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My Dual Opteron Build thread

In that case I'll absolutely take it. It'll end up in a nearly identical tower haha, but I'll put it to good use.
 
I passed up one of those HP dual Xeon workstation boards (XW6200) for the reason that the board is outsized and non-standard, as is the PSU.
I don't regret it.
 
The XW I had took a standard ATX PSU without issue. I have a single socket LGA2011 HP workstation board somewhere I have not experimented with(frankly I have enough single socket machines).
 
The dual CPU Xeon workstations took at utterly non-standard PSU, both in size and interface. While it takes what appears to be a standard ATX power connector, the pinout is anything but standard. I had to suss the thing out, as there's very little documentation. I've written about it here. Still have the PSU, but haven't figured out how to put it into a box, much less adapt the pinout. (e.g. "Power on" isn't activated by grounding a pin, but by applying +3.3V to one). Mine is the Compaq version.
 
I had a dell board like that. Gave up on it pretty quick.

My Opteron might not be as standard as I think. Its grown very finicky about posting. I've never actually gotten it to power by the power button but rather it turns itself on when power is applied. Not really a problem except often it refuses to do even that. The fans spin up. The fans spin down.

I have however gotten it all the way into Windows repeatedly.
 
So it seems I've had the front panel wired wrong this whole time. The power button works now. New graphics cards also arrived today, though I still haven't got an SLI bridge for them. This rig will be a lot more fun once I solve the noise problem.
 
Yeah those things were fun. Socket 604 I think? I kinda miss that machine. I had dual 3.2ghz chips in there, but only 3gb of RAM because of 32 bit limitations.


Meanwhile, in my opteron build, the brackets arrived literally AN HOUR after I dragged my bin of CPU coolers to the back of the garage. That's my luck for you.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Yeah those things were fun. Socket 604 I think? I kinda miss that machine. I had dual 3.2ghz chips in there, but only 3gb of RAM because of 32 bit limitations.
Click to expand...

Xeons supported PAE, and up to 64 GB of RAM on 32 bit, you just had to pay Microsoft's extortion to use it with one of their server versions of Windows. Or use Linux.

I had an X5DPL-iGM with 12 GB of RAM and dual 3.2 GHz 604 Xeons. Linux utilized all 12 GB of RAM. Windows required Windows 2003 Datacenter to see all of it.
 
Wish I'd known that back then. I graduated to Server 2004 Datacenter Edition but the x64 version for my dual 771 build. Of course the socket 604 died sometime betwixt the two so it was kind of moot. Still, most XP games will run on server 2k3. It'd be interesting to try 32 bit datacenter edition on my dual opteron with 32gb of RAM and watch a game poo itself over that much memory.
 
Applications wouldn't know the difference unless they were large address aware.

PAE allows up to 64 GB of memory, but it has a limitation that no single process can use more than 4 GB at a time, but most 32 bit programs have a 2 or 3 GB memory limit due to not being large address aware. There is a patcher that can patch executables to make them LAA, but YMMV if it will work or not. It does benefit some late 32 bit games like Supreme Commander that have crashing issues due to running out of addressable memory, the game can run longer and with larger battles and not crash.
 
I wonder if that would help TA:Kingdoms? Large numbers of units on that game quickly lose all ability to path.
 
You can try and see what happens.

www.techpowerup.com

Large Address Aware

This is an application that assists in making applications large address aware. When a 32-bit application is large address aware, it can access up to 4 GiB on x64 operating systems and all memory that isn't used by the operating system and other applications on x86. 64-bit versions of Windows...
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com
 
So the Opteron's gotten a second run at life. I had shelved the project because the coolers I bought were too frickin loud. I would periodically browse the bay of E for solutions. The other day, I stumbled upon the AIO water cooler from an HP xw9400 on offer for the princely sum of about $32. Less than I'd pay for a singl decently-quiet air cooler. Since this board came out of a xw9400, the bargain was struck:

1734306329842.png

Turned out to be a BIG sucker. For that, I would need a signficantly larger case. Fortunately, the universe provided that as well. Just a day later I won an auction for a Thermaltake Armor series, the kind that's long enough for EATX and then some, with a gob smacking 11x5.25 drive bays and a bonus 3x3.5 internal.

1734306535316.png

Board fit into the case beautifully. I can take advantage of some things the old case could not. Since I have access to more than 4 drive bays now, I'm able to take advantage of the floppy header on there. I went ahead and attached an IDE cable although I haven't yet got a drive to attach(if I can find a good price on a Zip100 with a black faceplate maybe).

No here's where we hit a snag:

1734306846540.png


That AIO liquid cooler takes up so much room I had to remove the case side fan.

Ok, maybe not such a problem:

1734306934342.png

I like how silly this thing looks. Its still pretty loud. Maybe there's fan control software, I don't know.

But I've now hit an actual, serious snag. I bought a pair of Quadro K4200 graphics cards to use in SLI. Annnnnd just discovered that, manufactured in 2014, these things haven't got drivers for Windows XPx64. So its back to the proverbial drawing board for video. I might run the thing on windows 7 for a while just to play. the K4200s will be shelved for a different project.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
There's a reason for that. Early 2000 antec cases were literally re-badged Cheiftec dragons. That was the big "life hack" among my high school friends and I. Antecs were the must-have hotness but cost a lot. Meanwhile if you played your cards right you could easily pick up a Chieftec Dragon for about $40. Exact same case. Exact same colors. Exact same features. I've been using my two original Dragons for 22 years now; tough to find another $40 case with those kinds of legs.

The cases I really regret throwing out are these gigantic ugly 4U rack-mount machines. The entire front of the machine was 9x5.25" vertical drive bays. Inside had room for an EATX motherboard and still about 4 inches between the end of the board and the back of even a very deep CD drive. I had adapters that let me turn some of the bays horizontal. The amount of space in these cases was INSANE. And I had 3 of them!

But I didn't own a single 4 post rack. So I finally convinced myself to toss them.

I regret it every single day. I have NEVER seen another cases with that much room inside.
Click to expand...
I happen to have 2 4u rack mount cases, that had EATX dual pentium pro motherboards originally (PR 440FX). If you are interested let me know! 👍
 
I am extremely interested but I doubt your close enough to make picking them up economical. Unless by some miracle you happen to be attending VCFSoCal :p
 
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