Project: EnvyBuild – A Powerful & Quiet Workstation

This blog is about a computer build. This build aims to use some custom mods where see fit. It will feature a lot of nice photography covering any such initiatives.

To form a comprehenive view of the build from beginning to end, start with this post and work your way forward.

The requirements of the system are as follows:

• Lots of RAM. As a workstation running tons of applications/application servers/web servers while developing we are going to max out the RAM as much as possible. 8GB seems to be the limit currently for most consumer grade motherboards.
• Fast quad core CPU. While developing in any modern multi threaded IDE and running an application server and database on the backend will provide for more than four runnable threads. Hence, quad core makes sense for a heavy duty workstation. We do not need a liquid nitrogen cooled beast at 5GHz. In fact, we are not going to squeeze out every possible MHz out of the processor due to the added heat, conflicting with the next point of interest, below.
• Quiet. No longer will we be able to live with fans that spin up irregularly every three to ten minutes. This system is going to be quiet. That means lots of constant low velocity 120-140 mm fans. It also means low voltages on the CPU, chipset and RAM, which in turn implies moderate clock speeds.
• Usable in Windows Vista, Linux and OSx86. Sometimes we need to boot into a different OS to test features and functionality across the board. Also, some applications run better or are only available for one of the platforms listed.

Costs will be prioritised according to the requirements above. Hence, it will not make sense to pay for an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme processor, when the limiting factor is going to be heat and ultimately noise. We will be going for air cooling since most quiet water cooling systems are fairly high maintenance and still a bit impractical in the long run.

CrossFire and SLI is not very well supported, if at all in Linux and OSx86. It will not be considered for this build as it does not agree with the requirements for many reasons. The graphics capabilities provided by a 8800GT GPU will work well in all three environments. It will even allow for an occasional game or two.

It is the authors aspiration that the knowledge gained by this build and eventually shared through this blog can prove useful to you, the readers and fellow builders. Comments and emails are very welcome and will be answered to the best of our abilities.

In the upcoming post, we will cover one of the most important components of a computer system: The motherboard, a DFI LanParty LT X38-T2R.