Today I bought new hardware and upgraded my desktop system. The “old” hardware will give my server more room to breathe (it’s an old P3 1GHz with 512MB memory, soon to be replaced by a AMD Athlon 64X2 6000+ with 4GB memory).
To upgrade my system, I replaced my motherboard, as well as the CPU (now a Phenom II 920), the memory (now 8 GByte) and the videocard (now an NVidia GeForce 9800GT by Gigabyte). Apart from the network card not being recognized automatically, the system was up and running after two reboots. The first to enable the network driver, and a second to enable the restricted NVidia driver.
Oh, and I replaced the 360W power supply with a 500W version. It also has a modular cable system, so only the power cords I need are attached, leaving you with less clutter in the case.
The Phenom II has a nice feature (or the motherboard has, I don’t know): you can group the 4 cores to act as one big core (ganged), or you can leave it to the default and have 4 cores (unganged).
Ubuntu now rocks again…!