I ran into a problem. I built my server using the old pc I got from work. I wanted to put my 400GB and 250GB hard drives in there and use my raptor 150GB for my main PC again. As the motherboard only supports IDE I went and bought myself a SATA PCI card. Unfortunately this old motherboard refused to recognise the card.

So back to square one.

I had my old AMD64 3500+ chip still, so I though of building it around that. I got myself and AMD A8V-SE motherboard as it didn't need to be special. It has onboard video which will be perfect for my server as I won't have to waste money on getting a card that I'll never actually use. I then got a 512MB stick of RAM. This should be more than enough for what I plan to do, but I can always upgrade to a gig later if I want to.

The next part was to see if this new setup would fit in the old case with old psu. At first I ran into trouble as the motherboard accepts 24 pin ATX power but the power supply only supplies 20 pin. I stuck a converter in and it worked perfectly.

Now I needed a cpu fan. I wanted something that would run pretty quiet. I came across Arctic Cooling's Freezer 64 Pro. I decided to buy 2 as my main PC is running a AMD X2 3800+ and wanted something better and quieter for that as well.

First things first was my main PC. This is how it looked before I started: (Click any of the images for a larger view)


Close up of the old fan:


Take that old thing off:


Arctic Cooling 64 freezer pro vs. stock Athlon fan:


Installed and ready for use:



That was the PC done. Now for the server. I only took a pic of the server when it was done:



For now I just installed the 250GB to the server. I'll add the 400GB at a later stage. Then it's time to start configuring the thing. I'll be putting up a lot of tutorials along the way of how I'm doing things. Some of them might be quite useful to anyone in the future.