PROJECT LOG Retreat Room overhaul

[jameseboy]

Introduction

It has been a long time since I made any posts on this site. I used to be an active member when I was back in university studying Software Engineering. Well, I graduated, Got a job, Moved out, Got married and as always, life has been in the way.

So in February this year, my wife and I finally managed to buy our first house together. Now, I have always had a home "Office". Aka the dumping ground for all crap in the house that we had no real place for. However I have now decided it is time to get everything set up as I want.

The Room

The room will have a few uses, but will mainly be used by my wife and I for gaming and as an office when I decide to work from home.

So, Here is the room in its state at the beginning of this.





As I said. Dumping ground for all the crap that I had been using for various things / getting the house redecorated.

One of my biggest complaints with the room that made me hesitant to use it was the amount of glare from the white wall behind the monitors. So first of was to address this issue.



Followed by a tidy up of the room & Setups.








The Hardware

The desktops we are using are both fairly modest, but do the job for what we need at the moment.

My Personal Rig Spec:

CPU: Intel I7-4820k @4.5ghz,
Cooler: Corsair H80i
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Formula
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX970
Memory: 32Gb Corsair Vengeance 2333mhz DDR3
HDD / SSD: As Below
Case: Bitfenix Shinobi Xl

I have just removed all the mechanical drives from my desktop, and added a few extra SSD's.
At the moment I have:

Crucial M4 120Gb Boot Drive

2 x 240Gb Spanned Ssd's for Games
1 x 500Gb Samsung 860 for Project work (Photography, etc)
1 x 120Gb Samsung 840 that I use for exporting photos / videos to.





The Wives Rig

CPU: Intel I5 2500k @ 4.2Ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100
Motherboard: Some Mini-ITX one I had kicking about
Graphics Card: MSI Gtx670 Power Edition
Memory: 8Gb Samsung Green
HDD / SSD: 1 x 250Gb Boot Hard Drive & 320 Gb Game Drive.
Case: Corsair Air240




Freenas Box:

CPU: Intel Pentirum G850
Cooler: Stock
Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-v pro
Graphics Card: None
Memory: 8Gb Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz
HDD / SSD: 60Gb Boot SSD, (Pool 1, 2 x 2TB Mirrored) (Pool2, 2 x 500Gb Mirrored) (Pool3 1 x 750Gb)
Case: InWin G7



That's all for now folks. Stay tuned for progress and updates.

 

[don256us]

Sub'd. Good stuff.

 

[jameseboy]

Update 1

Following on From my previous post, I have spent some time tidying up and getting some more bits and pieces together.

Firstly, I managed to get all of my wife and I's old game consoles set up to allow us to actually use them, instead of them sitting wastefully in our loft.

I'll be honest, too much time has been spent playing Tetris and Super Mario Bro's that should have been spent being productive.



NAS Update

The biggest difference since the last post is the update to my FreeNAS box. Building this box has taught me a great deal in regards to how things can be done using FreeNAS. As such some fairly major changes have been made.

Firstly, the previous specs

CPU: Intel Pentirum G850
Cooler: Stock
Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-v pro
Graphics Card: None
Memory: 8Gb Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz
HDD / SSD: 60Gb Boot SSD, (Pool 1, 2 x 2TB Mirrored) (Pool2, 2 x 500Gb Mirrored) (Pool3 1 x 750Gb)
Case: InWin G7

I had been browsing through Facebook marketplace and gumtree looking for some..... well just about anything that took my fancy. I came across a chap locally who was selling a lot of hardware off. So from him I managed to get an I5-2320, a stack of new 500gb seagate hard drives and a brand new 2Tb drive.

In addition I also found a rackmount 4u Chassis, Brand New for £20.

So I proceeding to update my build.





My specs are now as such:

CPU: Intel Core I5-2320
Cooler: Stock
Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-v pro
Graphics Card: None
Sata Pci Plugin card
Memory: 8Gb Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz
HDD / SSD: 60Gb Boot SSD, (Pool 1, 3 x 2TB RaidZ1) (Pool2, 5 x 500Gb RaidZ2)
Case: 4u Server Rackmount Chassis

The difference in Read & Write speed has increased about 20%, with the server no longer maxxing out CPU usage whilst transferring large file stacks.

I also picked this up in my travels last weekend. More to come on plans for this.

 

[EarthDog]

Looking good man, nice!