Getting things done

After being more than mildly frustrated with my employer’s ‘Test Lab’ I decided I wanted my own test lab… In one box, and under 2000 euros. Here’s the result:

The specs of the machine are as follows:

• ASUS KFN32-D SLI Motherboard
• 2x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2352
• 8×2 GB ECC memory
• 2x 750GB Harddrives
• Asus EAH4870 DK 1G

The build was relatively easy, once I got the part-list together properly which was less of an easy task. None of that hardware turned out to be very ‘readily available’ sadly, but in the end it all turned out quite nicely. The 8 core machine gives a lot of oomph when I need it (especially when testing out customer setups at home with KVM virtual machines) and 16Gb of memory is extremely nice to have.

Some placement issues with the motherboard did make me curse the entire bloodline of the designer at Asus though. Marvels such as this :

or This… What’s that Molex connector even DOING there?

And this GREAT place to put an onboard audio connect

somewhat detracted from an otherwise wonderful project. For the full build-process pictures see this gallery