A little while back in response to a poorly researched article on a tech website I decided I would list out the parts I would use of building a basic gaming PC for less than £350. With Windows 8 and AMDs latest FM2 socket processors now out it seemed to make sense to update that article. So for a mere… Read more
Tag: Custom Build
Media Suite PC
Buying powerful PCs pre built is all so well and good but the fun comes in when you build them yourself! That’s just what we have done at work with some media suite PCs which use 6 core processors, modular PSUs and all other kinds of fun things – full specs and photos to come after the video.
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Case close up
Well its taken a little while but the light at the end of the RDS Farm tunnel is in sight! After heavily modifying two X-Case RM 206 HS cases we now have our first batch of cookie sheet style servers ready for use. The video above goes around a bit of a tour of the case and the photos below… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Stress test 1 – Disk IO
While waiting for the cases/power supplies to arrive for our RDS Server Farm I thought we might as well fire one up and do a little stress testing, the first results (which look at application load times) can be seen below. Here you see pretty much the entire Office 2007 and Adobe CS6 suite (with a few other programs thrown… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Farm Architecture + Hardware Specs
Following on from my first post I am going to look at what will make up by RemoteFX RDS farm including the software and hardware architecture. First I’ve started out as you would with any small RDS farm; in this case with 4 session hosts and a single connection broker (which will also act as licence server). The 30 endpoints are pointed… Read more
Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – The Intro
Sufficed to say budgets are still tight for schools and nothing chews through the budget more than replacing a computer room full of PCs. One alternative has always been to convert the PCs in the room to ‘fat thin clients’ with a small OS (say Windows Thin PC) and hook them up to a Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Services Farm. The biggest… Read more
Time for a new backup server
For the past few months we’ve had a donated storage server sitting in our storage room, with 8x1TB HDDs it was the perfect chance for us to supplement our daily tape backups with the speed of hard drives and move tape to monthly. The only issue was that the server came with a rather pants Intel Core2Duo processor that didn’t… Read more
Inside a new Storage Server
For the past few days I’ve been hard at work selecting parts, ordering and building a new storage server for work – the results of which can be seen below. Read on for a full list of parts.