Fall Surplus Sale Success

YES!

Standing in line for hours on end, and being able to outrun my competition, paid off. My spoils of war are undergoing restoration now.

Linux NetworX Evolocity Supercomputer

10-node cage, six nodes populated
Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs in each node with 3 or 4GB Dual Channel RAM on a SuperMicro motherboard.

It's the supercomputer I was going to build last year times two and then some, packed in about a tenth of the space and with so much more RAM.

I don't know how many "U" tall the whole cage is, but my plan is to get a rack large enough to put two cages into if I happen to be lucky enough to score a second one at any point.

With Linux supporting PAE on the Xeons, I can go over the 4GB limit of Windows and take advantage of the six RAM slots on each motherboard. Even if I only break up the 512MB modules to fill the empty slots in the 4GB nodes and buy eight more 1GB modules to even the system nodes out, that's still 5GB per node and like $100 invested in RAM modules. The same amount of RAM in a desktop system would cost three times that much.

I just can't run Windows on this system. It's not fair in the least. I do have the licenses for it, though. I'd just be severely limited in terms of memory space.

In addition to the supercomputer, I also picked up a Dell D810 laptop with a busted LCD panel. More likely put out of its misery since it was a 1280x800 panel and not one of the good ones. I can have it fixed for about $80 with a WUXGA 1920x1200 panel. Supposedly, these systems are limited to 2GB RAM, which makes zero sense to me, but whatever. It will likely become my Windows PC while the Dual Xeon 3.2GHz rig with Radeon HD2600 becomes my Linux workstation first and Windows gaming system second.