| I just did exactly the same thing, as I wanted to set up a new home server that was small and quiet. I bought a BookPC from http://www.directron.com and put in the Celeron 300A that was running at 527MHz in my game PC and extra memory and HD that I had laying around. I loaded Win2K Workstation on it and it runs great. It is fairly quiet, and you must be near it to hear the fan so I am pleased. BTW, I used to run NT4.0 server, but WS supports dial-up, basic FTP, file sharing, and runs my ISP sharing program Sygate, so I went with it and am very pleased.
The BookPC motherboard uses the Intel 810 chipset, which is a pretty solid chipset and works nicely for this application. I, too, always build my PC's and have always avoided the integrated motherboards, but for a home server the built-in 2D video and sound are fine. I am pleased with the performance, but I wish I could overclock it more. There are no adjustments for the cpu core voltage, but there are some jumpers I'm trying to identify. So, at the standard voltage, 100MHz FSB wouldn't boot, 83MHz worked fine but the Davicom ethernet chip didn't work. So I'm running at 75MHz FSB, cpu at 338MHz, and everything works perfectly.
I highly recommend the BookPC, and the size just can't be beat. I put it on a shelf in my computer hutch over the desk, and it only takes up half the shelf and only about 4 inches vertically. Try THAT with a Micro ATX. | |
