I feel the need to chronicle the construction of the TF2 boxen.  Between the 10 visits from UPS/FedEx, 2 trips to Microcenter, and 3 different assembly/integration parties, it was quite an adventure. 

First, to be clear, the moose watched us always.

We started out with a metric boatload of parts.  We had to build 13 machines (12 tf2 clients and one server) I got the server parts a few days in advance and assembled that first.  i7 920 with 3GB triple channel memory and a 64GB SSD.  ”Fast” starts to describe it.  The box is just unreal.  

For the workstations, AMD donated Phenom II’s and 4850’s to the cause, leaving us to buy the stuff to wrap around all the horsepower.  Newegg was the source of most of the parts (cases, mobo’s, disks, RAM, mice, keyboards) with Microcenter filling in the blanks (heatsinks, mousepads, molex -> 6pin PCIE power cables (!), etc).  AMD send their stuff OEM, so we had to get heatsinks and cables for everything.  Not biggie, but still required an extra trip to Microcenter.  God I wish there was one closer to my house.  

There were giant piles of gear everywhere:

Nothing quite as satisfying as 12 cases just waiting to be filled.  Or something.  I’ll spare you the pics of monitors, disks, and everything.  There’s 12 of each.  It’s easy to visualize.

Cases out of the box.  They had 480W PSU’s in them already which is sufficient for our needs.  For the money, they’re pretty nice cases. 

Everything went together pretty well.  We had to do a BIOS upgrade on the FOXCONN boards we bought (A7GM-S).  It’s AM2+ out of the box, but it didn’t recognize the Phenom II’s.  The box would still boot… well, after it got power cycled once it would boot.  But the BIOS and OS wouldn’t properly identify the chip.  So we had to break out floppies and upgrade via a USB connected floppy.  Scary stuff, those floppies.  But it worked.  

We only had a handful of PCIE/molex power connectors so we had to move them around between boxes as we configured things.  Hell, we only had 2 processors the first day so we were moving procs around too.  It took the better part of a day with 6 folks working to get 12 systems up and running right.  We ghosted the OS onto all the drives which worked like a charm.  In hindsight we should have installed TF2 and done a bit more configuration on each system before we ghosted, but we fought through it.  

This was clearly exhausting work….

Though it turns out they were faking it.

Anyhoo, it all worked out.  The tourney went very well, the machines held up great, and I think I had the most headshots by sunday afternoon.  The moose is loose (with Mr. Blurrycam apparently).  w00t!