People who know my opinions on computer hardware will probably be quite surprised to see the logo to the right, but yes, I do now have a Xeon workstation!

With two Xeon 1.7Ghx Processors onboard, and 768MB of RAM, it should buzz through the 3D work I have planned fairly quickly. As I demand more from the system, it will likely get a pair of 2.8Ghz or thereabouts processors, and more RAM. I currently have Fedora Core 5 Linux running from a 10GB hard drive I had lying around, but the plan is to buy a pair of 18.2GB 15,000rpm SCSI drives, and create a raid array of them.

When I first ran the machine, I was surprised at just how much noise it made when idle. I don’t mean it was just humming, it was competing with the tumble dryer in the next room! When I tried running two instances of Prime95 to stress test it, I was getting system errors reporting overheating on processor 0. Oh dear I thought, then I remembered that on inspection, one of the CPU heatsink clips had appeared to be broken. A quick modification of the broken clip, and a clean of the CPU and heatsink surfaces, and the machine now runs with no errors, and at an acceptable noise level even at full bore!

Update

I had a lot of trouble getting the Nvidia drivers to work on my machine due to troubles with the earlier Fedora Core 5 kernels. If anyone else is having trouble, or is just wanting instructions on the driver installation, check this thread for full instructions.