Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Built it up before last night's Overnight shift, So far not so good. It BSODs upon bootup from a win7 DVD... and linux disks won't boot either (minus memtest86, whicha passed)

Also, only the upper of the two PCIe slots yields video on POST... tried a different pair of GPUs I had sitting, no dice. I'll have to do more diagnostics later...

I suspect it may be a cap issue, as the board is riddled with KZG's and while I trust that when gg1978 told me it was tested working he was being honest, I'm thinking two days in a warm/hot van may not have done them any favors. When my paycheck comes, I'll order caps and do a recap... and see if that helps.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

I knew this would happen. Some strange firmware bug, software bug, bad driver, wierd quirk is going to do this shit.

speaking of which, did you go through the board cmos settings? make sure nothing 'strange' is turned on? did the flash the bios on your sata card? get an updated boot driver? Sometimes win7 has a bad default ahci/raid driver (rings true with newer intel ICH's and Non-SP1 Win7 disks)

maybe you should try to use onboard sata for the DVD? maybe you should try an IDE dvd drive (does the board have ide ports?) maybe you should try a USB adapter on an IDE or sata DVD, or install win7 from a flash stick

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Using the onboard nvidia sata for the dvd. Went through the bios, fixed any odd stuff. Nvidia sata is not in raid mode

[c_hegge]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Perhaps he should get a REAL computer... with a real, modern motherboard, an up-to-date CPU, a bunch of cheap DDR3, an SSD... and Windows 7 would install THE FIRST TIME with NO ISSUES...

The occasional use of KZG caps aside, Tyan workstation boards are just about bulletproof. Way more so than even the most upmarket consumer boards, so his build does have an advantage

EDIT: Looks like the original post was removed.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

research has turned up that people have installed win7 on this board with no problems.

you just have the worst fucking luck with these things

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

research has turned up that people have installed win7 on this board with no problems.

you just have the worst fucking luck with these things

I NEED A THANKS BUTTON lol

[Sparkey55]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Finally... I have a final list of specs and part sources for my next personal workstation build.

here's a part list:

From V3, I am resuing:

-Supermicro EATX case
-Seasonic 600W PSU (may upgrade eventually, as 600W is kinda on the edge for what I'm doing)
-2x AMD Opteron 285, 2.6Ghz dual core
-16gb Kingston ECC DDR400
-4x 73gb 10K WD raptors, w/ 3ware 9500s-4lp+BBU, RAID 0
-Mitsumi Floppy/card reader combo, firmware upgraded for SDHC (may swap to a dedicated reader w/usb port if the floppy proves useless)
-Hauppauge HVR-1600 (currently in a repurposed V2, will be pulled for the build)

From stuff I had sitting:

-Liteon DVD-RW, SATA. yes, brethin, this is the drive you traded me ages ago... it's being pulled from a HP D530
-LG PATA DVD-RW: Found the other day at a goodwill for $4, I may use it elesewhere.
- Regarding opticals, the future goal will be a DVD burner and a BD drive of some sort, both SATA, and at least one having lightscribe (since I have a buttload of lightscribe DVD+R's, got 60 for $9)

-2x 120mm Arctic F12 CO PWM 2BB fans: I ended up buying 3 after I messed up and broke one

-2x Stock AMD 940 coolers with 5k PWM fans added- combo of some spare coolers and the original fans from V2's 604 HP coolers. Very short wires, hopefully they'll reach .

Sourced from other members:

-Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE w/SCSI and universal (flex) SLI bridge: gg1978 happens to both have one, is willing to sell it, and lives not far off a travel route I take almost every weekend. I'll hopefully be picking it up this coming friday...

-2x Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT(s?), SLI'd- Bought of brethin after negotiating a decent price... I was going to get 9600's but given the relative difficulty of sourcing 9600's at a comparable price (Would have been about 30% more expensive on ebay, and only if I sniped my ass off). I've in the meantime redone the thermal compound/pads and cleaned the dust bunnies out of the heatsink on both cards.

The reason I'm not sure if it's a GT or GTS is the chip's model no. shows as a GTS chip but Brethin told me they were GT. The cards have generic Nvidia branding, so no indication there. Based off google image searching, I actually think the cards are indeed GTS given image searching:

GTS: http://videocards.productwiki.com/nv...orce-8600-gts/ (mine looks like this one)

GT: http://videocards.productwiki.com/nv...force-8600-gt/ (mine doesn't look like that)

It also has nothing but poly caps... so no recap required.

And FYI, I didn't go for an 8800 GTS or two becuase of power draw, cooling, and reliability issues ( I already have one 8800 GTS 640mb in the junk bin, failed reflow, also takes 2 slots). These cards only use one slot, so combined with my case's mesh bracket fillers (lots of airflow cutouts), the fact there is only one slot between the cards shouldn't be an issue.

OS wise, I'm going to run 7 x64... I've read of people getting it to work no problems... The SLI may be the only hiccup, as I've never set it up before... to those that have, is it fully HW, or is there a separate driver/SW setting to make it run? Is it part of the GPU driver, chipset driver, or a driver all it's own?

I've attached a PSU calc. report of the build... I think my 600W will cut it... I think.

Comments or questions? (Any "you shouldn't build workstations, buy a celeron instead" posts will be deleted, please be constructive).

Why should anyone comment when you think you have the right to remove a post based on what you think is relevent? It looks like if it is something that you do not agree with out it goes. This mod power is going to your head IMO.

[Ami Sapphire]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

research has turned up that people have installed win7 on this board with no problems.

you just have the worst fucking luck with these things

Seems so. I actually managed to get Windows Vista SP2 working on my Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N-4M board, even the onboard NIC which has no Vista drivers, with no issues... then I installed WinXP Pro SP3 on it. I probably could get Win7 working on my board if I even bothered to do so.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

To those commenting on the post number one disclaimer: the job of a moderator is to keep rhreads on topic. This is not a "workstations suck" thread, so my disclaimer was warranted.

Any further complaints: pm topcat.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Seems so. I actually managed to get Windows Vista SP2 working on my Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N-4M board, even the onboard NIC which has no Vista drivers, with no issues... then I installed WinXP Pro SP3 on it. I probably could get Win7 working on my board if I even bothered to do so.

thats a 180 degree difference between his and your board. His is a 64-bit opteron server with an nvidia chipset

vista probably had your drivers built in cause its such an old board

[goontron]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

To those commenting on the post number one disclaimer: the job of a moderator is to keep rhreads on topic. This is not a "workstations suck" thread, so my disclaimer was warranted.

Any further complaints: pm topcat.

its on topic get use to it, we all have!

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

its on topic get use to it, we all have!

Just as much as deer repellant is a hunting aid.

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Moderators don't take sides.

[thesloc]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

ECC Ram = FAIL

[goontron]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

Moderators don't take sides.

exactly and this moderator power has gone to your head for sure! and if you start to ban any of us for comments stating how your MOD power has gone to your head, we will chat with chris too.
(this has happened on the forum i own before)

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

yeah rat in memtest did you turn on ECC?

[gg1978]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

It was running with (8) 1GB sticks of Reg ECC DDR, that were HP server pulls and a pair of Opteron 848's. I did run memtest on it over the weekend before i pulled the board from the system it was in. ECC should have been enabled already. It had one of the 550W AcBel PSU's running it. I never did try the second PCI slot, it had a 9400GT in the top PCIe slot.

[gg1978]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

might find this helpful...


http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/26...-windows-64bit

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

I mean ECC in memtest86+, not in the cmos

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's Main rig V3.5

ECC was indeed enabled. Not sure on Memtest... I knew it reported ECC status but I didn't know there were settings within memtest.

My only other idea is since the upper pci-e wasn't tested... that could be the issue. Lot's of KZGs around there, so I'm still thinking a recap of all the KZGs would be a good idea just to be safe. KZGs make me wanna anyway...