Four years later...a new PC

[rallynavvie]

More gremlins
VMware Workstation wouldn't run on this machine which is very disappointing. I get a BSOD reboot loop with it installed. This system board is made to run VMs and is one of the reasons I got it. I was going to run XP Pro, Win2k, and OSX in VM. I used to run Win2k on my last workstation in VM.
The other gremlin was in the BIOS. I totally missed enabling AHCI in the BIOS when I first installed Vista. Unfortunately enabling AHCI will cause issues on an already-installed OS so I had to do some trickery in order to get it running right. Patience was key during that process as the OS seems to lock up for a few minutes at a time and you just have to wait it out. Got the Intel AHCI driver installed and now I can see all my HDDs and utilize all the extended features of SATA like NCQ.

The good:
Case is ultra-quiet to the point where I keep thinking it switched itself off every morning. Only time it gets loud are when the PWM fans come on full after about 30 minutes of 100% utilization across all 8 cores. It is a little annoying that one might spin up for a quick second occasionally. Maybe a new BIOS has better PWM control logic. I'm a little disappointed in these chips for single-threaded applications but the massive cache on them combined with the snoop filter makes this thing leaps more powerful than its single-quad cousins. The memory isn't as much an issue as I thought it would be but it does run really hot. I'm glad there is an empty DIMM slot between each but if I ever populate those I may have to get a fan on them. The 9800GTX BE was a good choice now that nVidia is releasing the PhysX support for it. The 9800GTX+ may be a better bet. I may get one if the price is right and demote this one to secondary display support to help with VMs if I ever get it running. Vista hasn't been too bad to me but I am considering the switch to Vista64 once I hear more reliability with workstation applications.

[rallynavvie]

So I got a little greedy and ordered more parts

I am having way more fun than a person should with VMs, but I'm finally hitting the wall with the 4GB memory limit on 32-bit Windows. I'm trying to run some powerful VMs which like having plenty of memory and I can really only allocate about 1GB each when taking host memory into consideration. So I went to NewEgg and picked up 16GB to replace my four little sticks of FB-DIMM. I also ordered a copy of Vista Ultimate 64. I did some research with other Vista 64 users and they now have great success with the applications I'm running. I also did the legwork and found equivalent or newer drivers for all of my hardware in 64-bit. I'm interested to see how some of the native 64-bit apps perform. Adobe is moving to the newer of the DH800s and that will be my DCC workstation once again.

And since I'm going to the trouble of ordering stuff from the Egg and taking my system down I ordered two copper HSFs with similar PWM fans to the stock Intel units. These have heatpipes and should keep system temps down enough with the case airflow that the PWM fans will rarely come on.

This week I loaded Vista 64 onto a VM just to do some application testing. 64-bit VMs can run on a 32-bit host OS as long as it's running on 64-bit capable hardware. Neat!

[redwudz]

Sounds very good. I've stayed away from 64bit OS's after problems with XP64 when it first came out. It seemed really disappointing at the time that manufacturers didn't seem to give much support to 64bit programs. Hopefully that has changed. That also kept me away from Vista64. But I need another OS for a new computer, so something to consider.

I do like PWM fans and have ordered a couple of PWM case fans for my HTPC. They seem to have very good control of fan speeds.

I've only tried a few VMs, but that sounds interesting. 16GB with Vista64 also sounds interesting. What RAM, speed and brand are you using?

[rallynavvie]

There aren't many choices with FB-DIMM. They all run terribly hot and slightly slower than unbuffered memory. The difference being that I get zero memory errors which means less issues with bad sectors on HDDs from bad I/O so overall the trade-off is acceptable. I'm using 2GB Corsair sticks of PC2-5300. PC2-6400 doesn't do me any good since my board doesn't support 1600 MHz FSB Harpertowns and you can't really overclock it all. Not that I'd want to with this system anyway.

About to take the system down now, just doing some backups.

[MidnightMike]

Good Grief player! excuse my language but how in the hell do you sleep at night with 2 Xeon cpu's going even with2 Intel HSF 's?
I may have a e1200 celeron dual core cpu in my pc with the intel heatsink but it barely makes noise at night when I have it do something demanding, and if it does make noise, I would just go into bios and tell the blasted mobo to use low power consumption for the system and the cpu fan and that will shut it up real quick......

Not being ugly towards you, but there is a fine line where a PC needs to remain quite during a mans rest at night....
Only time I don't use that option is when my room tempature doesn't go above 82 degrees celcius.

[rallynavvie]

Actually the PWM fans on the stock Intel HSFs were pretty quiet. In fact with the case set up the way it is now this is by far the quietest computer I've ever owned. It doesn't sit near the bedroom so noise was never really an issue when sleeping, but since it does act as my HTPC it would affect my viewing. And I hope you meant 82°F and not °C there because the latter would be pretty warm to live in

I got it up and running late yesterday after being down for about 8 hours. As usual I had more gremlins to chase away. It took forever for Vista to install and it was probably because of the missing AHCI driver again. I flashed the BIOS to the latest while it was down (I hope never to attach a floppy to this machine ever again). I thought I would have to take the board off the plate to get these new HSFs on but they went in just fine on the stock backplate. On the left is the stock Intel and the right is the Dynatron with the copper base and heatpipes:


Once I got Vista sorted with 64-bit drivers I checked and found I only had 4GB of memory showing in Windows but all 16GB in CPU-Z. Having two nearly-identical copies of Vista Ultimate sitting around I thought maybe I installed the wrong one and put 32-bit back on
I pulled the board and reseated memory and still nothing. Reset BIOS to default and made a few tweaks and suddenly the rest were showing. Unfortunately after the first stress test I quickly realized I need to get a fan on those FB-DIMMs. Temps soared into the 80°C range on the memory while the CPUs were happy at 70°C. Before I had every other slot open and there was enough room, but with these crammed in like they are they don't get enough airflow:


So I took half of them out and will run 8GB for now and keep the other four sticks around until I do figure out how to get that 120mm fan on there. The 1GB sticks are for sale if anyone needs 4GB of FB-DIMM