power or cabling issue?

[rallynavvie]

I should never mess with something that works

I re-arranged my DH800 and DN800 systems today since my DN800 will now be my hidden file server and slave encoder, also known as "the bitch". It's in a cheap 4U case with as many HDDs as I could stuff into it, including my SCSI array. The DH800 now has no SCSI but I replaced them with PATA drives.

So now I've got the following running on my 2 year old Antec True550 EPS power supply other than what's attached to the board: 1x 10k SATA drive (OS and apps), 1x 250GB SATA drive, 2x 250GB PATA drives, 1x 300GB PATA drive, and one burner. All the PATA drives are new, replacing an aging 200GB PATA drive and two 15k SCSI drives.

Now I would assume that the simple 7200rpm PATA drives would consume less power than the 15k drives they replaced, regardless of their capacity. I was playing BF2 today and it got minimized to show me that my 6600GT was low on power. I've never had that happen before and I've pushed it harder than that. This isn't because I need to update drivers, is it? Unfortunately MBM isn't able to see my voltages and I no longer have my fan controller with the voltage display on it. I also have this stupid cold-swap tray for one of the PATA drives that has always caused trouble with the burner on the same IDE channel. Both are set for cable select but it still causes one or the other to not show up on boot and causes the other to occasionally just start accessing for no reason. I'm already on the verge of getting rid of that stupid thing.

PSU troubles. Ah, the memories :
http://4wheelracing.com/media/dh800/burned.jpg

[TaoTeWingChun]

Are you sure it's a power condition and not a temperature issue? Seems like that kind of setup would require super cooling and airflow. Have you monitored CPU temp to verify this? Especially playing BF2, that will tax the chips inside the case like no tomorrow.

Post back with your results, and good luck!

Cheers!

TTWC

[rallynavvie]

Could be a MCH heat issue since one of the DH800s weak points was the passive aluminum sink on the 875. I added a small 40mm fan to the sink just to keep temps down, but the probe I've got in the heatsink usually reaches 50°C regardless of the fan (though idle is still ~42°C). Hell, even the 6300ESB ICH should have some sort of heatsink but it would get in the way of my PCI-X slots.

The CPUs won't get hot, they're Prestonia cores so they run plenty cool (similar to the Northwood's architecture in that they're both 130nm process) and they have big Swiftech heatsinks with an 80mm fan on each.

Since I posted I went back to my SMP forum and found that the first revision DH800s have bad caps feeding the DIMMs. That could account for the issues while playing BF2 since all the Battlefield interations have been huge memory hogs. I checked and found that indeed mine are bulging just a little so I'll have to RMA the board at some point. Or since it's no longer in production I may just get another one from Geeks for $200 since it'll be the last revision of the board.

Guess I'll have to pull the DN800 and use that for a while instead. I just don't have a good PCI-E video card for it since it's just a file server and didn't really plan on getting one.

[ROF]

Bad caps strike again.

Early last year I can't begin to tell you the amount of boards I would go through just to get a decent one with caps that weren't bulging. It was very upsetting and after going through about 6 Asus boards, a couple AsRocks and a few Chaintechs I was about ready to go nutz. That was about the time I read a report about these issues and while it didn't ease my nerves it helped me to realize I wasn't the only builder dealing with this.

[TaoTeWingChun]

I never thought I'd suffer from bad caps issue, but dang I went thru 2 ASUS mobo's myself before settling on a GigaByte, which seemed to fix everything.

Good to see you located the problem! Hope you post back once you get your replacement board up and running!

Cheers!

TTWC