Rise of the triad, The 2014 Area 51

[AlienALX]

Today I hooked up everything on the desk to test, running from an external PSU (not the pump obs)

And then started the very slow and tedious task of creating my own AS page.

Still need to learn that, but thankfully it is very similar to AIDA 64 and a emulator I used to work with.

The PA is now fitted after I made a bracket for it.

 

[AlienALX]

"Spot the AC"

It's pretty neato how the whole fan frame lights up, too. That's saved me about £40.

 

[AlienALX]

OK my best attempt at a "daylight" pic. Unfortunately there is pretty much none today.

And a better pic of the AC

Still lots to do (get some lighting for the back plate, make a USB cable etc) but it's getting there

Oh BTW massive temp drops since fitting this new rad. Like 25c+ massive. I am beginning to suspect that the rad I was using before was old and rather crap (I got it on the cheap. New, but yeah a very old model).

Hour of Fallout 4 at 4k with +220 on the core (instead of +200) and more volts and a maxed out temp thing resulted in 41c. What's awesome is as soon as you let off the gas it immediately drops to 25c and then a final idle temp of 21c.

 

[Bartacus]

Great stuff man! Can't wait to see that mirror plate installed!

 

[AlienALX]

Great stuff man! Can't wait to see that mirror plate installed!

I'm currently looking into ways of lighting it up. White, obs, but can't find exactly what I want yet.

 

[AlienALX]

So I finally found something to light up the GPU with so that you can see it in the mirror.

It's LED, not a cathode (so no big lump to hide) and it has a milky shell. So you can't see the LEDs. Perfect really. Will need to be altered and so on but it's mainly the shell I was after.

 

[AlienALX]

Ever evolving.

This was relegated to my secondary rig as the single thick AIO was struggling with a fully loaded 14 core Xeon and I didn't have the space to fit a fat 120 rad due to the way it was built.

So I stuck a 10 core Xeon and Devil 64 Vega in there and it plods along good.

Managed to find a cheap 16 core Xeon which should be about on par with my 14 core (it has a 400mhz clock advantage) overall.

Also bought s H80i V2 so the CPU doesn't get too hot and my buddy is sending me an unknown micron SSD. It's either 400gb or 700gb. We shall see

 

[AlienALX]

So here's what I got.












Lots. I already have an identical ram kit so I'll have 32gb.

I've also got this beast.


Also

 

[AlienALX]

Notes.

Riser ribbon doesn't work so I'm going to get a new one.

I've not routed a single cable yet. Nothing. Not a single cable tie has been used. GPU needs to come out to be repasted with TG.

PCIE NVME Intel 2.5 nut case SSD not here yet. The only drives connected are the RAID 0 ssds.

Onboard sound does work! Including the headphone amp which is surprisingly great.

I killed the USB 3.1 fp socket. Didn't realise it wasn't the 3.0 socket.

CPU has a strange memory controller. Will explain that later.



As I said, it's still very much a loose WIP.

 

[AlienALX]

I think I have the weirdest ES I have ever had.

So when I put it into my Alienware it just continually rebooted. I did not touch anything else. I updated the bios, yet still it did the same. Oh well, must be the board right?

Got home today and to my great joy I found my new yet very dusty X99 Godlike Gaming supported my 10 core Xeon. I flashed the bios to the latest,put in the 16 core, rebooted after clearing CMOS... Same exact issue as the Alienware. Kept continually rebooting. However this time around I was armed with a LED readout, which kept resorting to 19 before reboot. I did some reading, and apparently it's either a Southbridge error or a memory error. This memory was brand new out of the packet.. So I did what was said, try one stick in the last bank and what would you know? it booted. I tried every other combination, yet back to error 19. So I figured sod the rule book I will put one in directly next to the one in there. And it booted. Not only did it boot, but it booted in dual channel mode. So I thought sod it, let's try to break the rules again. Sure enough it booted, in triple channel mode. So I added the fourth DIMM and it booted.... In quad channel mode.

This is how it's set up.

And...

The weirdest part is that if you use the other 4 banks AT ALL it won't boot. Which is supposed to be the first set of banks. So OK, so now I started to think either the board had bent pins or a bad RAM slot. Then I remembered I had all 8 running on the other CPU. What's funny is that this breaks every rule on X99, yet, the CPU itself only supports 4 DIMMs in a config like you'd find on X390 lol. It makes absolutely no sense at all.

Weird eh? it makes no logical sense whatsoever lol.

Now at first I was bummed out, but I soon got over it because now I have 16gb for my server build.

 

[looz]

Dead memory channels in CPU are rare but can happen. Sounds like it. :/

 

[AlienALX]

Dead memory channels in CPU are rare but can happen. Sounds like it. :/

They're not dead. They're just not there dude.

Logically it should not work at all. Not according to the manual. Let alone on single, dual, triple and quad channel.

Intel have hard wired the CPU internally to work like this.

 

[AlienALX]

Here's where I am at.

It's mainly just cable tidying and cable ties really. Everything is set up and working as it should. Drive side.

Top in the red bracket is the U.2 NVME. It's seriously quick. Then I have a Firecuda 2tb with two 120mm SSDs underneath it in RAID 0, then a 2tb hitachi and my faithful 600gb Velociraptor. That will be making way for something larger soon. I also removed the opitcal drive and created more space if I can get this 800gb SSD working my pal gave me.

 

[Bartacus]

Very nice sir, always love to see a rig packed with goodies.

 

[AlienALX]

OK so this rig has now been turned into a work horse. I use it for design, graphics, making decals, printing, plotting etc.

A couple of weeks back it became unstable. No reason at all. Then it would not POST all day so I had no time to take it apart and I left it. Went back after and it worked again, but it's clear something is amiss.

So I have bought that. 1920x with a X399 Carbon. It's from a trusted source, so hopefully it will stop the errors and be a nice upgrade at the same time. Was very cheap, too cheap to pass up tbh.