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Completed [PROJECT]: Leviathan

Dead Things

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Welcome to the Leviathan worklog.

Job 41:8-10,33-34

If you lay a hand on him, you will remember the struggle and never do it again! Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight of him is overpowering. No one is fierce enough to rouse him. Nothing on earth is his equal—a creature without fear. He looks down on all that are haughty; he is king over all that are proud.

So yeah, this thing is gonna be a beast.

The parts have finished trickling in, and I now have everything, ready to build. Unfortunately, the build will be delayed because I have to finish off two other builds first (one of which is a watercooling build, which may take some time). Realistically, it will probably be at least another week before I can post a legitimate update. But I will be hitting up the Home Depot this weekend, so I will update this thread as progress is made.

Famously, CMetaphor has a rather similar build called Behemoth, so naming my rig was a bit of a no-brainer: it would have to be either Leviathan or Ziz. And since Leviathan sounds so much cooler, Leviathan it is!

Here are the as-of-yet unassembled parts of Leviathan:

39804b29afcf6fbf2.jpg


These parts consist of:

Motherboard: Tyan S4985
Processors: 4 x Opteron 8356
Heatsinks: 4 x CM Hyper TX3
RAM: 8x2GB Samsung PC2-5300 ECC
HDD: WD Raptor 150
DVD: Pioneer DVR-212DBK
PSU: Corsair HX1000
Case: Ghetto homemade test bench
GPU: Undecided as of yet

Here's a closer look at the Tyan mobo. You'll notice it's pretty big compared to your standard ATX mobo, which you see to the right of it.

39804b29aeed47436.jpg


The form factor is called SSI MEB, which measures 13" wide by 16" tall. Suffice to say there are not very many readily available and affordable cases that can hold an SSI MEB motherboard, hence the need for a ghetto custom job.

In terms of purpose, this likely won't come as a surprise to those of you who know me. The short- and medium-term purpose of the machine will be dedicated to the folding@home project. In the long term, provided the machine proves stable and reliable, it will likely replace my current web host machine.

The part about this build that I am particularly proud of (pride already, and I haven't even started building!) is the cost of acquisition. So in the spirit of that, I am going to be completely open about how much this not-so-little machine set me back in total. I should note that I am not counting parts that are already anguishing around my basement towards the total cost of acquisition.

So in terms of costs, here we go...

39804b29aeed45a27.jpg


Motherboard was bought from Newegg.ca for $349.99 + tax and shipping, the total came to $411.59. Here's the link: Newegg.ca - TYAN S4985G3NR Thunder n4250QE Quad 1207(F) NVIDIA nForce4 Professional 2200 + 2050 SSI MEB footprint Four AMD Opteron (Rev. F) 8000 series (dual/quad-core) processors Server Motherboard - Server Motherboar

39804b29aeed40da7.jpg


CPUs were bought from ebay for $50.00 USD each. After shipping and currency conversion, the total came to $227.62. Here's the link: http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120462621928

39804b29aeed431b9.jpg


RAM was also bought from ebay for $25 USD each. After shipping, currency conversion and customs/brokerage fees (which for some happy reason were not charged for the CPU shipment), the total came to $287.92. Here's the link: SAMSUNG 2GB PC2-5300 M393T5750EZA-CE6 DDR2 667MHz on eBay.ca (item 360208539742 end time 16-Dec-09 12:48:27 EST)

CPU heatsinks were bought from NCIX.com as part of a larger order that I was making anyway, so I will not consider shipping as part of the cost of acquisition for these. These were $17.05 each (PM'd of course), and after tax the total came to $71.61. Here's the link: NCIX.com - Buy Coolermaster RR-910-HTX3-GP Hyper TX Series Aluminum 3-HEATPIPE CPU Cooler S1156/775/AM3/AM2/939/940 - RR-910-HTX3-GP In Canada.

And the rest of the parts were already languishing about, looking for a new home. I will accrue more acquisition costs at Home Depot over the weekend when I buy my supplies to build the test bench, so I'll update the total once that's done. But as of right now, this little project has cost me a grand total of $998.74. Not bad considering a year ago, each one of the CPUs in this build would have cost more than that (NCIX.com - Buy AMD Opteron 8356 Quad Core Processor Socket F 2.3GHZ Barcelona 2MB 75W 65NM OEM - OS8356WAL4BGH In Canada.).

Okay, so next steps...

I will, as I said, pick up the stuff to build the test bench this weekend. I will also try to get some basic testing done before next week to make sure all of the CPUs and RAM are working. My next update to you then, will be once I've started putting things together. Once I can get around to this build, it should happen pretty quickly.

Thanks for (probably not) reading my extremely long-winded intro to my Leviathan worklog.
 
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LCB001

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Oh My, looking forward to this one.

What sort of PPD are you expecting, something close to 32,000...
 

MonsterSound

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Thanks for posting an interesting build. It should be an impressive performer and really can't believe the prices you got (I mean I can believe it, but wow!). Those 8356 opty's are only 1 1/2 years from release.
Looking forward to more posts. :thumb:
 

misterd

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That would make one heck of a VM host machine. :ph34r: Too bad it doesn't fold for HWC, but the cool factor is way up on it either way.
 

CMetaphor

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"famously" lol. Behemoth wasn't all that famous imo. Looks nice (and a lil familiar tho!). Your 4985 is the "-E" version though right? While you got it for an amazing price, just be careful if you ever plan to upgrade your CPUs - the "-E" doesn't support all Shanghai procs and doesn't support Istanbul at all, unfortunately.

Have your double-checked that the TX3s will fit adjacently to eachother? If so, I might have to copy you on that one, as I'm using somewhat-rare supermicro tower sinks w/ heatpipes and 70mm fans. I couldn't find anything larger that would fit side-by-side for cpus 3 & 4.

Can't wait to see more though! On paper, your system should de-throne Behemoth from its long standing wPrime 1024M spot.... at which point I'll have to kill you and steal your procs and/or upgrade Behemoth even more, lol.

:thumb:
 

Dead Things

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I have not verified the TX3s will fit yet. I did choose them for their size though, as they really don't take up very much real estate at all. Eyeballing it gives me reason for optimism though. Considering the size and price, they are great little heatsinks as long as you can figure out how to apply the TIM properly.

It's good to bring up the -E limitation of the motherboard. This board will only work with HT1 processors, so all the 2200MHz HT Shanghais and of course the 4800MHz HT Istanbuls are a no-go. So yeah, with already a decent set of Barcelonas on there, I'm afraid this build basically has no upgrade path outside of adding another 16GB of RAM. But that's okay - the only reason why I wanted to do this project in the first place was because of its affordability, meanwhile Istanbuls are still $1000+ apiece.
 

CMetaphor

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... meanwhile Istanbuls are still $1000+ apiece.

When they get lower... I'll be getting them. Istanbuls and the faster HT Shanghais will more than likely be able to overcome the gaming limitation a 1GHz HT puts on the system. Meaning, once I can get Istanbuls, Behemoth will become my primary gaming box. :thumb:

Still though, It should be a very impressive build, and you can still get the 1Ghz HT Shanghais later on (which are still a very noticeable jump in performance over our Barcelonas).

Why the "Ghetto homemade testbench" though? Not going to mod a regular case to make it fit?
 

Fox

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Leviathan eh? Should have gone with Ziz cause now you're gonna need a lot of water cooling... I mean, it is Leviathan. :ph34r:

Haha, but it looks awesome, can't wait to see some of the numbers coming out of that thing.

Edit: On a side note, how much power do you expect to draw before GPU's at full load?
 
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