my home server: part III, windows 2003 and memory

Zardon

Some of you know the details of my windows 2003 server but for those who dont ill recap.

A while ago I wanted to make a personal server for my 4 pc home lan network. this was to be a file server, a place for my downloads and a general all purpose 24/7 machine which would run, nice and cool, stable and also importantly as I have been getting rather irritated with noise levels, quiet.

Firsly this PC started off with a little P3 450mhz and an old BX mobo with 196 meg of PC133 memory and a 20 gig hard drive, but I found myself using this more and more and decided to upgrade it. The next upgrade was a duron 1300 and a cheap mini mobo with some DDR2100. It performed well but I found the duron to be a hotish running CPU. So when I was given a "special" AMD 2200+ thoroughbred CPU 1.5v from AMD I decided to upgrade my server totally. Selling on the parts with a minimum of financial loss I settled on the following parts to accompany the 2200+XP cpu. Firstly and quite importantly the motherboard, having used and loved the Abit NF7s for many months, I checked on overclockers.co.uk to see the NON S (sata) version selling for £50. At this price this was my first choice as I felt it would make a great futureproof backbone for the server, being a very stable motherboard and capable of some fine overclocking without too much effort. Next was memory, I picked up a DDR2700 kingston stick for £70 (512 meg). I wasnt going to be overclocking hard so cost was a factor in this choice. My main rig uses OCZ3500 but its highly overclocked and rather expensive !

Remembering back to the noise levels, I wasnt intending to start strapping on a delta, so after much consideration and concern, I decided upon a zalman heatsink with accompanying 120 mm fan.... would this cool ok I wondered. I wasnt an expereienced zalman user, but id heard great things about noise levels, and it used a nice 120 mm fan with variable control, so that was my next choice, not bad for £30 either.

The case..... wanting something with enough room and at a reasonable price, I headed into my local dealer to see a range of cases, and after much deliberation again I settled upon the Chieftech standard green case with 360watt PSU. Good value for £69, and a reasonable and reliable PSU from what ive heard. Then a Liteon 52 speed reader for £18. I wouldnt need a burner, id have this all connected up via lan and the other rigs could handle the burning.

Hard drive....... important again ! picking up a maxtor 7200 120 gig in a local sale, and using a raid card kakarot kindly sent me a while ago I set up windows 2003 server. after a painfree install, I looked around and saw my lonely little quadro FX card sitting in a corner (its been there for a while since receiving the 9800 XT from visiontek as ive been playing alot of FPS games recently ). I also still had a spare 40 gig IBM drive for my Mp3s, so I fired that with the new drive as a slave.

Figuring the server could double up as a rendering machine (if it was fast enough) I fired in the quadro, wondering if the chieftec stock PSU would handle it. Booted fine, first time, installed the 45.23 quadro approved drivers, set up the 19 inch hansol as primary monitor and a little 15inch sony multiscan from earlier times as a secondary network monitor screen. as easy as that. installed the winbond application, checked rails, all almost reference. Looking good !

So time for some experimentation with this lovely little 2200XP from AMD with the zalman, for those who dont know the zalman fan varies between 1200rpm(ish) and 2500(ish), at 1200rpm its noiseless (under 20db) and at 2500rpm is in the 30-35db range.

Reboot time, then some overclocking.......... I would be making no core increases with this 1800mhz CPU on this cooler, not until I tested some applications and various fan settings, thats for sure.

bios = 2000mhz @ 200fsb..... stock volts. booted fine...... ran pcmarks, 3dmarks, sandra..... no errors. temps in the 40s, looking good.

bios = 2100mhz @ 210fsb ..... stock volts on CPU..... booted fine, ran 3dmarks, pcmarks, sandra, no errors, temps in the low 50s ......... ok time to increase the fan speed... put it at top 2500rpm... ekk too loud. lowered it to a nice level of 1800rpm... ran tests again, temps mid 40s... excellent !

bios = 2200mhz @ 218fsb....... stock volts on CPU.... failed boot. back into bios. core volt up to 1.65... reboot, booted fine..... ran all the tests again.. .temps in mid 50s... too much, but stable with a better cooler maybe.

bios back down to 212fsb... stock volts on CPU.... booted fine, ran all tests, pcmarks, sandra, no errors. looking good. over 300mhz overclock on a cpu with an almost silent cooler.

Experimented with ram.... got it to 212fsb @ 8-3-3-2.5CAS bloody hell, stock kingston DDR2700, well impressed with this stuff.

A week later, I found that copying massive files across the network from the server would result in massive amounts of paging, so time for another 512 stick.

phoned local store, DDR2700 kingston for £65...... same as this great overclocking stick, so I purchased it. Testing copying across the network. paging no more excellent ! and still running at 212fsb !

On the way home, my friend had told me our local PCWORLD had a samsung 160 GIG OEM 7200 8 meg cache drive for £70 pounds and after reading a magazine review in the UK where this drive WON the tests, I decided to purchase. wiring it into the RAID, and doing the 20 minute format, I ran some tests, this drive is smoking and almost silent. beating the maxtor in all tests with no noise -- the maxtor can be pretty loud at time when grinding large files.

So here I am, with server no 3, almost silent, running cool with over 300 gig of nice hard drive room and a 2200XP CPU running at around 2150mhz at stock volts with a nice FX quadro for any rendering or nvidia testing I need to do. im very impressed and im finding im using the server more than my loud main gaming rig now at night. so its time for a main rig overhaul with some serious noise reductions on route to my house as I write this. silent PSU, new case, silent fans..........


My server gets around 16,000 in 3dmark2001 and 5700 in 3dmark2003, not bad for a professional level card with a 2200XP oced, and as for serving files and rendering on the side, its really very impressive. I know im lucky I get some things for free or cheap (ill not deny it I get perks as the site owner here), but if it wasnt for the $2000 quadro in the server, it would be a cheap machine and handles anything ive thrown at it. Lan is handled by the capable netgear firewall/router which while secure and cool looking obviously lets every machine connect to the net independently. nice to see 11.5 meg ps transfer rates in networx (one of my server monitoring apps).

Just a word of caution. windows 2003 server...... needs alot of ram

krazy1

Yep I will agree with that... both my 2003 servers have 1Gb of RAM in them. They run pretty smooth with that too. I plan on uping the one server to 2GB in about 6 months or so......

Zardon

its a fabulous OS, but it runs pretty poorly on 512, not like XP (unless you are rendering or using photoshop).

win 2003 is probably IMO the best OS MS have made, granted its not as gaming friendly as XP as some installers dont work and there are some minor issues. but the memory handling over a long period of time puts XP to shame. ive had the server up for a month at a time still just like a fresh boot.

I know alot of people hate microsoft and adore linux, and while I think for a webserver like DH (which runs linux) it is more secure and has benefits (linux is). I can never see myself switching to linux at home (and please I dont want a debate over which OS is better, I already know them both pretty well.).

Windows 2003 rocks, well recommended to have one windows 2003 machine in a home network, the whole network runs so much more smoothly !

krazy1

I actually run all my web servers on 2003 BUT I use Apache as the Server app. Well except for my sharepoint server which has to use IIS but that is so locked down it isn't funny.... The only thing I have not been able to install on 2003 is mIRC and that is no big deal. Every game I have had to install on it runs fine. I ran CoD on it in dedicated server mode for my LAN party last weekend and it did a supurb job and never locked up for the 8hrs that we gamed....

Zardon

for gaming I found 2003 to be very capable and fast, with no graphical problems that XP didnt have, I just experienced a few problems with some installer packages, cant remember the games now..... also the odd application I use in XP refuses to load. nothing major.

Zardon

you might want to check into that, it works fine on my windows 2003 install.....

krazy1

DOH.... just my luck...lol.... I will have to see what the issue is.... never looked in the event log after the install attempt.... there may be a clue there.....

peroni

I took a sligthly different route for my server.

Since it is on 24/7 it needs to be reliable, quiet and not power hungry to save on the electricity bills.

Basically I stuck a server CPU, a P3-S 1.4G (aka tualatin) on my oldy but trusty BX board.
The cpu runs undervolted to 1.3v and underclocked to 1.05GHz, this way a fanless cooler is enough to keep it under 50C.
Since the CPU is built using a .13 process it does not require too much power, this way even a 230W ps is enough to get it going.
Check out this table to see the power consumption of your cpu

The case is a chieftech just like yours, the only fan in there is placed in front of the hard disks.
The system is running WinXP, I have just been too lazy to install W2k3.
It runs so smooth I don't want to touch it.
It does not even have a monitor, I am controlling it remotely via terminal services.

As for data security I have placed a removable HD tray in there. Every one month or so I make a 1:1 copy to the removable disk (currently a 120 gigger, to be updated to 200GB asap) and store it away in another room.

Zardon

I do some rendering on it also, so it needs to be fast peroni. nice option you have done though, underclocking is a good way to run things too. As for backups, i make lan DVD backups offline with 2 hard drives in raid for online.
Also its nice to test some games on Nvidia hardware too for issues etc. quadro runs pretty silent in 2d.

In my case its not really just a server.....

The_Neon_Cowboy

i tried 2003, 3 times now, but never could get ati drivers to work right under 2003, parts of opengl an d3d wounly run etc.... i couldn't game @ all.... none of my games would load giveing no video d3d or opegl ..

if thier a specail version of ati drivers for 2003 or what?

krazy1

Nope.. I just use the XP cats and mine works fine..... I am using the 3.9's... and I have a ATI 7000 series card in it.

peroni

No there are no special drivers but you need to tweak the OS to get it to run games, see this guide http://www.neowin.net/articles.php?action=more&id=54

krazy1

I used a program to help "loosen" the belt on Server 2003. This little prog. lets you loosen the security and do all kinds of stuff so that 2003 runs more like a workstation OS. Even helps you get the DirectX and stuff turned on.


Go Here The page is in German(Don't worry the prog is in english) Use the SERVER1 link to download.

Zardon

you dont really need an application to get it running like a desktop OS (although I really dont know why people dont run XP for desktop works fine), if you move graphic hardware acceleration all the way to full, all hardware options will run fine - it defaults to none, meaning even the ATI CP wont load. windows 2003 by default has alot of stuff turned off, such as audio. There was a great guide months ago on neowin which I still have and it shows all the options you can alter to get it running more like a desktop OS. im in work atm and I saw another link for this somewhere im sure someone will post it if anyone needs it. certainly I have tweaked it for audio in the services, and full hardware graphic acceleration but I havent altered the caching settings etc as they are fine by default for a server.......

Zulan

The Other link is: http://www.msfn.org/win2k3