Another dual-Quad build

[napier]

I figured I would share some pic's of my build in progress.
Specs

CPU's: Intel xeon e5520 X 2
Heatsinks: noctua u9dx
Motherboard: Supermicro
Memory: 12 GB mushkin ddr3 1066
Case: Thermaltake armor +
Hard Drives: Western Digital 300GB velociraptor ( for OS)
Western Digital 640GB black (for storage)
GPU: nvidia quadro fx 3700
PSU: corsair 850 tx

On with the pic's






More pic's to come as I get the rest of the parts







More pic's as promised, I just finished assembly today. The processing power of this machine is unbelievable, its just insane how fast this thing is. Hope you guys enjoy :)

[3.0charlie]

Which board is this? Dual PCI-e slots?

[napier]

supermicro x8ai , the only bad part is with the true black heatsinks the top one become useless. Dosent matter to much I dont really plan on using it anyways and if I wanted I could always change out the heat sinks

[3.0charlie]

x8ai? Can't find anything about that board.

[napier]

woops its x8Dai sorry

[3.0charlie]

Tx - any oc'ing options in that BIOS?

[Chilly]

Originally Posted by 3.0charlie

Tx - any oc'ing options in that BIOS?

Hes using a lot of the same parts as me, unfortunately no you can not overclock this motherboard at all. Even using something like SetFSB does not work, X58 has a bug when comes to clocking due to something with the NB->SB connection. The single socket, "enthusiast" "consumer" boards have a workaround implemented but server board makers find no reason to implement this fix because, well they don't need to overclock.

On the "few" dual LGA 1366 motherboards that people have been able to overclock, they can't get a bclk higher than around 135.6MHz which is, to be frank, useless. Regardless, I'm glad to see more and more people going this route, at least the people (like naiper) who can actually use the power.

Naiper, don't worry, the heatsinks, overkill as they may be, will look very nice. Like you said, if you ever do need to go dual PCIe X16 than you can just change the heatsinks.

[3.0charlie]

Tx for the info - I still have a dream of eventually having a dual (quad?) chip board with dual 295s, for folding.

Under water, of course.

This just may be the board.




Which ram are you using Mike?

[Chilly]

Originally Posted by 3.0charlie

Tx for the info - I still have a dream of eventually having a dual (quad?) chip board with dual 295s, for folding.

Under water, of course.

This just may be the board.




Which ram are you using Mike?

The X8DAi is a GREAT board, though I would also consider the X8DAH+, for mot much more(about a $60 premium), you get 3 x16 2.0 PCIe slots, a shit load of PCIe x8 2.0 slots and a metric ton of RAM slots.

I ended up using Cheap G.Skill 6GB(3x2GB) PC3-10666 DDR3-1333, Nice thing about these Nehalem-EP based boards is the fact that unlike in the past, where server board MUST have ECC Ram, its not requirement this generation. I don't know why Intel decided to let regulaur ram run fine on server boards, but for whatever reason they did.

Having said that, there are plenty reasons why one should consider buying ECC/buffered ram on a Workstation/Server platform. For example, one of them being that the non-ECC limit on the board is lower than the ECC, the X8DAi/3 supports up to 48GB MAX of non-ECC ram, while supporting a max of 96GB of ECC. Another(major) reason is when doing heavy duty rendering, ECC will ensure the integrity of the data being crunched and worked on.

While typical crunching(F@H, Bonic, etc) programs, Virtual Machines(ESX), Games, and etc do not have a great need for bit integrity as they are programed to understand and ignore certain amount of faults. Easiest way to understand it is like this, the difference between TCP and UDP, with ECC being TCP and most regular ram being UDP.

Since I do a lot of Virtual Machine work, Video Rendering, crunching, and some gaming, bit integrity is not all that important to me, so I went with regular cheap-o RAM which was on sale.

[napier]

chilly check your messages I need to know what brackets movieman used to install these heatsinks I cant find a bracket that will work.