ams is the name of a desktop machine that was put into play on January 1, 2011. The accidental death of my previous desktop (gwydion) prompted me to build ria to replace my old gateway, and repurpose my old gateway as my desktop.

ams was originally a dual-Xeon machine that I bought for work. Funny that even today, a dual 2.8GHz Xeon machine is not something to sneeze at (Moore's law has morphed). The memory bandwidth is lower than a modern machine with DDR3 and faster busses, of course. And I'd love to have a Mac Pro with at least 2 quad-cores, but it's expensive. Keeping ams alive means saving some money while still having a perfectly usable machine. That is, until I can't buy AGP video cards anymore (and that day is approaching quickly).

ams is watercooled, currently using a single 120mm radiator with both push and pull fans, a Swiftech MCP655 pump and obviously a pair of waterblocks (one per CPU). No watercooling of the hard drives like gwydion, and the video card just has a large heatsink.

Need to Buy

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  2G PC2100 184-pin ECC	2G PC2100 184-pin ECC memory	2G PC2100 184-pin ECC	2	$44.95	$89.90
  Noctua NF-P12	120mm fan, 150,000+ hour MTBF	NF-P12	2	$16.99	$33.98
  Noctua NF-R8	80mm fan, 150,000+ hour MTBF	NF-R8	1	$13.99	$13.99
  Total					$137.87

• Category	Total
  Need to Buy	$137.87
  Total	$137.87

Diary

• April 28, 2012
  
  • I updated ams from FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

• March 25, 2012
  
  • For many reasons, I needed to rebuild and install ports/oss today. I had forgotten that it's critical to build from a root shell to avoid using the binutils linker that's in /usr/local. So, use su and not sudo.

• April 28, 2011
  
  • ams now has 6G of RAM. Of course, I can only use 4G of it since I have loadable kernel modules I can't stop using and hence I can't run a FreeBSD PAE kernel. I left all the RAM installed anyway since I don't have other machines that take 184-pin PC-2100 ECC memory.

• April 22, 2011
  
  • I ordered 4G of memory for ams from www.upgrade-solution.com. ams has been hurting for more RAM for quite some time, this purchase was overdue.

• April 5, 2011
  
  • I updated ams from FreeBSD 8.2-PRERELEASE to FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE.

• January 2, 2011
  
  • I managed to get X11 and enlightenment working, though it wasn't trivial. I am using the nvidia driver since my video card is a GeForce 6200 card.

• January 1, 2011
  
  • I've been working diligently on ams for a couple of days. I had to install a new video card, since the one from the old gwydion was bad. I installed a Swiftech MCP655 waterpump, replacing the old Swiftech MCP350 whose bearing shaft had failed (after 5 years).

    Software-wise, I updated to FreeBSD 8.2.