You remember my Opteron Workstation Gaming Rig Hybrid aka Scylla right? It’s been almost 2 years since I built my rig and I think it’s time to look at a upgrade. What to upgrade though, the 9800GTX video card still runs all games very well, the processor and RAM is rarely fully utilised, however there is definitely a bottleneck after a little bit of digging around like most modern computers the hard drive is a clear bottleneck.

One of the major trends in the last couple of years is the use of Solid State Drives (SSD), from Wikipedia:

“A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads.”

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I thought I’d update you as I finally got round to selling the redundant parts from my little experiment.  I’ve also been using the rig for about 6 months and I’m really pleased with it.  One problem to report is that the DVD drive sticks every so often probably because it comes out vertically.

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So finally I get the system to post and thought that would be the end of my problems…

Firstly let me update you I brought the final parts a SATA DVD R/W costing £16.98 and a brand new BFG 9800 GTX+OC 512MB costing £176.13, because I can only use one graphics card I wanted the GTX 260 H2OC but am going to wait for the price to come down.

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If you have been following this saga – then you will know I have sourced a motherboard and the next steps are to buy ram and a power supply.

Again I have used ebay as it is still the cheapest place to source parts.

I have purchased*: a GMC ATX R3 Corona case as it looked cool and was a bargain at £35.99, budget (remember I’m trying to keep costs down) 8GB RAM @ 800MHz costing £68.98 and a budget 750W Hercules power supply costing £42.90.

*All costs include P&P

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If you have been following this saga – then you will know the next stage to this little project, after gutting the Dell T105,  is to buy a desktop motherboard.  Unfortunately there isn’t too much information on what motherboard’s support the Opteron 1352 (I could only find this).  However as the Opteron uses the AM2+ slot, I’m going to take a punt on a AM2+ SLI motherboard.

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