A Sysadmin Workstation

I have been thinking about getting a new workstation for some time now. I want a rig that I can pound on, use for Virutalization, and just plain play with little fear of breaking it. I'm a sysadmin and could care less about graphics performance. I use fluxbox and mutt and xterm for the most part. Surfing is done by Firefox. My requirements were, lots of Memory, lots of 'guts', and not lots of money. I looked around and decided to build my own.

After some minor research, I went down to my local computer store and purchased all the parts. Memory Express has a free service called 'quickmount'. If you purchase all the parts, they will mount your CPU, and memory to the motherboard and update the BIOS if required. It's a nice little service, and this time is saved me much trouble. It turns out the motherboard I was originally given was defective. This little service cost me an hour ( with mobo replacement and the minor paperwork involved) and saved me much headache. Good on them.

Okay enough preamble. Here is my hardware:

ASUS M4A78-E Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Quad-Core Black Edition 3.2GHz
Corsair 4GB XMS2-8500CS TWIN2X Dual Channel DDR2 Kit (x2, so 8GB total )
ANTEC New Solutions Series NSK6580 Super Mid Tower w/ EarthWatts 430W
Seagate 500GB Barracuda 7200.12 SATAII ( x2, for mirroring. see more below. )
and a monitor, keyboard and mouse I had laying around.

Assembly
I enjoyed assembling this rig. The case is for the most part will layed out. The only exception is the location of the main power connector to the motherboard. The removable 3.5" HD rack is a little too close to the motherboard, so I needed to put my harddrives at the bottom of the rack instead of at the top as I would have liked. No functional deficiency though.

Setup
For the record, I hate onboard video, it just eats system memory. Luckilly this motherboard has some fancy video 'sideport' memory. I'm not sure what the real purpose of it is ( I read it is used for buffering some Crossfire stuff, but I can't remember where). In the BIOS there is an option to turn off using system memory for video, and just use the sideport memory for it. I first tried to just set the Internal Graphics Mode option to Sideport, but that failed as I forgot to also select the Primary Video Controller option to Internal. Now that I have, everything works fine for me.

I have 1066MHz memory for this computer. But to my surprise the Motherboard defaults to 800MHz when all slots are populated. Hmm... The processor documentation says it fully supports it, but the motherboard defaults to 800MHz for 'stability'. I am currently running memtest86+ in both configurations to see what happens.

Operating System
Open Solaris.
Yup, I'm a *nix guy. Any unix-like operation system works for me. I want to use Open Solaris (OS) for tools I get out of the box, like ZFS, zones and dtrace. I have two 500GB harddrives so I can mirror then using ZFS. I will be doing some testing for performance. There are some different SATA drive access options in the BIOS (namely IDE or AHCI). We'll see what happens.

More to come as it becomes available.