Some of you may know about our crazy plans to setup another HappyDiggers server in the US. That plan seems to be going forward. Jiro bought my current 14core Xeon, motherboard and 64GB of RAM. This allowed me to buy the following parts to upgrade our current server with:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12 core / 14 thread - CPU € 335,00
ASRock X399 TAICHI - Motherboard € 348,33
Noctua NH-U14S - CPU cooler € 79,95
Corsair RMx Series RM850x (2018) - power supply € 118,00
USB drive € 15,99

I put together these components along with 32GB of RAM and an old Nvidia Quadro card I had lying around. Unfortunately the Quadro shorted and let the smoke out. Yikes...

After that I removed it from the motherboard and booted it up. Oddly enough it displayed the all-OK post codes and the num lock LED on the keyboard seemed to turn on/off when pressing the num lock key. So it seems that apart from the Quadro the other hardware is fine.

I don't have any other graphics cards lying around to test with and I don't feel like taking one out of our HTPC. So I've bought an ATI-102-B17002(B) 256MB PCI-e x1 card for 2 euro. That's right. ATI. From way back before it was bought by AMD. Essentially all it has to do is display the BIOS and a VMWare terminal. If I could have found a 4MB non-3D card that fits in a PCI-e x1 slot I would have gotten that. But this card should do nicely

Once I get the 'new' graphics card I'll try installing VMWare and do some testing. If that all goes well I'll do the server upgrade after that. This involves removing the current motherboard and expansion cards from the server case and replacing it with the new parts. This shouldn't take too long. After that I'll have to do some work on VMWare to get all the VMs up and running again.

I won't send the parts to Jiro after that just yet. He asked me to wait until he can upgrade his Internet connection to allow for more upstream bandwidth. This means the current server will continue to run with 128GB of memory, but with a faster CPU.

Pics!
Spoiler!