Today we are looking at the Corsair Hydro Series H80 CPU cooler. Most users in the server/ workstation market look at air cooling for their CPUs and for good reason. Those that can use Intel's LGA 1155 CPUs (either Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge versions of an Intel core) were fortunate enough to be able to use Intel's retail...
I recently posted about the Dell/ Silicom PEG6I six port Gigabit Ethernet adapter which I was able to get very inexpensively. One note I had was that I had yet to test it on ESXi 5.0 and I received a lot of e-mail on the subject. Unfortunately, I am in the process of clearing out a lot of old...
One question I get asked often is how to make a desktop PC VMware ESXi ready. That question invariably differs from case to case (and I cannot answer all questions) but one of the best bits of advice I can give is to make sure you have at least one networks adapter supported in VMware ESXi. I will be...
Today we are looking at the ASUS P9X79 WS which is a workstation motherboard built around Intel's X79 chipset and the LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors. Unlike the previously reviewed ASUS P9X79, this is a higher-end part, with a lot more functionality built-in. Unlike the base model, the ASUS P9X79 WS contains workstation-centric features such as additional PCIe slots and dual...
I have used many Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad network adapters to provide extra ports in servers for a few years now. They are well supported Intel 82571GB-based cards that are re-branded by Dell and other vendors. The big advantage to cards like these are that they allow users to add a lot of network ports into a single PCIe...
In my main workstation I have used a custom water cooling loop with a triple 120mm fan radiator since the Intel Core i7-920 came out. That loop is great, but requires a lot of maintenance. Not only that, the setup requires a lot of tubing inside the chassis so I decided to look at some of today's closed loop...
For those that store information on Amazon's S3 cloud storage platform, good news, it is going to be a bit less expensive in the future to store things. Amazon has reduced pricing starting 1 February 2012 for the first 1PB of storage. Over the first PB, storage prices remain the same. Now with all of this said, it is...
Intel will be launching the Xeon E5 series in the near future. The Xeon E5-1600 series CPUs are single socket only with three parts that look like their Core i7 desktop counterparts and have either four our six cores plus Hyper Threading. The high-end will be taken by the Xeon E5-4600 series, with the '4' denoting that the CPUs...
Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to play with some 8 core 16 thread Intel Sandy Bridge-EP based Xeon samples which will ultimately be part of the Xeon E5-2600 lineup. I will say that the turbo frequencies seem to be working a little strangely on these chips, but the one I am using for the...
Today we are looking at the ASUS P9X79 motherboard for Intel's LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors. It is quite likely that this board gets paired with one of two types of chips, first the Intel Core i7-3930K or a lower-clocked Xeon E5 CPU. As we have covered previously ASUS does a great job of segmenting markets by building a...