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Remember
when you were a young little johnny (johnette) and you wanted everything
BIG. You wanted to build a big fat honking full tower in an Inwin 500
case that had 10 fans and would hold no less that 15 HDs and stood a
whopping 26" tall. Your friends would come over and plop their
panties when they saw that badboy and bowed to you as a computer god.
That was good fun then but we now live in a day where rack space costs
money. Big cases are like big 4 bedroom apartments in downtown New York.
Young Johnny, you are now older and more mature and your palette has
matured. No longer do you want big, tall, hella large. You want trim,
slim, and tricky. I'm talking about the lost dark art of hand crafting
that beast box 1U you always wet your pants over. Today we build a screaming
STICK-O-TNT2. Get out your pencils...and take everything I say with
a bag of salt. The top half of this very long page lists the components
and the bottom lists the stages of building.
SHOPPING LIST We need parts to build this unit. Here are some of the things to hunt for. Remember that with a 1U, you want a mobo with tons of crud built directly onto it. You can get motherboards with sound, video, ethernet, SCSI etc built right onto it and this is essential since we will only have one spare PCI slot. What you stick out of that slot is your preference. I opted to stick ethernet out of it...but I plan to get a different motherboard and stick video out of it in the future for my daily driver. Motherboard
- ASUS CUA Again, this is the list for the computer I am building. It is more a "daily driver" than a hardcore server, but will function as a top notch server. 4 of my buddies are also building these. Some don't use video cards since they telnet to the box. Some use 2 ultra scsi3 drive in a raid with no CD. You might opt for a zip drive instead of a floppy. You might want a hot swapable scsi in the CD slot. MOTHERBOARD I
have always been a ASUS man. You could argue one mobo is better than
another. They are all pretty good. Some of the more popular ones with
overclockers are Tyan, Abit, and Asus. For this project, I chose the
CPU CPUs
are so fast these days that even an old 300mhz can swamp an ethernet
card. The bottleneck is not the CPU anymore. You can spend a pile of
money and buy a 1gig Xeon, but there are so many good chips for around
$200. I opted for the lord of darkness Pentium 666..and my guess is
that marketing pulled a fast one and called it the 667.
I buy CPUs at RAM I
think that for a home computer or base server, you want minimum 128mb
ram. I think 256 is a much better place to start. You can go cheap on
ram, but it usually bites you in the ass. The best place to buy ram,
bar none, is Crucial. Crucial has an awesome ram finder based on your
motherboard brand and model. They then offer different speeds and types
of ram like the rare ECC error checking. I generally buy good 256mb
ram CASE The
funny thing about a 1U computer is that the case is tiny, yet it costs
3X as much. I think this is because supply for the cases is low and
demand right now is high. I opted for the BOOM
Rack case because I dig the name. The GT
case is also nice and includes the PCI card. FAN AND HEAT SINK This
is a hard item to find and it is critical. You need a reduced height
fan and heat sink. The only one I could find was at GT. Later on I have
a picture of the fan that comes with the unit and how big it is compared
to the copper model. I actually found the supplier in Taiwan, ATTECH,
if anyone wants to import 90 DEGREE PCI ADAPTER If
you go with the GT case, you get this card free and that is a nice option.
If you go with the BOOM Rack, you need to order this. The place I found
one seems to be back ordered as of writing this BUILDING THE BEAST BOX STEP 1 - ALL THE PARTS All the stuff showed up last week. I was a little disheartened when I opened the BOOM rack box and it seemed that UPS had karate chopped my poor new case. The front security panel was toast. Luckily I planned to remove this part and everything underneath it was ok. Here is everything sitting on top of the case. Here is the plain case and the case cracked open and empty. STEP 2 - INSTALLING THE CPU Here is the skinny mini 666 devil child CPU. It goes into the pin cushion receiver and can only really go one one...it just falls in once the silver arm is lifted and then you lock it into place with that metal arm on the CPU. See that little fan...that is on the TNT2 video chip...groovy STEP 3 - FAN HEAT SINK Before founding sexswap.com and the Trix, I had a vending route. One thing you always carried was silicone heat sink. This is to pass heat from metal parts to other metal parts on any circuit board, like a pinball machine, juke box, or motherboard. The fan comes with a dab of this already on it. I like to do things to excess so I squirted on a glob more. Here is the fan being lowered into position. Above I was saying that I had a pic of the two fan types...check out the big Don Bosco heat sink that comes with the unit...that would not fit in out ticked out 1U case. Here is a top pic of the two. And here is the CPU and fan and wiring completed. STEP 4 - MOBO TO CASE I was probably on my second Jim Beam when I built this. For some reason I was infatuated with the CPU and installed it first when really you should attach the mobo to the case first. There are usually 6 screws. The black case came with tons of nice black screws. Approximately 3 sizes. There were even 4 rubber vibration dampers for the screws but I wasn't sure where they went so I left them off. STEP 5 - DRIVES Now we attach the drives. There are brackets in the bottom of the case. Remove a bracket and then attach it to the drive and then re-install the bracket into the case. There are two front knock out pieces that can be removed and thrown away if you use a CD or removable HD. Here are the 3 installed drives. STEP 6 - POWER PLUGS There is a power plug for each drive and also one for the motherboard. We still have some room so things aren't too tricky just yet. STEP 7 - RIBBON CABLES You need nerves of steel and fingers of chop sticks. The cable that came with the ASUS was well made, BUT it was short and probably would work in a tower but not with drives side by side. I decided to enter the realm of the computer 'junk drawer' in hopes of finding a spare. I located a weird one with clips. I was able to plug in both the CD and HD, one in the primary and one in the secondary. The cables went in fairly well but thing were getting tight and you have to plan where you are going to overlap things to get the lid on. STEP 8 - LITTLE PLUGS Onto the tiny cables that cause much grief. If these are flipped the wrong way or in the wrong position, your computer will not start. These LED and power plug go together on a tiny strip. The cables are well labelled, but you still need to pay close attention. Here is a page from the manual. One thing that can sneak by the best of them is the space between the power switch and the reset switch. I once thought I had a bad motherboard when after 7 hours of hair pulling we found out we missed that space. Finished. STEP 9 - TRICK PCI ADAPTER Check out this adapter that is very low and allows you to use once PCI card. I chose the ethernet card to go here. STEP 10 - CLOSE THE LID Here are the cables all flat and ready to be locked in. Here is a picture of the back of the case and how all the ports look. and here is the finished |
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