can be shut off when you're not playing around and thus won't impact overall performance. If you really want to learn you can't be afraid of breaking something.

If it were me, I would purchase a new system but for different reasons. I have no patience and dislike waiting for things to copy over the network. Additionally if I'm streaming a movie from my server to my ps3 so I can watch it on my big tv and it skips, it is frustrating. Once you've been exposed to gig/e connections you'll never want to go back (think dialup to broadband). Get a new box, preferably a full tower so you have room to add drives in the future. Make sure the mobo has a gig/e nic on it and plenty of SATA connections. Then get a gig/e switch (cat 5e is fine for gig/e in short runs) and put it somewhere close to the server but make sure you have room to "dock" the laptops near it at night for backups. The alternative is wiring cat6 through the house.

For your linux install, I would recommend red hat or debian using an lvm/software raid combo so you can grow the file system as need dictates and still have the redundancy that raid provides. It's a little confusing at first but like anything else you'll get the hang of it and there are plenty of walk throughs available. Some people will say that software raid won't perform as well as dedicated controllers. They're right but a decent controller that will have enough ports for growth will easily cost as much as the rest of the components.

In summary, you're fine with what you have now. But if you do decide to spend the loot on the upgrade do it right the first time and build a system that will grow with you for a while.

 

That eSATA drive is external.

 

RAM: Some mainboards of olde had a hard time with all RAM slots populated unless you juiced up the RAM voltage in the BIOS. Abit boards were enthusiast boards so I imagine they'll have a provision for this. DDR default voltage is 2.5 volts and you can run it for years at 2.7 volts which in my experience has been enough to remove troubles with having all RAM slots filled.

VM: I use Sun's Virtual Box, it's pretty good and has support for more than one CPU in a VM and it'll run darn near anything very well.

LAN Card: Screw those built in LAN cards and anything that isn't INTEL. Intel's NICs work well ALL the time.

OS: Ubuntu seems to the distro with most amount of steam behind it.

 

IIRC, whether or not you have to pair the memory sticks will depend on whether or not the memory is 'dual-channel' and if the motherboard supports it. If it is dual channel, I fully recommend foregoing the 3rd gig, and run 2gigs paired in dual-channel mode. You will also need to remember that depending on the operating system you install, it may not be able to use more then 2gigs anyway (I believe this was a limitation in XP... not sure about linux, so you will need to check)

I did some more thinking back to the days when I was messing around with overclocking (gah... 8+ years ago... I feel old).

IIRC again, there are really 3 settings that you have to play around with to change the clock speed of your system. In order of importance: Front Side Bus speed, Voltage, and Clock speed/multiplier (or something like that).

Changing the FSB produced the greatest changes in computing power, but it affected EVERYTHING in the system, so if one component didn't like the new speed, you would lose stability.

Voltage was important because to run a higher FSB reliably, you need to supply a higher voltage to the critical parts. This is where the increasing heat generation came from. So along the lines of my underclocking suggestion, if you don't reduce the voltage, chances of seeing any difference in temperature at 100% utilization is slim. Reducing voltage will most likely cause instability unless you can find a 'sweet spot' for your FSB and clock speed/multiplier.

Changing the multiplier will only affect the CPU. Increasing/decreasing this value will only net you minimal changes in speed, and will only affect processor intensive apps. Since it sounds like you want to make this a file server/net server of sorts, I doubt very little processing will occur... which means most of what will happen will be memory intensive, which is where you will get the most benefit.

So feel free to mess around with your settings, but after second thought I'm of the opinion that you will see little/no benefits to over or under clocking the system.


As far as buying a new NIC, definitely go get a gigabit nic... that will net you a significant improvement.

As far as I know, it is unlikely you would be able to run two cable modems on the same line. I could theoretically see how it might be possible, but that would require significant knowledge of modem/server communication protocols, and most likely modification of the modems.

 

I believe he was referring to your first suggestion: "WD eSATA16 500GB @$80"

that one is definitely external

 

In an earlier post, you mentioned a WD eSATA 16... eSATA is External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. Internal drives aren't eSATA for obvious reasons...

Hitachi, I don't use em, but they don't fail more or less than any other drive*. The Deathstar comments are from ignant folks that still think the Deskstar line are faulty. Originally, IBM's consumer storage division had the name Deskstar. IIRC they had a line of 60 and 80 GB Deskstar IDE drives that had *massive* failure rates. The problem was so large that IBM sold off their consumer storage division to Hitachi and washed their hands of the whole mess. Deskstars became known as Deathstars.

* Companies can and do drop clangers from time to time...Seagate with their 500GB failure rates and firmware screw ups for example.

 

Run a Linpack bench.

 

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