Well, this is a little post about my recentl adventure in rebuilding my workstations. I started out in Dec. 2006 with a new state of the art HP Pavilion a1630n, which has served me well for several years. Other than having to replace the hard drives a couple times, it has been very reliable and fast. It was supposed to have an AMD Athlon X2 4600+ (2.4GHz, 2×512KB L2 cache) I believe, but due to a mistake from HP they actually put in a 5200+ (2.6Ghz, 2×1MB L2 cache), which was quite an elite processor at the time and I believe the second fastest in AMD’s lineup! So it was a mistake in my favor!

I really enjoyed the speed over the years, but when I upgraded to Vista from XP MCE 2005 SP3 I noticed it starting to slow down, and maxing the processor out a lot more, even with the boost to 4GB of RAM from 2. Vista was very inefficient at memory management (much more so than XP) and so sometimes after I would have it on for several days just switching between programs could take up to a minute of hard drive swapping, during which the system was pretty well locked up. It was ridiculous and almost unuseable–certainly a time waster, whereas it was supposed to improve productivity. I was a late adopter of Vista, even though my computer came with a free express upgrade to Vista Home Premium (32-bit) from HP, which arrived in the summer of 2007. I only started using it on my desktop because my heavy multitasking was starting to overload Windows XP and it would become unstable. So to improve reliability and multitasking stability, I upgraded to Vista. It is able to handle my multitasking without crashing most of the time due to being based on the more robust engine of Windows Server 2003, but unfortunately my system was heavily bogged down. So I decided I had outgrown my computer, and decided to rebuild the whole thing into a multitasking monster, which would be able to handle my heavy workload without crashing or slowing down to unuseable levels.

I decided to upgrade the motherboard to something with a stronger architecture (most of all RAID HDD support), and more upgradeable/customizeable. So I found one of the highest-end motherboards that was out when I first got my HP–it was an Asus M2N-E, which supported up to 8GB dual-channel DDR02/800MHz RAM and could be upgraded through BIOS upgrades to use quad-core microprocessors. I ordered one of these used off E-bay, but later regretted it as it didn’t come with a backpanel or even a driver CD. I installed it into my new case and once I got the new AMD Athlon II X4 2.9GHz CPU installed with my 4GB of DDR-2/800 Corasair RAM (4×1, supports 4-4-4 timings) which were transferred in from my own computer, as well as other parts from my last system, such as the 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB HDDs, 2 DVD drives, nVidia GeForce 9500GT x/512MB (DDR, 128-bit) RAM PCIe 2.0 x16 graphics card installed, as well as the additional peripherals of the PCI modem (mainly for the occasional fax) and the Pinnacle Video capture card, I was all set.

The hardware I had was able to operate at its full potential, as the graphics card could use the double-speed afforded by the PCIe 2.0 bus (as compared to 1.0 in the last PC), the motherboard could use the faster timings on the RAM, and hard drives coule be run in a RAID 0 array. That I set up, knowing I would need their combined performance to make Vista boot up with decent performance. I did get things up and running on the Asus M2N-E, but unfortunately while doing a BIOS update to provide full support for the latest processors, it crashed and became upreadable. I didn;t do anyting I could see to cause the crash, so I’m not sure why it happened, although I believe it was being done from a floppy disk under a DOS boot, so maybe something on the floppy was corrupted–or the file I downloaded as the BIOS update was. Anyways, I was disgusted with that motherboard afterwards and decided to give up on it for now, instead of purchasing a BIOS replacement chip from ASUS (which would take a while to come in, and could die as well!), so I forsook it and bought another refurbished unit, this time a newer model–an ASUS M4A-78+, which is working fine with the new CPU and all my peripherals, including the RAID array.

When I was first setting it up, I had intended to setup this system in a dual-boot configuration between XP MCE and Vista, but this turned out to be physically impossible as there were no working XP drivers for the RAID array! And I wasn’t going to compromise running Windows without RAID, as that was one of the main reasons I was upgrading this system in the first place–to have the suprtior hard drive performance afforded by a RAID level 0 array, in which both hard drives work together as one. So I had to use my Vista DVD, which was OK and still had in input the RAID drivers during startup by inserting the supplied driver CD. Everything worked, and now I would say this system provides a level of performance under Vista similar to the performance I had under XP running on my old hardware, and sometimes even better. I certainly can’t complain and it is much faster now than running Vista on the old machine–fast enough to be productive so I can actually get something done without the ridiculous frustrations I was having before.

I also added a new 1TB WD Caviar Black drive as an auxillary drive for storing multimedia, as well as a third optical drive–a 4x Bluray drive/DVD-ROM. I still have the same two monitors as before–a 21.5″ Acer w/1920×1080 and an AG Neovo x/1280×1024. Both work well at increasing my productivity and letting me see more at once. One little hickup I did encounter though was with the integrated audio on the motherboard, and probably the reason it was RMA-ed in the first place–the driver installed but it produced no sound! So I installed my PCI Soundblaster X-Fi which I had bought 3-yrs ago for my last system (but at the time the drivers were unstable causing system crashes and greatly slowing down system startup), and it worked and was stable, although I found that the D/A converter must be failing as it had trouble producing certain frequencies of sound. So I took out that fried soundcard and replaced it, at least temporarily with another one I had tried–a Turtlebeach Montego DDL PCI, which is quite a nice soundcard, but does not produce much volume, and so needs much more amplification than most other cards. This extra amplification unfortunately can produce more background noice. I’m using a JVC stereo system as my speakers, and have to turn it up at least 50% more than before to get the same volume of sound. I also can’t use the front-panel HD audio with the DDL as it doesn’t have the connector, though the X-Fi did. Currently, I’m conneted to the headphone jack on the stereo system, which is OK, but not as much quality as before. So I will probably upgrade to a new X-Fi PCIe card later this year to get the volume and more advanced features it had.

Also, though I have grown to like Vista (if you have the computing power to run it well), the Home Premium does not have some features I had before under XP, like the ability to send faxes. Also, I wouldn’t have been able to join a domain under it, whereas I could have under MCE ’05, at least if I configured this during installation. And so I plan to set-up a dual-boot configuration with Windows 7 Business 32-bit, which will support both of these lost features. Then it should be a really solid system!

Also, I have an external hard drive, custom built as well with another 1TB WD Black edition HDD (these have a 5-yr warranty), in a high-quality Vantec NexStar-3 external enclosure, connected via eSATA, which allows the drive to transfer at its full speed, as compared to USB 2.0, which would only be about half the speed it could communicate at. So that is the story of rebuilding my main workstation into a higher-performance system for handling heavy multitasking under Vista and Win 7. Here’s a summary of the specs:

AMD AthlonII X4 CPU @ 2.9GHz, model 635

Corsair 4GB dual-channel DDR-2 RAM @ 800MHz, 4-4-4 timings

2 x 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 Hard Drives

16x DVD-ROM, 16x DVD-RW drives, both on an IDE channel

4x Blu-ray drive (8x DVD-ROM), on SATA

1TB WD Caviar Black edition SATA-2 aux. drive, same drive in external enclose for backup on eSATA

nVidia GeForce 9500GT PCIe 2.0 x16 w/512MB RAM

21.5″ Acer LCD monitor–1920×1080 and 17″ AG Neovo 1280×1024

Turtlebeach Montego DDL PCI soundcard

CoolerMaster case–4×5.25″ drive bays, 7x 3.5″ bays (2 external), ThermalTake 450w Power Supply

Pinnacle Video Capture board w/composit inputs via external unit, 2x Firewire ports

MS Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit edition, 7 Business Edition 32-bit.

Note that I still have the HP and will be using it as a secondary multimedia/networking system–it’s presently running with its original OS, 2GB DDR-2 800 in dual-channel and another 500GB SATA-2 HDD (WD Caviar Blue). I think I may install a Gigabut Ethernet port it in as well, because although it claims to have gigabit ethernet networking integrated, I have thus far only been able to get it to run at 100Mbps, even with my gigabit switch and with trying various Cat 5e cables. I never used it before as I was always running off of wireless, but now I have been building a more sophisticated Gigabit Wired/wireless network and want all PCs connecting at the full speed if possible.

Even my 2004 system which I am making into my server running Windows 2003 has a working Gigabit port integrated into the motherboard–and it’s fast! It has an Athlon XP 3200+ CPU running with 1.5GB dual-channel DDR-400 RAM and a 250Gb running in SATA-1 mode–a very solid, quick and reliable system on a DFI LAN Party NB-II Ultra B motherboard, with a ATI Radeon 9650 128MB AGP graphics card.

Well, that’s about all I can write now, but I will plan to post again soon about the progress in getting my other systems, including the laptop, up and running the way I want them!

Source:http://danscomputerservices.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/upgrading-my-workstations/