Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 | Hacker News Reader

Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900

duartes.org

47 pointspius23 comments

I always keep an eye on the Arstechnica.com hardware guides. If I'm ever building a server I'll probably just get whatever they put in their hotrod minus the fast video card and double the ram. Or just keep the video card and play HL2 while I serve pages :)

Its amazing what you can put together for <$1000 these days. I'm sure I'll be saying that every year hence forth, but it never ceases to amaze me.

I did that last month for a dev server. Read their budget guide and bought most of the components. Spent about $500 and got a nice 4GB dual core box built.

That's not what I'd call a server. Not even ECC RAM.

I agree it is not a good idea to make a home computer a server... unless if you can't afford anything more and you are going to host it at home. At which point it would make sense, but for something that goes into a datacenter the author would want a more robust solution.

Is this is a total ripoff of Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood's post, "Build the Ultimate Developer Rig" (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheCodingHorrorUltimateDevelop...), or did he pick almost the identical components by himself? Maybe he did pick this all by himself but I find it suspect at least that there are so many similarities. He's passing it off as original content but I don't know...

These components are basically the only sensible buy if you're buying a powerful multi core server on the cheap. AMD is right out currently, 8 gig of RAM is cheap, Q6600 is the only cheap intel quad core (and it's nearly as cheap as the cheap dual core chips) etc. So it may well just be a coincidence.

Hi,

I did read their post when it came out a while back, but I did not use their parts list for this computer or look at it recently. Looking at it now, the 3 common parts were the CPU, motherboard, and case.

Both the motherboard and the CPU are customer choice award items at newegg, with tons of sales and positive reviews. I imagine 90% of people building Intel quad cores use this CPU, and the MB selection is narrow. The case was the big coincidence, but it was $30 off when I bought it, which is why I did.

The "algorithm" I used to pick the parts was:

1. Go to new egg 2. Sort by # of ratings 3. Find the top-rated, high-selling stuff. 4. Look at the % of low ratings, and read a few of the low-rating reviews to see if something is wrong with the component (everything has a few one-egg reviews, but their kind matters) 5. Google the part to see if it's ok in the main reviews or if no major problems are around. 6. Done

cheers

I built a gaming PC around Thanksgiving with very similar components, and I haven't read that article either.

For another US$700 you could buy a cheap RAID card and another six disks. That would quadruple the storage and only cost a total of US$1600.

I'd have sprung for a 10,000 rpm WD Raptor SATA drive. More expensive, but they are large enough now to hold OS + VMs + main data, then you can have less frequently used data on the cheaper SATA RAID drives. Still amazing what you can buy for the price nowadays.

I thought about that too. They stayed out because two of those guys mirrored would have broken the $1,000. But yea, it's definitely good return on the money. If you've got a couple hundred more, I'd go for it.

I think the 750 gig drives are the one to get. I've heard that some of the 750 gig drives are faster than other 7200 RPM drives, not sure about all of them.

Apparently the fastest 7200rpm drives at the moment are the single-platter 250GB drives, as having one platter means the arm for the heads is much lighter than say a terabyte drive (4 platters) or a 750GB drive (3 platters) and can therefore home in on the appropriate drive track more quickly. Not useful if you need lots of storage though. 750GB drives are definitely the most value for money at the moment.

If you're running Linux then it's probably worth steering clear of cheap RAID cards (if you're using them for RAID).

Linux's software RAID performance is ridiculously fast these days, it left all the cheap cards we had standing and even gives mid-range cards a good run for their money. Another added bonus is there's no crazy proprietary on-disk format, you can rebuild the array on any Linux machine and in most configurations, pull out a disk, drop it in any other Linux machine and read it.

http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~gelb/castle_raid.html has some benchmarks those guys did a little while back but Google's filled with stuff on Linux's software RAID performance.

Amen for Linux software RAID.

I can't believe the tiny CPU fan. Maybe there have been some technological advances since I last assembled my own system.

You should see the 45nm dual core chip fans then... it's great to be moving on the other direction for once! Nehalem is natively quad core, too, so when that comes out 8 execution threads will be had for ridiculously low wattage.

Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900*

*bandwidth not included. good luck colo'ing that bad boy.

Eh...you can build something as good and cheaper than this if you carefully monitor Fry's ads.

Here we go: today's Fry's ad in The Dallas Morning News:

  $230 for Q6600 + ECS GF7100PVT-M
  $200 for 1TB Seagate SATA300/32MB, 7200RPM
  $60  for 4GB PC6400 DDR2
  $70  for Antec uATX Minuet 350 case
  --------
  $560

Throw in another $60 for 4 more GB of memory, and you've got what he's got, but with a bigger disk and much, much smaller case (it probably won't be as quiet) and for only $620 instead of $900.

4 GB of RAM is $60? When the hell did that happen?

Fry's sells defective components back to customers in the hope they'll be too lazy to return it (they do have an extremely liberal return policy, though -- it'll just go back on the shelf for someone else to buy).

I've never had a problem with components from Fry's. Just gotta choose the right brands. Patriot and Kingston are decent brands that usually gets sold in good sales (I think I got a couple of nice Kingston 2 GB sticks of for $35 each recently). Sometimes you'll see a great deal on Crucial as well.

I should also add, that your theory doesn't even make sense - the kind of people who buy components from Fry's are exactly the kind of people who will return stuff. What they are doing is just typical retail loss-leading sales in hopes that you'll buy that new DVD-burner* with a higher markup while you're in there.

* or whatever

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