A New Case has cometh...

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As a lot of you know Kleefy and I get pretty good hardware to demo with. In a post awhile back I talked about our new AMD shuttle machines we built to help have better performing demo machines. Mine's been going fine but Kleefy had a problem with his in that his power supply died on him and also fried his motherboard. After a bit of research we found out that the Antec cases we bought were only outputting 195 watts which in most cases is fine but with all the virtual machines we run it was starting to strain under the load. So we both decided new cases and power supplies were in order. We ended up getting the Lian-Li V300 Micro ATX Aliminium Case and the Coolermaster Extreme Power 430W 24-Pin power supply. The good thing is the case is a bit bigger than the Antec case so we have more room and we now have a much better power supply. So once I got the goods it was time to transfer all the bits to the new case.

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So I thought it was appropriate to take one last photo of my shuttle machine in it's Antec case. Don't worry Mr. Antec case; I will find a home for you soon..

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As you can see I'm getting down to business now. The hardest part was taking out the motherboard because you have to angle it to get it out.

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The motherboard gets ready...

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The new motherboard tray from the new case. What I like about this is it slides out so you can access things inside really easily. Plus now I have room to put a full size video card if needed.

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The motherboard mounted on the tray ready to go inside the case.

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Now I bet you are saying "Hey didn't you miss a couple of steps?" Well maybe but I was running out of time and needed to get it all back together. The case has 2 trays for 3.5" drives and 2 5.25" bays. I have 3 drives and a DVD drive so I had to buy a 5.25" to 3.5" Bay converter so I could put one of the hard drives in the second 5.25" bay.

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And finally here is a screen shot of my server in action.  Here I'm in the process of building some new Windows Server 2008 June CTP virtual machines.

So what have we ended up with:

See the previous post for the original parts.  But the following is new:

  • New Lian-Li Case
  • New Collermaster Power Supply
  • An additional 4GB of memory in 2GB sticks.  This now brings the machine up to 6GB!   Now all we need is the quad processors from AMD!
  • Windows Server 2008 x64 edition June CTP build. 

This machine is going to be used at TechEd as a Virtualization platform so if you want to have a sticky beak then give me a shout.

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Cheers, Jeffa