I’m a PC enthusiast and as such long for the latest and greatest hardware.  Every time a new CPU, chipset or video card gets released and receives rave reviews I instantly go to my chosen online retailers and price things out.  Then reason sets in and I put away my credit card.  The reasoning is simple and effective: my current PC does everything I need.
Perhaps need is a bit strong.  My home PC is used for gaming, email checking and web browsing, occasional photo editing and CD ripping.  I’m currently …

The BC4000 RAID HBA family, comprised of 64-bit, PCI-X low-profile compliant controller cards, are the only 2U compatible SATA RAID controller cards available today. The product family provides both four-drive (BCM4452-H) or eight-drive (BCM4852-H) support and are based on Broadcom’s new BCM5770 Serial ATA controller chip. The new Broadcom BCM5770 SATA chip and the BC4000 controller card significantly boost reliability with efficient power consumption and thermal load balancing, and feature a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive …

I’m a big fan of Antec cases, having two SX1000 series in use. I’ve been eyeing the new Performance Plus and Performance II series but found the price to be a little steep for my tastes. Recently I was perusing their site and found the Solution series, a low cost alternative. A quick Google search revealed no reviews, so I ordered the largest of the series, the SLK3700AMB. After a few weeks went by it arrived. Within minutes of opening the box I was thoroughly impressed.
I’ll do my usual case review of moving from the …

This piece should be prefaced with the comment that this is a commentary on user experience with the Asus A7M266-D motherboard, not a full blown review.
I’ve always been a fan of dual CPU designs: the prospect of all that extra power just captivated me. Being a fan of AMD as well the Athlon MP line was too good to pass up. The draw of dual AMD CPUs and 64 bit 66 MHz PCI was strong: the focus of the site was moving to ATA RAID controllers and those PCI slots were needed …

FastTrak S150 SX4

Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
Supports hot swap of failed drives
Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and recovery of fatal, media and disk errors
Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory
Seamless upgrade to Promise’s external storage solutions

Promise controllers and I are old friends, all the way back …

I’ve been a big Promise fan since the original FastTrak (later renamed FastTrak33 to fit with the product line). At the time I had a bunch of 2 GB Western Digital hard drives that I didn’t know what to do with. The idea of using a RAID controller to make one big 8 GB ( wow, that’s big ) drive was fantastic. Of course there were some growing pains, but the card worked great. What’s even better is that I just requested a new BIOS chip for the card and …

I picked this board up as I had a socket 939 Athlon x2 3800+ processor and needed to use it somewhere.  I checked around for a “cheap and cheerful” motherboard; something around $50, which usually means a Via chipset and limited features.  Picked up the Asus A8V-E SE and was delighted with the feature set of the Via K8T890 chipset; my only complaint was two SATA connectors instead of the standard four.

Installation was straight forward, as everything is well positioned on the board and the manual gave all the pertinent details.  …

Being a fan of computer cases, especially Antec cases, last year when I was building a new system I came across an excellent price on an Antec Atlas 550. For reference I suggest reading my original review: for this piece I’ll cover the differences between the two. This was a new model, the second in the Antec server line, a reworking of the Antec Titan that I had enjoyed so much. At the time the Atlas had the same 550 watt power supply (the Titan now comes with a 650 …

This one will be short and sweet with three options available for RAM: ECC (or parity), buffered (or registered), unbuffered.  First step is to match the RAM to your motherboard, so use SDRAM, DDR, DDR2 or FB-DIMM.  You don’t get a choice on that one.  As well you should match the speed of your memory to the motherboard and processor requirements.  It’s the additional choices listed above that matters to a server: let’s look at each.
ECC or error correcting code RAM contains extra chip(s) that check for any memory errors …

I bought an eVGA Nforce4 SLI motherboard a few years ago: nice board, socket 939 and was my main system until I upgraded to Core 2 Duo. Sold my old Athlon 64 x2 4400+ but had the motherboard lying around, along with the 2x 1 GB Pc3200 DIMMs. No real use until I picked up a cheap socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and decided to build a secondary gaming system.
Once I had the system up and running I remembered the horrible fan noise from the chipset fan. …