« SFF PC's | Main | We Have Connection. »
February 23, 2006
Overlord is born
Overlord, The new lil tyke
My new baby finally arrived. UPS delivered the final parts from newegg yesterday.
A whopping 2GB of DDR2 533 MHZ ram.
I spent the better part of the day (and 90% of the night) assembling the lil tyke. .
Yep, another one of those 3:00am hacking sessions and boy am I dragging ass today!
It's a cute lil system that I'll describe in more detail after I upload the pictures during the process.
One thing I'll say, It's an engineering marvel, yet very tedious to put together.
Although ITX has come a looong way, the problem with these ITX machines is you have to assemble them in a particular order or you'll find yourself disassembling them to put in the part you can not reach.
Shown with CD's to represent overall size
Overall so far, overlord is looking good. It's not quite as fast as I expected, yet the benchmarks are proving me wrong. I can't help the feeling that it's a lil slow. I'll have to look into the whole speed step technology to get a better handle.
I ended up going to Centos 4.2 instead of my preferred 3.6. Seems the drivers (SATA specifically) are not in the older kernel. . You can imagine how difficult it was getting this to work after attempting PXE boot, floppy, CD-R only to find out, not only is your network device not suppored, but your SATA device isn't either. Centos 4.2 went in pretty easy and detected most of the hardware. I still can not get the network drivers to work which means a complete kernel rebuild, I fired it up last night and went to bed around 3ish.
Part of the lengthy install was just preparing the network shelf, reordering power cords.
This expanded into cleaning up old serial, scsi and power cords under the computer desk.
Afterwards I ended up reordering the powerswitch only to knock down Gatekeeper and the Radiobot.
UGH...Sorry guys.. He did not like that too much and it took me a while just to get him back up.
Finally after all is said and done, it's a bit neater and I have finer control of the external peripherals (SCSI CD drives, tape drives and USB devices) which allows me to turn them off via switch when not in use.
Even though those devices may not seem to be on, anything with a wall wart is actually drawing a few watts of power. So with the new switch arrangment I can save "some" minscule power amounts.
Hey when it comes to a UPS, every bit counts!
I have to be carefull with the Hercules & the Xeons. Although the system hovers around 160 watts. It can rapidly spike to 300 watts if a high CPU load occurs.
More to come later.
Posted by Me on February 23, 2006 09:30 AM