65,000 hours of DC

[AMDave]

One day, about seven and a half years ago, I came home chuffed to bits.

I wrestled the box out of the back seat of the car and got to unpacking it right away.

I remember I spent a whole evening plugging things in and loading up software and going 'look at that!' and marvelling at how quick the AMD Duron was at floating point calculations.

And so was born my first dedicated boxen, "dn01".

Over the years I have thrown some tremendous challenges at that little machine and it never failed to bring me joy by grinding through the hard stuff.
It has been a desktop, a database server, a web server and all of the time a dedicated cruncher.

I have paid it plenty of attention with 6 monthly tear-downs, cleaning and rebuilds and once in a while a new CMOS battery.

It just kept on performing.

Looking at the date on the invoice and estimating the number and length of the outages, it seems that this little boxen has poured its heart out for me for about 65,000 hours.

About a month ago it started to show some signs of trouble with an intermittent reboot that I could not pin down.

This week, the spontaneous reboots have grown closer and closer together.

Tonight they are just minutes apart.

The parts required to bench test the fault are no longer available.

It is time to retire good old 'dn01'.

65,000 hours of DC - Thanks AMD, for completely exceeding my expectations.

[NeoGen]

Those were the days when things were built to last...

Make it a good burial cerimony. Case covered with the Australian flag, several rounds of shots fired to the air, like in the military. :)

There's no way to tell exactly in what projects that machine was, but I'm sure it contributed quite a bit to your current track record (http://www.amdusers.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=member%3AAMDave). :)

[liuqyn]

rest in piece old friend, maybe the (computer)gods will reincarnate you as a Phenom II.

[Ototero]

I hope there is a "Silicon Heaven".

[mitchellds]

I think I keep a duron cpu as a key chain. I think its the one I pencil modded to overclock. remember this trick ?

http://www.motherboards.org/articles/guides/41_1.html|

[Beerknurd]

R.I.P. dn01

[AMDave]

Hey, thanks for the tributes :)
It outlasted the Intels dn03 and dn05 by about 3 years.

I shut it down, unplugged it and ceremoniously cut the cord in half with wire-snips.
(a good safety step for end-of-use/faulty equipment, to make sure no-one tries to re-use it).

I suspect it was the mobo that finally went and the CPU could well be rock solid.

At least it is a bit quieter now without that old model thermaltake shredding the Troposphere to ribbons :p

[NeoGen]

Dave, the ceremony must be finalized with the purchase of a new Phenom II to run in it's place. I'm sure dn01 would have wanted it that way, right? :)

[AMDave]

I know ... Way to dig up an old thread!

DN06 bit the dust today. I unplugged it for the last time.
I can't remember exactly when my goddess bought it for me but it was about 6 or 7 years old.
It was an old Acer PowerFH with chinese maufactured mobo and Intel Core2 CPU 6300(EB) @ 1.86GHz (2 processors) and barely did 64-bit processing being one of the earliest models to do so.
It had been giving compute errors for some time so was no longer being used for DC projects but now it won't boot without various checksum errors etc. unprompted reboots and lockups.
So it's time for it to go to the 'farm'. (chop it for parts :P )
The NVIDIA 9600GT GPU that I had added to it bit the dust a few weeks back, so Its an all AMD & ATI house now except for the laptops and handheld devices.

haha - DN07 is now on 'notice'. It's a Phenom I x4, 8GB RAM, HD5770, that I am using both as a server & cruncher and is now my oldest working machine.

As a follow up to NeoGen's last post above, I did go out and buy the parts & built 2 Phenom II x6 machines DN08 and DN09.
They are both now my biggest hitters each with HD7770s in them, having upgraded them from HD5770s.
With 8GB and 16GB ram respectively they can take anything I throw at them including the infamous monstrous BURP WU.

[Brucifer]

Lol.... I've still got a Pentium that works that put in hours and hours of crunching. It is still here in the room, but it is now just a nostalgic collector of dust. It's main use now is for wiping hard drives and running an old dos version of quicken that I still use to do my checkbook. Don't have the heart to get rid of it while it still runs. Has an old Asus motherboard. But my old Duron croaked a long time ago. And I've had most of my old AMD64's die on me. I still have one dual core running that has a 5770 in it running boinc. I am currently replacing my C2Q's with i5's that consume 77watts. That has helped my power bill. :-)