So, after suffering a hard disk failure, I figured it was time to buy a new PC for (Oracle) research purposes and the choice seemed to boil down to:

1. Buy a Dell or HP high end PC from their website and pay serious money for it.
2. Pick a proper server off Ebay – cheaper but may have pitfalls including warranty, dodgy sellers and delivery. (it was interesting to look for E10K Sun boxes on there)
3. Spec a PC myself and get a box shifter to build and ship it.
4. Upgrade my current PC with a selection of new bits.

I chose #3 and bought it from a company call Scan. I’m pretty happy with the result and the service I received although due to some DOA parts it took a little longer than I’d hoped…at least they had the problems to deal with instead of me!

#1 is expensive and you’re sort of limited to the options they offer. I costed up something similar to what I’ve ended up buying and it was nearer 3,000 pounds rather than the 1800 ish that I paid.

#2 is cheaper than #1 but these type of machines are really noisy, albeit solid pieces of kit and more akin to what I’d work on during my day job.

#4 and #3 are similar except for who gets the grief of making all the new bits work together, and every time I try to build things myself I get grief with it (usually parts arriving DOA or incompatible with each other). Scan had to deal with a DOA motherboard and CPU amongst other things…rather them than me.

So, #3 it was…and it arrived a few days ago.

Specification is:

• Tyan S2932 Server motherboard
• Two, dual core AMD Opteron 2218 2.6GHz processors
• 8Gb of RAM (4 x 2Gb DDR2 667MHz)
• Six, 1 TB Samsung HD103UJ Spinpoint F1, SATA 300, 7200 rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ drives
• Antec P190 midi tower case

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Pictures (Click on them for bigger images) below:

Not quite an “enterprise server” and I’m sure it pales into insignificance against any of the kit Kevin uses, but pretty quick.

I’ve configured it for dual boot of Vista 64 Ultimate and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (using EasyBCD) and I’m about to start doing some installations and benchmarking…should be fun.

I installed VirtualBox on the Vista 64 OS and it’s working very nicely…well, it’s set up and working…we’ll find out how nicely it’s working when I install Oracle and HammerOra and give it a bit of a kicking!

Who knows, I might even find time to blog about it!