Quantum Reality

So, I'm going to upgrade it.

First off, some basic details:

• It currently is a Celeron Dual Core E1200 running on an Asus P5KPL-CM with 2 gigs of DDR2-800.
• It runs Windows XP SP3 + Apache (for Windows) + PHP and MySQL for wordpress. The install is from xampp which is basically your all-in-one turnkey setup for idiots like me.
• Also have an IDE RAID controller with the thing that I can't get rid of. Will therefore retain the 3Ware RAID setup when I transition it all to my new 'puter.

So, with that in mind, upgrade my board and CPU!

I'd prefer a microATX motherboard and a relatively low-power CPU. I want to know your particular favorites because I am aiming for hardware that operates so reliably I can concentrate just on the software side of things. So incidentally, an HTPC rig you've put together would translate well to this purpose.

My budget is prolly about $200 Canadian.

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Manyak

With the CPU you're currently using I assume this is a personal or small business site and won't be seeing too much traffic.

So unless you're running some serious server-side webapps you should upgrade the RAID controller, HDDs, and network card before the board/CPU. And also make sure you've got a router that can handle the connections.

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For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!

Quantum Reality

Well, supposing I do all the upgrades in one shot - SATA, board AND CPU.

Then what'm I looking at?

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Manyak

Well if you get a decent RAID card and NIC (and enable jumbo frames) that will alleviate nearly all the CPU overhead on I/O, allowing it to concentrate on just the PHP and database.

As for what you'd need for that, well, how many users are you seeing at a time? And have you monitored the current CPU usage at all?

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For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!

Quantum Reality

Hmm. I haven't done in-depth CPU load tests but TBH I've been very reluctant to install anything other than Wordpress utilizing PHP and MySQL, more for reasons of security than CPU load.

I have been asked if I would host a forum and I declined at the time on security grounds; I hosted one of my own once before and the database suspiciously got corrupted (I won't get into detals but the group for which I was hosting it - we had persistent problems with a few kids that liked to be wiseasses) so we moved to external host providers.

If I could solve the security (which I think I would be able to do a bit better since there are patches and updates for PHP) then I'll definitely want some elbow room for the CPU.

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Manyak

Well the E1200 should have plenty of breathing room for starting a forum, then as it gets more popular start watching the CPU usage and see when it's in danger of becoming a bottleneck. When it does, that's when you need to upgrade. If the popularity is growing at a fast pace, then you'll need to make a big upgrade. If its not really growing fast then you can take your time upgrading it in small steps as well.

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For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!

Quantum Reality

So your suggested parts would be? I do want to get a feel for what kind of guideline

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Manyak

Well the way I would do this is:

- 2x WD 500GB Caviar Black in RAID1 for only the database, 64kB stripe size and 64kB clusters

- One of your old hard drives for the static data (HTML and PHP)

- One of your old hard drives for the OS and stuff

- Any good NIC you can find, such as the Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708, or Intel 1000 PT. But do not enable TOE. Do enable jumbo frames though, at 9k.

- A gateway that can handle a decent number of concurrent connections. Either look into DD-WRT devices, or build one out of an old PC using Untangle, Endian, pfSense, or other similar software (google them!).

- Possibly some more RAM as the database grows, for caching.

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For Sale: [Conus] CM Storm Scout, TEC, WC, Laptop, A900, Model M, GPU, Audio, and a ton more!!

Quantum Reality

Hmm, makes sense. I have some free RAID controller coming from someone which is taking a dog's age to get here but what the hey, it's a freebie. No, it's not a PERC.

I think I might settle on this setup then:

Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H

Athlon II X2 240

I have the RAM and other parts to transfer over and this equipment would let me transition the server to a SATA/SATA-RAID basis in the future.

PS. This would be totally sweet if it wasn't for the fact that Core i5s cost an arm and a leg.

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Quantum Reality

Oh PS, if anyone is wondering this picture shows what my IDE RAID controller looks like.

I will have to choose my motherboard with that in mind, initially, so I may look for a board in which the SATA ports poke out from the side at a 90 degree angle so as to not block the RAID controller.

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