Project: Behemoth-XVI

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I'm finding W7 to be pretty sweet to, I've had one BSD but I was mucking in the registry and deserved it. It copies large files across my lan better and it just seems snappier ) IMHO

[Saibot]

Holy !@!@!#!@$#*(@&

i just came across this LOL...

wat the hell??!??! i didnt even know a mobo like that existed WTF?!?!?!... and the possibility of 256 GB of RAM!??! you gona be using this for gaming or some super google-type server?!? or just for the fun of benching it after ur done?!? O_O

sorry, but my mind is boggled beyond belief right now.

[CMetaphor]

Originally Posted by Saibot

Holy !@!@!#!@$#*(@&

i just came across this LOL...

wat the hell??!??! i didnt even know a mobo like that existed WTF?!?!?!... and the possibility of 256 GB of RAM!??! you gona be using this for gaming or some super google-type server?!? or just for the fun of benching it after ur done?!? O_O

sorry, but my mind is boggled beyond belief right now.

It is a bit much isn't it? lol.... "Excessive" might be a good word for it, lol. Yes, 256Gb of RAM can be installed on the board, but the board will drop the speeds down one notch when all 8 slots for RAM for a CPU is populated. I.E. - 8 Sticks of DDR2-800 ECC Registered will read at DDR2-667 speeds. I don't think I will ever approach that much ram in this system though... perhaps another 8Gigs in the future, we shall see

This system can handle gaming quite well (working on starting to benchmark it in a few games now... but slowly, hehe) but will also be used for encoding, recoding, rendering and more... or all of that at once . I'm just trying to find the best OS to use with the system right now as even a "workstation-optimized" Server 2008 seems sluggish in comparison to XP or Windows 7... But it seems as if ill be trying out some Linux in the near future, so we'll see how that goes!

[jak3_dude]

I'd just like to say...you sir, are a Hero.

that's right, capital H
seriously, and this build isn't even finished yet...I kinda want to see that breakdown of before and after prices, but I think I'm going to have to sit my wallet in another room while I do so, rofl

Behemoth is a very accurate name, that thing is huge...I like it a lot. It's like a powerlifter, it doesn't just look big, it can lift (or in this case, number crunch) big as well. Bite >= bark.

This entire project has my approval!

[CMetaphor]

haha! Thanks dude! I've quite honestly not had the time to "polish off" Behemoth as yet.... But that hasn't stopped it from doing just about anything I can throw at it easily . Im currently playing around with Handbrake to find a way to upconvert/resample DivX movies into HD.... lol

[CMetaphor]

Yup. Motherboard is no post again. I'm currently going back and forth with Supermicro's tech support group and I've contacted the reseller of the board... Maybe I can get a Tyan instead, this is rediculous...

[Soultribunal]

Originally Posted by CMetaphor

Yup. Motherboard is no post again. I'm currently going back and forth with Supermicro's tech support group and I've contacted the reseller of the board... Maybe I can get a Tyan instead, this is rediculous...

The 3 Tyan Boards I've used have been good to me in the past. I'm thinking maybe you should go down that route. Thats insane for how short a period of time you've had it CM for it to be doing this to you.

Regards,
ST

[Chilly]

Hum, I always found the opposite to be true, I never could trust Tyan motherboards. CMetaphor, this is a server board that stops working, they're designed to be run 24/7 under grueling conditions, if this is the second time its happened I'd start to suspect somethings else killing the motherboard.

I just did some searching for you and it seems that this model (the H8QM3-2) seems to have no *known* issues, in fact the only documented issue I could find was someone having problems getting the installation of VMware ESX to work properly.

Has any of the hardware your using (CD drive, GPU, HDD, Ram, etc) ever given you issues in the past? One PC I once worked on, his wireless PCI card kept frying motherboards after about a month of running, but untill it killed the motherboard the wireless card seemed to work fine. Only reason I figured it out was the wireless card was because while his PC was over at my place to try figure out what was wrong, I borrowed the card from his PC(because I assumed it was fine, I thought it was the PSU at the time) to set up a spare PC(I had no spare cat5 cable), when BOOM, it kills my KNOWN GOOD motherboard as well. As soon as we replaced that card, his motherboard never died again.

I'm just saying, it might not be the board at all, it might just be something strange like your DVD Burner killing it.

[CMetaphor]

I'm going to do some thorough troubleshooting tomorrow (on canada day... yay) but I've already tried the following:
-Different PSUs (Striker 1Kw, which always worked fine, sold it to get an Olympia 1200w, also no issues in any other system)
-Different graphics cards - GTX295 or 3870x2 or onboard (ATI es1000)

What Im going to do tomorrow:
1)Pull the mobo (there goes a good chuck on my canada day right there)
2)Pull all be one CPU and One stick of RAM, see if i can get it to post on a regular basis.

Why i don't think its any other component:
- System ran stabily for two months with all 4 CPUs and 8 gigs of Ram. It has been stressed, severely, many times during that time without issue.
- The issue is intermittent despite any combination of hardware I have plugged into it.
(By Intermittent i mean it was intermittent at first.... now i have a 1 in 20 chance of getting the system to post... if im lucky, and even then it freezes in Windows).
- The motherboard has already failed once...

[Chilly]

Originally Posted by CMetaphor

System ran stabily for two months with all 4 CPUs and 8 gigs of Ram. It has been stressed, severely, many times during that time without issue.
- The issue is intermittent despite any combination of hardware I have plugged into it.
(By Intermittent i mean it was intermittent at first.... now i have a 1 in 20 chance of getting the system to post... if im lucky, and even then it freezes in Windows).
- The motherboard has already failed once...

I'm saying something else might of killed the board, not that something is causing the board not to post, in my story above, the wireless card KILLED both the boards, they had to be RMA'ed. The strange thing was that the wireless card would work for a little while(about an hour on my computer, a month on another) before killing the system.

The wireless card killed a total of 5 motherboards before we figured out what was wrong, usually lasting about a month before it killed it, most likely it was outside of typical tolerance levels and that it stressed the board a lot, but not enough to kill it outright. The motherboards that lasted a month each were quality boards, the one that died with an hour of me putting it in the system, low end cheap $50 board.

I just find it EXTREMELY odd for a server grade motherboard made by a great OEM like SM, with no known issues(unlike certain ASUS server/workstation boards I know) which I can find online, to die slow unexplainable deaths, twice within the span of a couple months.

Its my hunch that something is slowly killing the board, causing issues to occur more and more often(till its like you said, unusable) and not that its dieing on its own.