The Big Swap

I’m kind of stuck.

I’d wanted to take the 6 core AMD FX-6300 I had and stuff it into an old 4U rackmount chassis that I had lying around from my first mini-start-up (way back in 1999). Actually, the chassis itself may have come from a different start-up, but such is life in the Silicon Valley.

One thing that’s somewhat nice about PCs is that even though the standards change, the footprint for ATX motherboards is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago. I pulled the old dual-core Pentium III board out of the machine, and popped the new(-er) AMD board in, however, one thing I hadn’t anticipated was that a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO heat sink will not fit into a 4U (!) chassis. I guess I should have thought of this before, given it feels like the machine is really a heat sink with a motherboard strapped to it.

A quasi interesting historical footnote about the Pentium III vs the AMD FX6300.  The P3 ran at 450 MHz with a 250 nm die size.  The AMD runs at 3.5 GHz with a 32 nm die size.  Not quite 10x the speed with 1/10th the size, but pretty close.

Oh, I also gutted a 350W PSU out of another machine I had lying around only to realize it didn’t have a PCIe cable on it to power the older nVidia GTX 660 I was planning on stuffing in to it.  So…  more parts from Amazon tomorrow. Yay 1-day shipping!