Building a V8, or Maybe Biting Off More Than One Can Chew

Pam Heinze — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:08:06 GMT

I wanted to build one of these for a long time and always managed to talk myself out of it because dual socket Xeons are scary and complicated but I figured I had picked out all the right parts and could handle it now.

First of all, I need to say, that the keychain pictured at NewEgg with the Coolermaster Stacker 830 was not in my box and I really wanted it. It had a bottle cap remover on it and many of the beers I like to buy are not twist offs, and my current key chain had the picture thingy fall out so I need a new one anyway. So I was very sad when I went through the box and did not find that key chain.

Also a little disturbing was the picture of the motherboard tray was not the same as what I got. The picture at the website appeared to be compatible with the Tyan Tempest motherboard, but the one I got had loads of extra holes and a big blank spot. Half of the processors hangs over this blanks spot, and this is what that looks like.

So two of the screws just hang off into nowhere and I bravely attached standoffs to them, hoping that would secure the heatsinks to the processors. I loved the idea of the motherboard tray that I could assemble and then slide into the case, and here is what it looks like before I slid it into the case.

The Coolermaster 830 is very big and I thought my Tsunami Dreams were big, but this one makes them look puny. It comes with casters and I installed them. You want to roll this thing around, you don't want to be picking it up and putting it on top of things.

To connect to the motherboard, it seemed smart to connect the front panel headers first. They are at the top of the board and are not labeled. So you sit there with the diagram from the manual and figure out where the power switch goes and the reset and the hard drive led and reset, which doesn't seem to work for me, so I thought it was odd that it went on the end pins. The power supply doesn't have an off switch so the whole thing comes on but wait, we need to talk about teasing out the connectors you need and stuffing away the ones you don't and not having them hang right into the processor fan because even though it is a big case, it still isn't big enough for all the snake-like cords coming off the processor which isn't modular so the unused stuff needs to be stuffed under the dvd-rom drive out of the way after you finally tease out the stuff you need.

Once the header pigtails are in, then the 24 pin, the 4 pin and the eight pin can be attached and connect USB and IDE and SATA for the drives and we might actually be ready to go. With half of the heatsinks hanging off INTO NOWHERE!

So it did come to life and I got into the BIOS and checked the hardware temps and OH MY GOD, it says the processors are running at 70 deg C below Tmax. What the heck is Tmax? Am I running at 70 deg or 70 deg below it?

I intalled Ubuntu 7.10 and tried to install sensors but they read -48 deg C. It's cold in my basement, but not that cold. I installed BOINC and it pulls 220 W at full load and the processors are only running at 85 percent according to the cpu monitor applet and I usually get rid of powernowd right away when I install Ubuntu on a BOINC machine but with the temperature issue, I am a little afraid to do that right now until I am confident I have installed the heat sinks correctly. I installed BOINC and got it going and kept waiting for the system to blow up under load but it hasn't yet.

But I'm a little baffled as to why the motherboard tray would have a big blank spot where I am supposed to bolt half the heatsink to. I will probably spend the rest of the night shutting down and trying to tighten that side, in hopes of getting those temps down in the BIOS and I must say the heat sinks that come with these things leave a lot to be desired anyway.

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Building a V8, or Maybe Biting Off More Than One Can Chew