A client at work needed a super powerful machine for demo purposes. Dell couldn’t really give it to us (especially since we needed in an as-small-as-possible case), so we decided to build it ourselves. This is probably one of the most powerful machines out there (without overclocking, just standard hardware):

•  AMD Athlon FX-60 (Dual core, 64-bit, 2600MHz)
• 2x 2x1GB (Dual Channel Set) OCZ DDR400 with golden heatspreaders
• Geforce 7900GTX with 512MB Video RAM
• Gigabyte something-something mainboard with nForce 430 chipset
• 2x Western Digital Raptor X 150GB in RAID0

The system is running a 32-bit Windows however. 3DMark hovered around the 10300 points mark, HD Tach reported 120MB/sec average throughput, 6% CPU utilization for the disks and I/O bursts of up to 215MB/sec. Not bad, eh? All this will be placed in a Silverstone SG01 case, but it hasn’t arrived yet – we needed to test the hard- and software beforehand, so it’s all layed out on a table near my desk… Surely has attracted a lot of visitors, and everone passing by needed to know some more. Geeks and hardware…

But not all is that well.. The RAID controller drivers need to be on a floppy for the XP setup to recognize the controller… but

• We didn’t have a working floppy drive. I dug up 2 old ones from the serverroom storage but neither did the job.
• Gigabyte packed the wrong drivers on their CD for the RAID controller. So we needed to get them from the ‘net.
• Once the "Windows kernel" part of the setup is loaded, Windows no longer sees a USB floppy drive anymore, so can’t get the drivers
• Slipstreaming the NVidia drivers into the XP setup CD is quite difficult, in fact we wasted 7 CD’s on it and did not completely succeed.

I went home in the evening and we installed from my One And Only Working Floppy Drive+Cable Combination(tm). A few bluescreens later (Thank you, BIOS-graphics-booster overclock-thingamajig option set to Enabled) we got the thing working… finally. Caused a LOT of frustration.

We also bought an Adaptec SATA RAID controller for it, which plugged into the PCI bus. PCI bus means it’ll be capped to 133MB/sec (or thereabouts) with no way of bursting over it… Which was indeed the case. Same average throughput, but no bursting at all. Pity there wasn’t a PCI-X or PCIe x8 slot on the board (MicroATX..) or an Areca controller would really have kicked some major ass. I must note slipstreaming the Adaptec drivers into the XP cd went without ANY problem, and XP installed first time. Thumbs up Adaptec! 

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