The AMD FX-8350 4Ghz Black Edition

Today I’ve put the finishing touches on the fastest machine I’ve built to date. I’ve put together a brand new AMD FX 8350 Black Edition running at 4 Ghz with 32GB of ram. I’ve outfitted this new rig with 6TB of hard drive space, a DVD Burner and Blu-Ray writer as well as 256GB SSD. I also included an NVidia GTX 630 video card with 4GB of ram. It’s all wrapped up in massive case by Silverstone and I installed Windows 7 Professional as my OS. And let’s not forget there’s a 1000 watt power supply giving life to my new creation.

And what do I plan to do with this? Well besides the obvious answer of any damn thing I want, it was indeed built to hand Virtual Machines. It will easily handle the task of running a couple of server systems simultaneously. Plus, it has enough juice to do some decent gaming in the off season.

I also have a Dell XPS 8300 running it’s own Virtual Machines and I plan to get the two machines talking to each other in their own little environment.

I went with Windows 7 for two simple reasons. One, I don’t like Windows 8. Not at all. Not in the least. To say it’s hideous would be kind. Second, I don’t have Windows Server 2008 at my disposal. If I did, I would have gone that route and used Hyper-V to get better performance and memory management. Server 2008 might be a possibility by the end of the year, but it’s not here now so I have to go with what I have.VirtualBox will serve my needs and let me run multiple machines at the same time. These aren’t production boxes. They are meant to be beaten senselessly and undergo rather bizarre experiments all in the name of science.

But so far this build has gone exceptionally well. The case has plenty of room and includes 10 drive bays. There are plenty of fans to keep things running smoothly and the 8 Cores of the FX-8350 are shockingly fast. I haven’t done any benchmarking or even loaded up enough software to tax the system. That time will come. For now, only the essentials have been installed. I plan to keep this system stripped down and running as fast as possible. My 4-core Dell Inspiron will continue to be my workhorse and handle a great deal of the mundane tasks.