High-End Workstation!

[Mephistopheles]

I'm currently buying the following heavy-duty workstation for a professor:

SilverStone Tenjim TJ10 (Black with Side Window)
Enermax Galaxy 850W PSU
2x Xeon X5472 3.0Ghz 1600Mhz FSB Quad-Core
16x 1GB Kingston DDR2-800 FB-DIMM
Tyan Tempest i5400PW (S5397) Motherboard
2x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200.10 Hard Drives
2x Thermalright HR-01-X
Dedicated nVidia Video Card (something 8x00-based)
Zalman FB-123 Cooling (with a fan holder!)
7x Enermax Marathon 120mm Fan

Pretty nice, huh?

One of the Enermax fans will be placed directly on top of the 16 FB-DIMMs with the Zalman fan holder. The 92mm fan won't be used, I'm buying the FB-123 for the fan holder alone. I think it was the easiest way to cool the memory. Also, I'll replace the stock case fans for these.

What do you guys think?

Also, here's a very important question: which OS should I use? Will, say, Ubuntu 7.10 work out of the box? I couldn't find any more info in Tyan's website... I'm thinking about checking with them, but their support forums seem to be offline right now. I'll try later, but if anyone has any info regarding OS support and has any input to give, I'd appreciate it!

 

[OlSkoolChopper]

Pant, pant, pant...

I havent droled so much since the last time I watched Pam and Tommy.

Have you cheked out the Tyan Tempest i5400PW to make triple and quadrople sure that its BIOS is happy with the Penryns?

Only other queston I have is are you sure tha the 2 x Thermalright HR-01-X will fit side by side? Those sockets look prety damn close to each other!

Also a tiny bit of advice. You're spending huge bux here, so why not spend another $16 on HDs and go with 2 x 500 7200.11s? I think youd be much hapier on a system like this.

Keep us posted on how its goin, as I may jsut decide in the next ten days til WolfieDay to copy you and do:

2x Xeon X5472 3.0Ghz 1600Mhz FSB Quad-Core (might go down to E5420 to save huge bux)
8 GB of Something DDR2-800 FB-DIMM
Tyan Tempest i5400PW (S5397) Motherboard (Id love to find a cheaper one! boo hoo)
Some Seasonic 750 or so PSU
2x Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Hard Drives
2x Some big muther HSF that will fit
8800GT
Got a case with 250mm fan in and 2 x 120mm out

All I have to do is rob a few ATMs in the next week and a hafl!

Edit: What are the OC possibilties for the Tyan?

 

[wh3resmycar]

all those processing power just to watch porn. a look back at tommy and pam would be sweetest there hehe..

since its a workstation, shouldnt it have the quadros/fireGL?i mean come on, you aint building an F1 car that runs on diesel will you? so as a workstation with gaming GPUS

 

[hewlettpucktard]

I would be very interested in the Penryn certification for the Tyan i5400PW motherboard. Is there another way to derive this info as it does not seem to be listed on the Tyan website?

 

[OlSkoolChopper]

all those processing power just to watch porn. a look back at tommy and pam would be sweetest there hehe..

since its a workstation, shouldnt it have the quadros/fireGL?i mean come on, you aint building an F1 car that runs on diesel will you? so as a workstation with gaming GPUS

Hey, I want my pron in crystal clear HD! Want to see each bulgng vein!

I cant tell you what the prof is gonna use it for, but for me the 8800GT would be more than fine. I dont game.

wow...uall must be made out of money or somthing

Not really. You could confgure a Q9550 system with a really good mobo for about the same money. But this is a octopus!

 

[Mephistopheles]

Well, there is less info than what I'd like on that i5400PW Motherboard, and that's not only the penryn certification. For instance, I'd really like to know what OS I can definitely run on it. I'm under the impression that any good and latest distro should work, but I'm very afraid that that will not be so.

What I do know from Tyan's website is that (a) this motherboard supports the E5462 Xeon @ 2.8Ghz and (b) this motherboard has been validated to operate with these 1GB DDR2-800 FB-DIMM Kingston modules.

I think that supporting the E5462 is a sign that the other Penryns are supported. As for the memory, that should work flawlessly.

I think I will send a forum message/mail directly to Tyan to ask for OS support and CPU support. After all, this is a brand new motherboard. It's probably the easiest way! The manufacturer should know. Question is, will they take their time to answering all my questions?

As for the quadros/FireGL, this will be a programming workstation, and as such the dedicated 8x00 series video card is just so it can run a little graphics. There will be no serious image editing or 3D model manipulation going on here... All we need is the raw firepower. And there's a lot of it in this machine!!!

 

[OlSkoolChopper]

The statment that the mobo supports the E5462 is really good since I cant see how it would be fine for that but not for the other Harpys. I wish you the best of luck in geting an answer from a mobo manufacturers. I think I'm 0 for 15 lifetime so far. I was wondering why you were going with that specific RAM but this confirms that there is a method to your madnes.

If I do end up geting a somewhat stunted clone of your system the first thing I wanna run on it is Pong. Anyone know if you can download a multithreaded Pong to work on Vista Biz?

 

[Mephistopheles]

Oh, and OlSkoolChopper, you asked about the HR-01-X: I don't know about fitting them in a vertical position (wider side oriented like |), but I'm sure they'll fit in a horizontal position (-), which means I'd expect the following setup to be possible:

If a fan was placed on at least one of those (preferably both), there would be a vertical wind tunnel, aided by the air intake that the TJ10 has and the hot air would be exhausted by the 120mm top case fan that is located directly above the two CPU sockets. that would be one good way to cool these CPUs.

 

[Mephistopheles]

Yes, there's a method to my madness.

My madness whispers quietly in my ear... "Kingston Part number KVR800D2D8F5/1G, remember...

Also, I was checking about Quadro video cards and I found some at accessible prices. What would be the advantages of getting a quadro series video card instead of, say, a 8800GT?... Anyone has any ideas on that?...

One more thing for those who think this is a lot of money for one mortal like myself: this is not a computer for me. It's for a professor that I'm helping out here and the money for this will be from a research grant. I wish I had the money for this rig though. I think I'd probably throw firefox and a bunch of other apps directly to memory automatically as soon as the OS goes online, and load times would be instantaneous... too bad RAM drives are as expensive as this... drool

 

[Gravemind123]

Quadro allows hardware acceleration in professional design programs like those from AutoDesk. The difference it makes in AutoCAD is astounding, my school's P4 setups have hardware acceleration and run as smooth, if not more smooth then my Core2Duo setup that lacks it. If you do work with design programs or image rendering you might want to check if a Quadro or FireGL has acceleration supported by the programming; it can really help!

 

[Mephistopheles]

I just sent my OS support question to Tyan. I hope they answer.

Well, I'm fairly certain that RHEL and maybe SuSE Enterprise will be supported. If Ubuntu will work or not is another question though. One thought that crossed my mind is CentOS... which might work. But heck, how should I know???

 

[Raviolissimo]

Pant, pant, pant...

yep. nice workstation.

 

[hewlettpucktard]

The Tyan website at http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=560 states: "The latest Tyan DP server platform supports the 45nm Quad-Core Xeon 5400 series processors and the 5400 chipset (Seaburg). The Tempest i5400PW S5397 features (16) sixteen DDR2 FBDIMM slots, (2) two Gen2 (x16) PCI-E expansion slots that can either support an I/O expansion card or a graphic card; while also supporting front side bus speeds of 1600/1333MHz." It seems that it is 45nm compliant. However, I am not seeing any information with regards to OS compatibility. I don't believe it would be a problem with my application of Vista Ultimate, but it may be with various flavors of Linux, et al.

 

[OlSkoolChopper]

Those HR01Xs look perfectly happy on that board. I'll bet two Tuniq towers wouldnt be anywhere possible on that though! Great idea about the verical wind tunnel. I'll bet that would keep those Harpies at 35C under load! I understand that the Tyan has been certefied to run with that Kingston RAM but would there be any reason to beleive that other similar FBDIMMs would create a problem with that mobo? I wouldnt even consider a Quadro as I dont do any AutoCAD and likely the 3d software Im gonna buy is gonna be more mainstream in nature than specialized workstation type stuff, so it will be perfeclty well suited to working with the 8800GT. Is tehre any way to find out how to OC this sucka? "Ya, I've got an octocore and I've OCd it cuz I NEED MORE POWER!"

 

[Mephistopheles]

Yes... it might be a problem with Linux. Hopefully, I'll get my answer from Tyan support...

As for the CPU cooling, keep in mind that socket 771 doesn't have the same square layout for the mounting holes. Instead, the mounting holes form a rectangle. The thermalright retention module for xeons is this one:

And the square one for the desktop socket 775 is this one:

So you cannot use a socket 775 cooler to cool a xeon... Which is why the HR-01-X is so special: it comes with the xeon retention module...

 

[OlSkoolChopper]

Damn! The stuff you learn on this forum is amazing! I had no idea that the 771s had diferent HSF mounts. OK, so HR01X it is. Thanks "Mephistopheles is not your name, But I know what you're up to just the same." :lol:

OK so now onto OC. Where would I go to see if there is any hardcore dude out there who has OCd this twin socket mobo?

Also... just because Im broke until the court gets Turpit to pay up the judgment from the Wolfdale launch date thread, is there any otehr mobo from Tyan or other that woudl do the trick and doesnt cost $550? 🙁

 

[hewlettpucktard]

I've been reviewing several websites and it seems that Supermicro also has a line of well-regarded dual 771 motherboards based on 5400 Seaburg chipsets. Was there a specific reason you chose the Tyan, OP?

 

[surrealdeal]

2x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200.10 Hard Drives
Hahahahahah!!! What? no IBM Ultra320 15K drives? come on, man! It's for research!

Your professor might like the Solaris operating system, depending on his background, but knowing academic types, he should. The last time I checked it handled huge loads better than linux as well. Just for the love of god, not ubuntu.

 

[Lithotech]

One more thing for those who think this is a lot of money for one mortal like myself: this is not a computer for me. It's for a professor that I'm helping out here and the money for this will be from a research grant.

Very cool opportunity! /drool

Very cool and smart Professor to have someone like you build the system, as opposed to buying a prebuilt or even barebones.

I get the sense that he might have built it himself if it were not a DP 16GB system. 😀

Silverstone case, Thermalright coolers, packed with good fans, it's been a few years coming but we can finally say we have Dual Quads in our computers instead of in our cars! :lol:

Please do a work log, pics!!!!

As for overclocking, I have no idea what options are in the bios or how well they work. I can say, though, that these socket 771 DP systems are designed for mission critical workloads, stability is the name of the game. You take a hit in ram performance with ECC ram (if I am not mistaken), for the sake of perfect error free operation. Overclocking the system is defeating that purpose. With these systems, if you want more speed you just buy faster cpus. The cpus are a small cost compared to packing a Chenbro SR110 with 15x large SCSI/SAS hard drives at $600+ a pop. I think we can thank AMD for that, many Xeon parts are at very nice prices these days.

Kingston Value Ram no less! At least even ECC ram prices have come down. Wasn't long ago and 16gig would cost a fortune for ECC.

And Dual Quads in a computer will always cost much, much less, than Dual Quads in a car... depending on the year, make and model you have them in, you could build a cluster of servers lol.


.

 

[Lithotech]

Operating system will largely depend on exactly what he intends to run on it. Since you are considering Ubuntu, it's safe to say his apps are of linux flavor. What I know about linux I could write on the back of a drivers license. I have trouble enough learning more and more about Windows (and now Vista). For an MS operating system it'll have to be 64bit XP/Vista or Server, to use all that ram.

It'd be great fun indeed, to dual boot it with Mac OSX. Using Parallels to run simutaneously, or Bootcamp as dual boot, what you are putting together can potentially crush the latest Mac Pro.

There simply must be some smaller message forums around, that has decent traffic and specialising in DP workstations and servers. I can imagine this motherboard would have it's own forum, as it is one of the few that will take the latest intel Xeons.

I found this thread because I also have been commisioned to assemble a server of sorts. At this point I am researching the latest tech in this field, and acting as consultant on the matter with a learning institute that I teach part time at. Our requirements are not yet locked down, and it's possible we can get away with even a single core and single processor system -- I've yet to meet with the rep of the company that is gifting us the software and setup. I've always taught that to understand the present one need only study the past, so looking at older tech in this area is just fine and actually been quite enlightening in respect to the changes that this tech has gone through fairly recently. Oh yeah, it's all fun! Oh yeah, one day... our family home server will be a DP board with a crapload of ram and HDs in a sweet case tucked in the corner of my home made rack, LOL.

So any links anyone can post directing us to any forums specialising in this area will be greatly appreciated!

.

 

[Mephistopheles]

hewlettpucktard: Actually, the reason for going with Tyan is that it's more widely available here in Brazil. The equivalent motherboard from supermicro would be the X7DWN, and now that I've checked, supermicro is more forthcoming with information about OS support: Fedora 6, 7 and 8 are all supported, which is a big plus. Unfortunately, this is an "Enhanced Extended ATX" motherboard... wonder what that means?... Which one is better: Supermicro or Tyan? Now you got me thinking...

surrealdeal: "It's for research" doesn't equal "all we can get". This is money coming directly from taxes and we spend it with caution. This professor doesn't need heavy HD I/O, but he will make good use of 8 cores @ 3.0Ghz, being that he has already coded quite a few highly parallel number crunchers for physics calculations. For our uses, disk I/O is simply not an issue, and besides, with 16GB of RAM you can juggle huge amounts of data in actual physical memory.

"We are only interested in what we actually need" - shouldn't that be the motto for all computing?... I've seen a few professors saying "I need the (f*cking) best there is in every category! Maximum memory, SCSI hard drives, and whatnot!" Hearing this is very frustrating...

As for solaris, I don't really know about it. I've used some version of solaris for a few minutes back in the 90s (it's funny when you say it like that) but haven't had any contact with it since... I'll look it up.

Lithotech: thanks for sharing my enthusiasm about this! I was really, really considering to do a work log for this. Too bad it'll probably take some 30+ days for all the components to get here... This will be fun!!! A lot of fun!!!

Also, overclocking is completely out of the picture. This is a production environment and people don't like the idea of running out of spec. And you have nailed the reasons for not OCing perfectly: it defeats the purpose of these systems. If you go dual socket, you'll be, in all likelihood, spending much more for memory than for the actual CPUs, so why not go with the latest über-CPU? You've said it all.

You said you're acting as a consultant on the matter? Sounds as if you and I are in a very similar position!

 

[rockyjohn]

This is money coming directly from taxes and we spend it with caution.

Wouldn't you know - government money.

What kind of research does he do and what specifically is he crunching numbers on ? Just curious.

 

[Mephistopheles]

Hmmm now you got me.

The professor and I are both physicists, but his research doesn't have a lot to do with what I do. What I do know is that one of his students works with DMFT (Dynamical Mean Field theory) and variations thereof. He has other students that have also had success in paralleizing their programs.

For a list of this professor's recent publications, check out this link.

 

[OlSkoolChopper]

Ya, ive been in a few Mean Fields, usualy while being chased by big ugly muthas with chains and switchblades.

My prmary worry is the $$$ of the system, so Im gonna start checking out the web for other 5400 chipset dual socket 771 mobos. Maybe I can find somethng that will still work with the Harpys and save me a couple of hunderd bux! Any asistance would be apreciated!

 

[Mephistopheles]

Supermicro has a few options, but unfortunately there are only very few motherboards supporting the 1600Mhz FSB...

AFAIK, only supermicro's X7DWN and Tyan's i5400PW support these processors...

Damn you apple for monopolizing these high-FSB CPUs!!