Powered by Core i7

After spending 1.5 month to practice on the InternetworkExpert Service Provider Volume 1 workbook, I've suffered enough of sluggish response of the emulated routers on both my company laptop and desktop. For Volume 1, the maximum number of routers required is 10; Volume 2 simulates the actual CCIE SP lab, so it requires 14 units of emulated routers (R1-R9, CellModeATM, BB1, BB2, BB3 and TermServ).

Just 3 days ago I've started practicing on the 1st lab of the Volume 2 via multiserver Dynamips and this causes both the C2D 2.13GHz and DuoCore 1.73GHz's CPU utilization to shoot up to 100% fulltime. This triggered me to go ahead and upgrade my system. Here's what I bought yesterday:

Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz
Intel DX58SO Motherboard
Corsair 6GB DDR3 1333MHz XMS3
Cooler Master 550W Power Supply

Unfortunately, WinXP can only support up to 4GB of memory allocation, and under the System Properties, it shows only 3.23GB of RAM with Physical Address Extension activated.

The next thing I did after setting up the PC was to load the full lab topology. I'm extremely pleased with the performance as the CPU utilization is only 14% with 14 routers up and running without any configurations. With all the common SP services (OSPF, BGP, MPLS VPN, MPLS TE, etc) turned on, the load increased to an average of 17% only. Ping response time improved from more than 1 second to less than 40ms, which is acting almost like a real life router!

Perhaps this upgrade is one of the most well spent toy (or rather tool) besides my Makita 9227C and EOS5D. Hope this tool helps to speed up my lab practice and head for the exam before the 4th quarter of this year.