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Thread: The Tank

  1. #1
    Dark side super agent
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    The Tank

    After resolving the Not Putting a Heatsink on the CPU crisis, I thought you might like to see the collection of antiques I'm bringing together.

    Firstly the case, the reason this build is called The Tank. It's an Antec 1080AMG full tower made of 1mm steel. It weighs a fricking ton! Really, it should have wheels. It's been sitting unloved up in my loft for too long now so it's time to put it to a good use.


    The Tank opened up. Despite the size, it doesn't take that many drives. Two drives can be installed in each of the detachable disk racks you can see in the middle. There's space for a further four 5.25" devices which I'll likely use for hard drive caddies. The PSU is a 600W OCZ job I bought a few years ago.


    The insides. Here you can see the Supermicro X8ST3-F server motherboard in place. It's a socket 1366 ATX board with a built Matrox G200 graphics card (wool!), six SATA ports, 8 SAS ports, two Gigabyte network ports, remote management stuff and probably a couple of other things I haven't discovered yet. It didn't come with a manual... The CPU is a Xeon e5620, a four core CPU with hyper threading - an i7 for servers really.


    How it looks with the heatsink on. It's an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro job. It was cheap(isn) and does the job nicely.


    I've now installed a four port NIC on one of the PCIe slots. I didn't take a pic of this but you're not missing much!

    I'll be using The Tank as an ESXi server. I already had ESXi installed on a USB thumb drive which I used on my Microserver. I plugged the thumb drive into one of the internal USB slots and was a bit surprised to find it booted up no problem at all, correctly identifying all the NIC ports and starting up as per normal. I had my VMs on a drive which I pulled from the Microserver and had also installed. There they were, all ready to use... The big test (which I haven't done yet) is moving over a further four hard drives which I used for an Xpenology storage array. This may be more of a challenge as I had to do some fancy tricks to allow the drives to be used directly by the Xpenology VM. I'll find out soon enough how it goes
    An Atlantean Triumvirate, Ghosts of the Past, The Centre Cannot Hold
    The Pillars of Britain, Foundations of the Reich, Cracks in the Pillars.

    My books are available here for Amazon Kindle. Feedback always welcome!

  2. #2
    Senior Member Pob255's Avatar
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    • Pob255's system
      • Motherboard:
      • Asus M5A99X EVO
      • CPU:
      • FX8350 & CM Hyper 212+
      • Memory:
      • 4 x 2gb Corsair Vengence 1600mhz cas9
      • Storage:
      • 512gb samsung SSD +1tb Samsung HDD
      • Graphics card(s):
      • EGVA GTX970
      • PSU:
      • Seasonic GX 650W
      • Case:
      • HAF 912+
      • Operating System:
      • W7 Pro
      • Monitor(s):
      • iiyama XB3270QS-B1 32" IPS 1440p

    Re: The Tank

    interesting looks like the Antec 1080AMG was just a chieftec dragon with an antec badge on it

  3. #3
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    Re: The Tank

    I think you may well be right Pob. It was a long time ago that I bought this case so I can't remember my reasoning for the purchase - probably the reviews were good!

    Small update - the drive cages hold three drives each, not two so there's space for ten drives in the case if need be. I've also transferred across four drives from my Microserver which I used as my Xpenology storage array. I can't remember the specifics especially as I don't use ESXi everyday but I had to manually arrange for the drives to bypass EXSi and talk straight to the Xpenology VM (I think) so I was a bit dubious about whether the disk transfer would go smoothly. It did. I plugged in the drives, started up ESXi then the Xpenology VM and voila. It's a testament to how robust ESXi is that I can swap to a whole new machine on an entirely different architecture and have zero problems.

    Here's a picky of the final setup bar the addition of a fan or two. It's definitely an old skool case - no place to tidy the cables!
    An Atlantean Triumvirate, Ghosts of the Past, The Centre Cannot Hold
    The Pillars of Britain, Foundations of the Reich, Cracks in the Pillars.

    My books are available here for Amazon Kindle. Feedback always welcome!

  4. #4
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    • carvedeye's system
      • Motherboard:
      • AsRock Z69 Extreme4 Gen3
      • CPU:
      • Intel Core i5 3.3ghz @4.8 ghz
      • Memory:
      • 8 gig (2 x 4 gig) Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz
      • Storage:
      • 3 x 1 tb, 1 x 320 gb
      • Graphics card(s):
      • MSI GTX 780 Lightning LE 3GB
      • PSU:
      • Hyper Type R 850 watt
      • Case:
      • Cooler Master HAFX 942
      • Operating System:
      • Windows 7 Ultimate
      • Monitor(s):
      • 22" samsung SyncMaster 223bw
      • Internet:
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    Re: The Tank

    Great Job Bluecube
    Case:Coolermaster HAF X 942 - Motherboard:AsRock z68 Extreme4 Gen3
    CPU:i5 2500k @ 4.8 ghz - Cooler:Corsair H100
    GFX:MSI GTX 780 Lightning LE 3gb - RAM:8 gig Corsair Vengeance 1600MHZ
    OS: Win7

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