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Thanks for the link Meph. The X7DWA-N seems only to be about $25 more expensve than the X7DWN+ and has twice the RAM sockets. Still, we're pushin $600. However it would seem to me that if I was going on my own system with 1333 FSB, I should be able to pick upa chaeper mobo. Thats too much for my budget unfortenately. 🙁
 


Thanks for the link. I looked at the list ..... and still have no idea what he does. I didn't download any of his articles, figure if I can't understand the titles it won't help me much. I'll wait for the illustrated version to come out.
 


Dude, Im surprisd you didnt understand that. Its all about the dynamics between mean fields and kind fields. Dang. Easy stuff... :bounce:
 
Wow, I'm impressed! Tyan support has already given me an answer!!

For anyone interested - and, considering the firepower that this board delivers, there might be quite a few people interested - this is what they told me:

Currently, we do not have an official list of operating systems that are supported on this board since it′s so new. However, judging from past experience, it will probably support Windows XP 32/64-bit, Server 2003 32/64-bit, Vista 32/64-bit, as well as the latest versions of RHEL and SuSE. We typically do not do testing with Ubuntu, however, from what I′ve seen on past boards, it usually works without issues.
Click to expand...
 
Very nice machine, I want the same for me 😛

The only I can say is that the case is horrible. Get a Thermaltake Armor Xtreme edition, is ALOT nicer has 2 holes for cooling the xeons.

I love this case.
 
Very nice machine, I want the same for me 😛

The only I can say is that the case is horrible. Get a Thermaltake Armor Xtreme edition, is ALOT nicer has 2 holes for cooling the xeons.

I love this case.
 
Well, about the case... The main advantage is that it is readily available, and I've read several reviews. I think it's OK for this purpose. Do you mean horrible in appearance or functionality?...

I have some experience with Thermaltake armor cases (I own one myself!), and from what I've seen, they are good, but not as exceptional as they seem initially.

Silverstone, on the other hand, doesn't cut corners: they would have made the hinges for the two "front doors" on the Armor out of aluminum, not out of plastic. Being as it is, my thermaltake armor's doors sometimes vibrate and create an irritating and unnecessary noise. Also, the two doors don't line up so well when closed: I think one of them was bent during shipping.

Plus, the Thermaltake Armor Xtreme Edition isn't available anywhere in Brazil. If you want to take a look at what's available in the store I'm building, follow this link. This is a list of manufacturers; clicking any one of them will bring up a list of available cases.

Edit: I've just checked and the Armor Xtreme Edition's holes for CPU cooling don't match the position for the Xeon CPUs as seen in Tyan's i5400PW... If I were to buy a TT Armor for this, I think I'd choose the simpler window version, without holes. Looks much prettier, as those two holes make much more sense when they match the motherboard layout anyway... At least that's what I think...
 
Thanks for refering the Tyan support. Good to know that its ok with Vista 64. My sugestion is get an XClio or X-Jupiter with a big mutha of a fan on the side over the mobo. You'll need it. I know I woudl, and Im still considering not going for the E84 and sheling out the bucks for a dual socket 771...
 
Hmmm should I get higher-capacity fans or will these be enough?

After all, the motherboard will have 2x130W for CPUs and 16x10W for FB-DIMMs... this adds up to 260+160=420W of power! That's quite a lot...

I could go with akasa Amber Series 120mm fans (~1400rpm, I think), but they're kinda ugly.

A good option, I think, would be the SilverStone FM123 120mm fans:

6.jpg


They're particularly interesting because each of them comes with a PCI-cover with room for other 2 fans of the same series:

3.jpg


This is very clever. But it's also more than twice as expensive as the Enermax Marathons... What do you guys think?
 
I've never used a fan controler on anything but HI so to me their a waste of time and money. Also keep in mind that you'll likely to hit 420W only if your totaly frying the system.
 
Agreed! The PCI fan controller will sit in the back of the case, completely unused and forgotten about.

The Tyan mobo has SIX 4-pin fan headers that can take 4-pin PWM fans like the Scythe Kama 120MM PWM Fan 300-1200RPM 0-24.9DBA 12-52CFM. You can also jack in 3-pin fans, but the 4-pin PWM fans will spin much slower if set that way, and I am not sure that the board can control regular 3-pin fan speeds. At least, I have run into that many times with 3-pin fans on the CPU fan headers on mainstream boards, the fan speeds won't adjust.

The part number is DFS122512L-PWM. Hopefully you can get these where you are, they are really good fans:

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=26269&vpn=DFS122512L-PWM&manufacture=Scythe

This way you can set the temp tolerances, and the board will adjust the fans automatically.

Using apps like Everest Ultimate or Speedfan to monitor temps and fan speeds, I then use a very slick application called WebTemp to graph this data over time. WebTemp is very cheap to register a license. It is fairly easy to set up, and will email you these charts once a day, and upload them to an FTP site hourly.

Over-fanning a case is a common mistake. It can cause turbulence so bad that you get pockets of hot stagnant air that refuses to exhaust out. I am all for filling all the fan slots, so to avoid stagnant air you simply have to experiment with fan speeds untill you get a nice flow in and out of the case.

Using WebTemp is invaluable for this. You make a change to the tolerances and let the system run for 10-20 minutes -- either load or idle, load is better. Then look at the WebTemp charts and note the maximum temps. Make another change, and let it run a bit and check WebTemp again, you will instantly see if temps went up or down. Rinse and repeat until you are satisfied you have an optimum setting.

This is great for tuning for silence too! Many times you will find that a 2000rpm fan will achieve the same temps at 1200rpm, and not make any noise doing it.

They have a free trial version, which I used for all of one day before returning to register lol!

http://www.webtemp.org/

Here's a chart from my main work system, 8 hour duration:

3800stats.png


.
 
Lithotech: thanks for your input! Unfortunately, I'm having dificulties tracking down any 120mm PWM fan! This really sucks. So I think I'll stick with the Enermax Marathons, which, at 1000rpm, probably won't over-fan the system. I'm still considering putting a more powerful intake fan for the midsection. After all, there'll be three fans sucking air out, and only one for the intake: this one could pack a little more punch...

I've been given the alternative of switching to a much cheaper case, the Chieftec BA-01-BBB, which looks like this:

chieftec_ba01bbb_detalhe2.gif


Impressively enough, this costs 30% of the price of the TJ10. But it means a reduction of less than 5% of the system cost and I think it's not worth it: the Tenjim has a top air exhaust that will create my "vertical wind tunnel effect" much better than this chieftec alternative. The Tenjim is equipped with 120mm fans only, and the Chieftec has tons of 92mm ones. And for fans, bigger means better!

Plus, the build quality simply can't be compared. And the Chieftec is just plain ugly! With a huuuuge, pointless space in the upper part of the case (it's 67,5cm tall!)... I mean, just compare the picture above for the chieftec and the Silverstone TJ10:

SSTTJ10BW_3.jpg


What do you guys think?... I'm thinking: the system is already maxed out, let's not put it inside an ugly tower like the Chieftec... agreed?...
 
Agreed.

The TJ10 is a large case itself, it looks dwarfed by the Chieftech lol!

The Chieftech is all drive space, which you don't need. No removable mobo tray. 90mm fans can be hard to find. I don't think there is any question... stick with the Silverstone!

As for PWM fans, don't sweat it. If the mobo can't control 3pin fans, just run them at full speed. If you find you need to adjust them, there are plenty of options to do that later, such as one of Silverstone's 3.5" drive bay fan controllers, or Zalman's 5.25" fan controller.

It's always best to have more exhaust than intake, creates a low pressure situation in the case which will reduce or eliminate stagnant air.

Silverstone's fans are pretty good too. I'd use what they give you with the case, and only replace the rear exhaust with a faster fan of good quality, then fill up any empty slots with the 1000rpm fans you planned. That'll leave you with a spare which is always handy.

Silverstone cuts out the hole for fans instead of leaving a grated honeycomb pattern as a guard. It makes a hell of a difference, no restriction for air except the chrome finger guard. In a TJ04 I just put together, I put an Antec Tri-Cool LED in that slot and the amount of air being pushed out of the case is amazing! It also added a bit of light to the case, which it really needed because it has a window. The Antec fans are cheap for an 80CFM fan, come with a 3 position switch, and at low or medium speed they are very quiet. At high speed they make a humm-whoosh sound. I leave them on medium most of the time, and use low speed for silence, high speed for overclocking. At high speed it pushes so much air out of the case that you can barely feel any air out of the PSU. In fact, on another system that I cut the grating out myself, it seems the PSU is sucking air in! That system's PSU has a slow 120mm fan, but still, to have the exhaust so powerful as to make the PSU fan work backwards... needless to say, the fan stays on low or medium in that system.

Fans are easily added or changed later, so it's not something that has to be completely decided upon or finalized before assembling the system. You can confidently assemble the whole system with just the fans that come with the case, and after getting it up and running and have all the monitoring software in place before starting to optimize the airflow with extra fans or swapping fans.

.

 
Get adequate cooling...that's my suggestion

I work on an octocore machine at work (2x Xeon 2.66ghz quads)

Now I know the Xeons can get hotter than Intel's Core 2 Quads etc...but I wonder when they start to throttle their speed down (if they do)

I ran Prime95 @ work 4 sh*ts an giggles...all 8 cores were above 80c in under 5 minutes....

And yes running a render in XSI or Maya will pretty much load up your cpu 100% so that is an issue for some.

I don't have any stability issues though...FYI the cores idle at around 50-55c...crazy.
 
Thanks for your input, lithotech. You are right! Fans are not a critical decision for this build right now. We can always change that later if need be.

Also, supremelaw: I was wondering wether or not to mount that Enermax Galaxy with the 135mm fan sucking air from the inside of the case or from the bottom. There is the possibility that this computer will stay on the floor, which wouldn't be good... But that's a decision I can comfortably make later.

Actually, Tyan does recommend a few cases! They list three cases, and they're all pretty wind-tunnel oriented, although they lack the high number of case fans of state-of-the-art cases from, say, Silverstone. Take a look at the smallest of them, it's in this link. The other ones are: case ONE and case TWO. They're both much bigger than the image shown here, and their build quality isn't quite as tidy as Silverstone's. They're "down-to-business" cases. I have the feeling that the TJ10 can do pretty much anything these chenbros can, and still be better-cooled and much more stylish! TJ10 all the way! :sol:

Edit: supremelaw beat me to these pictures, sorry. But my conclusion still stands: these chenbros aren't that great...
 
plasticsashimi: These Xeons will generate 130W of heat, but I think I'm safe with those two thermalright supercoolers. If cooling is inadequate, I can always get more powerful fans: if these supercoolers and good airflow don't get this below 60C in 800% CPU usage, then I don't what will.
 
Well, actually, I had seen the ASUS motherboard based on the previous chipset (support only for 1333Mhz and 53xx xeons). What I particularly like is the easy memory cooling ability. To offset that, I used that Zalman FB123:

fb123_f_p.jpg


This, with a 120mm fan (92mm shown), blowing air directly over the FB-DIMMs, should also provide sufficient cooling... I think. And it's always better to use one 120mm instead of two 80mms... According to my math, the 16 slots on the Tyan should cover a length of roughly 14 or 15cm. It's sad that I couldn't find a 14cm fan. Would have been cool... 🙁

Although I must say that buying the ASUS board would be easier. However, it has just been launched, and it should take a while until it's available. Also, Tyan is a company of good reputation, AFAIK.
 
Any idea how much this mobos gonna cost? I really need a twin socket 771 45nm board that I can pick up in the $300s... all the ones being discussed here are pushing $600 at the discount etailers! I hate bein poor! BWAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
 
for a workstation card the new fireGL series of cards have proven to be more powerful than the 8800 based workstation cards. thats all i have to say, prolly been said, but im too lazy to read right now...nap time
 
We've found 3 cases with room for two PSUs:
Lian-Li, Antec and Cooler Master.

Also, we now prefer to situate a PSU
at the case's bottom rear, e.g. CM 690,
with an intake grill in the case's bottom panel:

cold air falls, so this arrangement feeds
the coolest air into the PSU, which exhausts
heated air straight out the rear panel.


Does Tyan recommend any particular cases
for that motherboard e.g. compatibility lists and such?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I sort of noticed on Tyan's site that they tend to recommend Chenbro cases. I think there was a model or two of Chenbro's that I liked, and fell in the $350 range. For $350, you get a fairly plain case but with the ability to add a lot of nice optional parts which run around $100 a pop. You can quickly and easily run up a $600-800 bill. Most of these extras are to do with hotswap storage etc, not something everyone needs.

At $350 to start, you can buy a HELL of a lot of case when looking at mainstream cases. The E-ATX mobo requirement narrows down the search a lot. My preference in this range with E-ATX is that it have a removable mobo tray. The Silverston TJ10 has one, the Cooler Master Stacker 830 does, some of Thermaltakes higher end aluminum like the Shark, Lian-Li, yadda.

/edit: Lian-Li's build quality is second to none. Haven't seen anything near it since the old Cooler Master WaveMasters. There was a new item in stock a few weeks back, they were saying was even better than Lian-Li, I'll report back if I remember the name of it. The Chenbro's, plain as they are, look like they's be plenty fun to work with and appearance is quite nice to my eyes. One day, I think I'd very much like to have an SR-109 (106, 107, or 108 even), they all take a regular size PSU, the SR-110 takes the slim redundant server unit that must cost a small fortune. :lol: Yep, the SR-109 and a nice PC P&P 750Quad PSU... /sigh

The PSU on the bottom of the case is a two edged sword.

1) It makes it difficult to achieve clean cable management, and downright impossible unless you have a high quality PSU with proper long cables. Since you will need, at the least, a PSU with an EPS 8-pin connector, that pretty much eliminated any low or average quality PSU's, you should be safe as far as line length. It's still near impossible to have perfect cable management, but optimal is easy and will do (if you define that as no obstructions and nothing visible unless there is no other choice).

2) For dual nForce 8800GTX vid cards in SLI, a bottom mounted PSU is a benefit, because these cards take two PCI-e 6-pin cables each, that's 4 fairly heavy lines you do not have to run from the top of the case down to the bottom. In fact, the only problem is what to do with all the extra cable.

3) Sure, heat rises. The PSU is also one of the hotter devices in a case, so it'll be radiating heat up past the vid card(s), NorthBridge, RAM and CPU on it's way out the top increasing all your temps across the board. That is why Antec's P180 has isolated the PSU in it's own chamber at the bottom of the case, and some Lian-Li's do the same.

4) The PSU doesn't need the coolest air, they have their own (hefty in good ones) heatsinks inside, and the capacitors are the largest (and with the highest ratings) in your system.

5) The PSU can very nicely act as system exhaust. The trend of 120mm fans in many good units, and the fact that it is often situated directly about the CPU socket, makes it perfectly suited for this. At the very least, allowing you to slow down the other exhaust without sacrificing temperature.

Of these examples, number 1 and 3 is probably the most concern for me. I have my main work system in a P180, got one when they first came out. I call it The Fridge. I still love it, regardless of the time an effort it took to get the cables clean enough to not drive me crazy. And it is not affected by the PSU heat rising, the chambers work great.

But I doubt I will even buy another bottom PSU case for myself. I may go through a couple or few Cooler Master 690's for other people's builds as it is a very good case for the cost. But for myself, not again. This is exactly why I occasionally buy new innovative products, not just so that I have one but to learn from experience these issues you encounter from use. To me, it is still very cheap education, and I've never had trouble selling parts that I decide I don't want. I price them cheaper than I paid, the difference being an expense I catagorise as educational. The things I learn you can't go to school for, and the things I go to school for cost a lot more per course than computer parts.

I much prefer a top mounted PSU. All the mobos are designed for it. When I find a mobo with the main power connectors at the bootom of the board, I'll then consider a case with a bottom mounted PSU.

Here is a link to a bit of a work log I did on my P180, experimentation with fans!

http://www.esnips.com/web/P180DuctReplacementMod/

.
 


That with stock Intel coolers? If so, it'd sound about right. The Thermalrights should knock a good 10 degrees off idle, and more off load. They are not supposed to throttle till around 100C, I still don't like to see them above 70C when load testing an overclock. Yikes! If they are stock coolers, no suprise I guess.


 
There are a few questions you need to ask yourself before committing to anything:


What exactly are you building the workstation for?

Bespoke coding or commerical? Are there workbenches out there of a similar ilk? (Because in some situations, a 2 GHz Barcelona chip will spank an X5365)

What kinda memory throughout will it need? With 2 sockets, the Intel FSB can clog up quickly.



Also, the newer ATI FireGL graphics cards have the same performance at half the price as the NVidia quadros.



I have scientific linux on my machine, its a free distro that is Red Hat enterprise compatible - which is what the majority of scientific commercial linux codes will be (or should I say will require).
 
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