Songhay Studio: Hardware Acquisition Strategy
NASA-like redundancy should be the guiding principle behind how hardware is acquired. Ideally, a second barebones desktop (wagon-top) workstation should be buildable from hardware on hand.
With this guidance, a possible acquisition sequence would work like this:
- Sapphire Radeon R9 270X 2GB GDDR5 DVI-I/DVI-D/HDMI/DP Dual-X with Boost and OC Version PCI-Express Graphics Card 11217-01-20G (this would be a second card)
- Ergotron LX Desk Mount LCD Arm (this would be the second arm)
- LG—27" IPS LED HD Monitor (9.3lbs) from Best Buy (this would be a second wagon-top monitor, based on the assumption that shipping costs will not be competitive)
Whisper-Quiet Fan Experiment
The fan for my CPU cooler is (probably) the loudest thing on the wagon. Replacing this with something quieter should help. I should have the time to play around with this after the items above are in place—or I may just get into this first (it would be cheaper).
According to my entry from 2011, the motherboard (with no backup) currently on the wagon is the Asus M4A88T-I DELUXE Socket AM3/ AMD 880G/ USB3.0/ Hybrid CrossFireX/ A&V&GbE/ Mini-ITX Motherboard which is socket AM3. It follows that the Scythe SCBSK-2100 BIG Shuriken 2 Rev. B CPU Cooler for LGA 2011/1366/1156/1155/1150/775 and Socket FM1/AM3+/AM3/AM2+/AM2 (SCBSK-2100) should be the one to try. (An interesting Amazon customer comment, “Very impressed with the heat dissipation capabilities and the zero noise factor at HTPC duties. My psu is louder than this thing.” This suggests that the next thing to look into is quieter power supplies.)
Mounting Internal Drives for My Youngest Son
My spacious Silverstone case can accommodate internal drives. This would do well for my son’s Origin and Steam software. For the sake of redundancy, new drives should be internally mounted and the existing drives would then become backup. The current choice is the “whisper quiet” Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive—WD5000AAKX.
Ergotron Neo-Flex Mobile MediaCenter and Beyond…
My “Songhay Studio: Ergotron Neo-Flex Mobile MediaCenter” post points to the next and final major addition to my studio hardware. Any other major hardware acquisitions will be concerned with audio and video production. The steady-state condition with regard to studio hardware would be reinforcing the redundancy, ensuring that production lines are safe from large interruptions due to hardware failure.