Over the past few days we've been performing a few hardware changes to the server. During this time we took a few photographs of the major parts to show you the changes that we've made.

Firstly, a quick list of the hardware changes and recent purchases:

• 1 Intel i7 SandyBridge 2600K processor;
• 1 Asus Sabertooth P67 motherboard;
• 2 4GB Corsair Vengance DDR3 RAM;
• 1 Corsair H80 CPU Watercooling system;
• 1 ultraquiet Noctua fan;
• 1 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drive; and
• 1 LG DVD RW disk drive.

In addition to what was already in there:

• 1 XFX 80+ 850W Powersupply;
• 1 Nvidia XFX GTX 250 Graphics Card;
• 2 120mm Fractal Design fans;
• 1 140mm Fractal Design fan; and
• 1 Fractal Design Black soundproof case.

And now here comes the stuff you've been waiting for... Images!


In this image, you can see the innards of the original machine. The motherboard is a very old (around 5 years) MSI motherboard which i do not know the model number of. Processor was an Intel Core 2 Duo Conroe processor (hence the name of the server ) and a measily 2GB of RAM.

Here's an image of the motherboard itself...

As you can see, the buildup of dust, and lack of cooling (even though there were 4 fans in there), just wasn't cutting it for hosting a webserver and a minecraft server. Complaints of lag and crashes were getting too much, so we decided to upgrade it.

Here's an image of the new motherboard...

As you can see, this looks so much better. The reason it is covered in "thermal armour" is due to what happens under it. A series of ducts and routes for air increase the flow over components, keeping the entire thing very cold.


The new RAM we have is also very powerful, and has it's own blue metal cooling fins to keep it nice and chilled. Each module has 4GB of memory in it, at 1866Mhz clock speed, and a CAS latency of 9-9-9-24 (lower is better, and this is pretty low ^^).

Here's an image of the motherboard seated in the case, with the ram and a new noctua fan to keep it all cool...

It looks very awesome in its new home, and is still super quiet.

The watercooling system for the CPU didn't arrive with everything else, and so had to be installed (around an hour or so ago!), and we have an image of it for you now...

The watercooling really suits it here, with an extra Corsair fan, and the noctua mounted on either side of the radiator, an awesome light show from the pump block, completes the server upgrades.

Hope you enjoyed it, because it's all for you.