After months of waiting, September saw the release of the Intel Pentium G2120 and other Ivy Bridge based Core i3 and Pentium CPUs. This is significant in the marketplace because Intel sells an absolute ton of these CPUs both in the consumer desktop space, but also with low-end servers. Frankly, these days a Core i3-3220 with its onboard Intel...
Want to take a look at the Ivy Bridge generation vPro, Small Business Advantage (SBA) and Anti-Theft? Check out my latest guest post on Tom's Hardware this morning. As some may recall, Tom's Published another Intel vPro article around this time last year. This time, I looked at the incremental improvement of the newest generation of Ivy Bridge based Intel...
We get feedback that some users have issues flashing Supermicro X9SCM-F, X9SCM, X9SCL, X9SCL-F, and X9SCL+-F BIOS. This is especially important since these boards share the same BIOS file and have been around for awhile. These Supermicro motherboards that came out with Sandy Bridge need a BIOS update to support Intel Ivy Bridge based Xeon E3 CPUs. The first...
OCZ entered controversial territory with the Vertex 4 and subsequently the OCZ Agility 4 SSD. For those drives, OCZ paired Marvell SSD controllers with in-house Indilinx firmware. Although OCZ has been fairly quiet regarding exactly how the drives work, we do know a few things. First, when you write to these drives, performance drops off considerably once you consecutively write past...
In a previous article, I tested the LSI 9202-16e and pronounced it the fastest host bus adapter that money can't buy, with an AMD server pushing the card to over 5,200 MB/ second. Patrick then went on to pry one apart for your enjoyment. Noticeably missing, however, was any indication of how much throughput the card could muster on the...
What happens if you install Windows Server 2012 without the GUI features and then realize that you want to turn on the GUI? For those who are used to GUI based Windows Server administration, seeing a command line interface can be daunting. This guide will help you to go from the command line interface, using PowerShell, to installing and...
Just a quick note to the readers out there looking at a RAID controller, there is a scorching hot deal on the IBM ServeRAID M5014 RAID controller with BBU right now. I recently was looking to populate controllers for my new Windows Server 2012 machine, and noticed the IBM ServeRAID M1015 prices were much higher than a few months ago at...
I purchased a few Ivy Bridge based Intel Core i3 and Pentium G series CPUs in the period between when they became available and their official release. One thing that I did want to point out to all of those Intel "push pin" retail heatsink and fan is the the new Ivy Bridge Intel Core i3 and Pentium G...
The Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F is a dual socket LGA 2011 motherboard for Sandy Bridge-EP processors that has outstanding features, lots of onboard drive connectivity. A quick preview, the Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F motherboard ended up with a 9.4/10 overall rating and a coveted "Recommended Buy" for reasons below. Jeff is working on an in-depth storage piece with the X9DR7-LN4F. I see the Supermicro...
We watch SSD pricing fairly regularly at ServeTheHome. When SSDs were newer technology, a 60GB to 64GB SSD was enough to install an operating system and a few programs, making it a lower cost boot drive option when prices were $1.50 to $2/ GB. These days, larger capacity drives are well under $1/GB so we are something similar to...