Dual Athlon Workstation

• Dual AMD Athlon MP 1800+ CPUs running at 1.53Ghz
• 1 Gb 266Mhz PC2100 DDR RAM
• 18.2 Gb 10,000 RPM IBM Ultrastar U160 SCSI Hard Disk
• Tyan Thunder K7 S2462UNG Motherboard with AMD-760 MP chipset
• 2x 10/100 Mbps 3com 3c920 Network Interfaces
• 32Mb Matrox G550 AGP Graphics Card
• 48x LG CD-ROM Drive
• Lian Li PC-75 chassis

I built this beast myself, loosely based on Linux Journal's Ultimate Linux Box of November 2001. I originally opted for an el-cheapo chassis, seeing as going for best performance parts I could find had already sent me over budget. The special PSU needed for the motherboard is also pretty expensive for what it is. I kitted the box out with a total of seven fans (two on the CPU coolers, three 8cm and two 6cm extra fans) so it ran nice and cool. Unfortunately it sounded like a 747 taking off when you hit the power switch...

Seeing the error of my ways, I went out and got myself a more up-market case. People rave about Lian Li cases, and if you can fork out the cash to get your hands on one, you'll see why. I was actually after a PC-62, as the Extended ATX motherboard won't fit in a PC-60, which I considered to be large enough in other respects. However, being rather impatient, I grabbed a PC-75 as it was in stock at a local computer store. I originally figured cases with windows were a bit bogus, but it's amazing how tidy you end up making all those guts when you know they're going to be on show. I figured putting lights in there would be just too geeky, but they really set the whole thing off.

Moral of the story? Don't be tight when it comes to the case!

Pretty much all of the Red Hat distro installed from CD images over HTTP from LAN server.