The Haswell Desktop – Another Build

ThermaltakeUrbanS41A

Recently my desktop has had a few hiccups but being almost 3 years old it has taken a beating. A lot of things I do myself and around the house revolves around the Lian Li machine which was repurposed from a Windows Home Server to a Heavy Weight Single Desktop use. With the launch of the new Intel Haswell Processors and a few interesting pieces of hardware I had laying around I decided to put this new machine together and also add some more gaming capability to it.

ThermaltakeUrbanS41B

Hardware

  • Thermaltake Urban S41
  • Thermaltake 1500W
  • Samsung 840 SSD 500 GB SATAIII
  • Intel Core i7-4770
  • Gigabyte Z87 LGA 1150 Dual LAN ATX
  • Corsair 16 GB DDR3 1600Mhz Vengence
  • Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB GDDR5
  • Digistar BlueRay Drive (Slot Loading)
  • OCZ 128 GB SSD SataIII
  • WD 3TB SataIII

For the software I want to dual boot both Windows 8 & Windows 7, honestly Windows 7 is amazing and does the job and extremely stable. I have one Windows 8 laptop with a touch screen, and for Windows 8 to work smoothly it has to be a Touch Screen integrated into it. So dual boot option looks like its something I’m contemplation at this point, but the first install is going to be Windows 7 at least. Then the Windows 8 install on the other SSD and W8 can handle the dual boot option on start up, but lets see how it develops.

ThermaltakeUrbanS41C

Google Space Expansion

GoogleStorage

When Gmail first came out we only had 100MB or 500MB with our emails, and sometimes you had to pay exuberant amounts for the upgrades. Google has spoiled us with their Gmail Services, I remember when it was launched years ago when they said you would never have to delete anything ever again, they were the first with 1 GB and just kept going up exponentially for a while and then they got to about 7 GB and still more then everyone else with the easiest email system to handle and most intuitive. Now they have really gone over the top and providing paid storage for huge amount of storage for a very low amount. Storage availability from Gmail has become so large that people have written lots of tools & scripts to make use it for online storage or back up, and now because of these numbers more scripts & tools will be developed. I wouldn’t mind paying $100 per year for 400 GB of storage, that’s a lot that can be stored or shared online.

Storage Upgrades:

  • 20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
  • 80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
  • 200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
  • 400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
  • 1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
  • 2 TB ($512.00 USD per year)
  • 4 TB ($1,024.00 USD per year)
  • 8 TB ($2,048.00 USD per year)
  • 16 TB ($4,096.00 USD per year)

Link: Lifehacker

Windows Home Server – Stage 2

So most of the hardware came in and K had the other half of the solution for this beast of a machine. I had all the 1 TB Drives but not all of them are going into this machine. I spent a good part of the day trying to rewire some of the items, but I did a horrible job so K redid it again.

The Hardware:

  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Dou 3.0 Ghz/4MB/1333MHz
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R
  • Ram: Kingstong Hyper-X 2 GB/PC800/
  • Graphics Card: XFX NVidia PCX 7200GS/256MB DDR2
  • Main Drive: Seagate 750 GB

After all the work that was done, it turns out that he case is too short. The Silverstone 1200 Watt PSU was too long in the case to fit with the Athena Backplane for the hot-swappable Hard Drives. At this point we went to Hawally to see what our options were for a big PC case with ample space. Other then that the Gigabyte mother board is fantastic for server needs with 8 Sata ports, 8 USB ports, it doesn’t have a graphics card so I picked up a decent graphics card. It didn’t matter much since this will be automatically connected to the system through remote access. This is turning into a monster of job, but I’m loving it and it keeps looking better.

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