I haz made puter



^ Why not just put together a cheap mini-server of your own? I see buying a QNAP/Drobo the same as buying a pre-built computer.
 
This will most likely be the basis for my next build...

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ASUSTeK Computer Inc. - Motherboards- ASUS Rampage III Black Edition

Socket 1366 - 6 core i7, supports up to 48gb of triple channel ram (I'll do 24gb).

YouTube - ASUS Rampage III Extreme Black Edition Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

In this case...

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Obsidian Series® 800D Full-Tower Case - Obsidian Series - Cases

YouTube - Corsair Obsidian 800D First Look (NCIX Tech Tips #50)

Some SSD, not sure about video card solution yet, enough power to dim the neighborhood... still scheming.


NICE!! Post on that case if you ever do the build. It looks absolutely sick!

I read somewhere that fully loaded with mobo, hdd's, etc. it ends up weighing close to 80 pounds. Not exactly for LAN parties :D

OH, and to whomever posted Battlefield 3 (too lazy to scroll up): FUCK YOU!! I pre-ordered that shit after watching the video. Then to satisfy my need to kill something, bought Crysis 2 last night. Bastard, you cost me $100. (seriously though, THANKS! :D)

Side note, Crysis 2's graphics are beautiful. Still couldn't get the temps over 41 degrees, and super smooth. I wish they had a benchmark built in to the game, but I guess it doesn't really matter as long as it plays cleanly.
 
^ Why not just put together a cheap mini-server of your own? I see buying a QNAP/Drobo the same as buying a pre-built computer.
I had made an old Dell box from about 9 years back into a NAS once with a free, downloaded copy of FreeNAS. It worked great but:

1. It was still an full-sized computer you had to keep running (With a full-sized computers footprint.)

2. It needed a monitor. -At least every now and then.

3. It sometimes needed you to manually update it... FreeNAS was not without its' security updates.

4. It used as much electricity and generated as much heat as a full-sized compy too.

5. Since I used an old dell to make it from, there was no SCSI controller. -Meaning no RAID to mirror or stripe disks with.... Which means slowness & a lack of safety.

So I got a QNAP last year, the model with 2 drives and put to 1TB drives in and set them to Raid 0 for Fast data serving... It's pretty much just as fast as having another hard drive in your own machine... And for every computer in your house to access it at once you won't notice a performance hit, either... It's very smart. (And has TWO 1-gigahertz ethernet connections on the back to go out to your router... Doubling bandwidth there...BALLIN!)

It's quieter, sips less juice, puts out less heat, has a smaller footprint, and the only time I use its' control panel is through a browser window on another PC's screen. -No monitor required. Nonetheless, it's got a dual-core atom CPU and routes data in a far smarter way than most other NASs, meaning less waiting.

I was orgininally going to get the QNAP with 4 drive bays and back up one pair of drives to the other, but then I realized that It's far smarter to back up two local drives to the cloud so I'd have offsite redundancy like the big boys do it. Amazon's service is cheap and highly recommended for this, but there is a bit of a learning curve.
 
It's quieter, sips less juice, puts out less heat, has a smaller footprint, and the only time I use its' control panel is through a browser window on another PC's screen. -No monitor required. Nonetheless, it's got a dual-core atom CPU and routes data in a far smarter way than most other NASs, meaning less waiting.

Fair enough, but all these arguments are invalid if you purchase "server friendly" parts instead of using old hardware. You can get small cases, mATX components, install VNC to control remotely without monitor etc.

I've got an old laptop connected to an external drive as my ghetto remote storage/NAS solution right now. It works well, but I'd like to upgrade to a more powerful creation down the line.
 
Nice rig man...I used to build my own all the time until I fried a mobo one day while installing it. I got pissed off and since then I've chosen parts but have had it built for me where I buy the parts. I get frustrated sometimes with those tedious screws and such and get a bit aggressive so I figure the extra $50 or whatever it is you pay them is worth it. I will add and replace parts on my own of course. I still refuse to buy the ready to go rigs.

It's almost time for an upgrade but I've been running a pretty solid rig since like mid 2008 on XP Pro and shit still runs pretty solid. Hard drive and vid card has died since though which I've replaced with better shit, here's my setup right now:

Asus P5k-SE Mobo
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
4 Gigs DDR2
500 WD Drive can't remember specs but it replaced a Seagate that died 6 months in (POS)
DVD Writer
Radeon HD 5770 (replaced geforce 9600GT shit kept overheating)
Antec Case

Only 1 drive but it's partitioned and I run 2 backup drives. One does daily backups the other weekly. Next rig I'll prolly run some RAID though. I hope you've got something setup in regards to this so you don't kick yourself one day if shit hits the fan.

I think it ran about $900 at the time + the replacements over time. I also got some bad ass cpu fan that looks like it could cool my car engine if it needed to since the old fan was giving out.

Man now I want a new rig :(
 
@Fatbat those ASUS mobos are sweet. I have one myself and you can get a lot of extra overclocking power out of them especially North Bridge speed. Quality, although a bit overkill, some of the advanced features you'll probably never use. If you don't mind spending the money on it go for it but you could get a comperable from MSI or the likes for a little cheaper. I lpersonqlly ove ASUS's products though.

Being stuborn, waiting for SSDs to come down in price a little. Have a hybrid drive in my laptop, and will tell you it's an excelent choice if you don't want to step all the way to SSDs yet.
 
Nice rig!

I just did one recently and hooked up a dual "MSI Cyclone GTX460 1GB" combo for SLI.
Those are great cards with solid heatsinks and overclock very well.
SLI is super... love it!

You got boatloads of RAM. And you must be really big... most people use tissues.
 
Nice rig!

I just did one recently and hooked up a dual "MSI Cyclone GTX460 1GB" combo for SLI.
Those are great cards with solid heatsinks and overclock very well.
SLI is super... love it!

You got boatloads of RAM. And you must be really big... most people use tissues.

LOL!! I'm a really big deal...in my head. :D

Just got done playing Crysis 2 for a couple hours. The Corsair H70 does a phenomenal job of cooling. CPU never went over 40 degrees. I need to get another stick of Hyper X. There's an empty slot...that just won't do. Why do they sell them in 3 packs and not 4? WTF is up with that?

@rage9: what do you mean by a hybrid drive? is it literally part SSD and part old fashioned hard drive?
 
LOL!! I'm a really big deal...in my head. :D

Just got done playing Crysis 2 for a couple hours. The Corsair H70 does a phenomenal job of cooling. CPU never went over 40 degrees. I need to get another stick of Hyper X. There's an empty slot...that just won't do. Why do they sell them in 3 packs and not 4? WTF is up with that?

@rage9: what do you mean by a hybrid drive? is it literally part SSD and part old fashioned hard drive?

They normally have a large chache and like 4 GB of solid state type memory, like you can see here:

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

Much easier on the pocket book and quite fast. Believe me they are noticeably faster than standard 7200 RPM hard drives.
 
@Fatbat those ASUS mobos are sweet. I have one myself and you can get a lot of extra overclocking power out of them especially North Bridge speed. Quality, although a bit overkill, some of the advanced features you'll probably never use. If you don't mind spending the money on it go for it but you could get a comperable from MSI or the likes for a little cheaper. I lpersonqlly ove ASUS's products though.

Yeah, I love ASUS too thought their support and site almost drove me away, they've since improved it greatly.

My last built, which must be close to 4 years old now, is on the first Crosshair ASUS ROG board and I had a an ASUS Geforce 7950 GX2 which was pretty dope for the time, but unfortunately burned a chip a year or two ago. I replaced it with a GTX 260 also from ASUS which has been great.

Also +1 on the QNAP, that's my plan to get all my HDDs out of my tower and into a dedicated file server and just keep an SDD and a shit ton of ram in the box to be able to rid myself of a scratch disk for Photoshop, 3ds Max, etc.

NICE!! Post on that case if you ever do the build. It looks absolutely sick!

For sure!