Swisha's Dual Athlon MP server rig!

[swishamane]

Hey guys, I've been working on my server rig in silence for awhile, but I wanted to get a thread going, and see what everyone thinks. My rig is as follows...

-Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard ($150 loaded)(Dual socket A, onboard SCSI Ultra 160, AGP Pro slot, 5 64-bit PCI slots, etc...)
-Dual AMD Athlon MP 2100+s ( 1.73 Ghz / core)
-4 GB ECC Registered DDR 2100 (Might only be able to get this thing to post on 3GB tho, having trouble)

Server case -$20.00 shipped (complete with Pentium Pro server system inside)
ATX to ATX GES adapter -$23

Summary of past month

My problems working on the rig so far have been custom mounting the mobo in a server case made for a oldschool Pentium Pro CPU. I had to somewhat completely modify the case, removing everything from it I dont need, dremeling and fabricating metal in the case for room. I had to transfer the guts of one PSU to the servers stock PSU case so I can keep the stock look and mounting abilities of the stock PSU case. I caught a break tho, the Chiefmax 680 watt PSU guts I need for power fit right into the Sunpower server PSU case like they were made for each other. AND, the Chiefmax used the same size fan, so it was just interchangable. w00t! Another thing was the ATX GES PSU form factor. Its uses the same 24-pin PSU connector, but re-arranges the wires for the special Athlon MP PSU standard. After acquiring an ATX to ATX GES adapter, I'm finally in the booting stages. I got theboard to post on 1GB for test, but its having trouble with all 4. I'll post pics soon! This pic is tease of mobo freshly installed in case...



Additional Comment:

Here's a couple pics of the server test running after initial build. Running XP very smooth, but poor thing has a vga problem. I cant explain the effect, but theres like a scrolling effect in the background, that's barely noticable, but enough to get annoying. I think its a ground problem for some reason, because it has the effect with the onboard video, and any agp card I throw in, no matter what... It also will only run on 3GB of the 4GB it came with. My BIOS flash update was sucessful, but not enough to enable the 4GB. Couldn't find any options for more memory either.


Close up of somewhat clean job, for customb uild, it went suprisingly smooth.


Rig is on in the pic, you can barely see the 15 GB HDD through the case in the front. I still got a lot fo work to do. Trying to get 3 to 5 scsi disks, but aint got no monie$. Anyway, what does anyone think?

[Nagoshi]

I think it looks great. I love dual CPU boards, hence why I am playing with my dual Pentium II right now if I had more money I would go dual AMD or dual Xeon, if I can find one rather cheap.

You sure made a neat job with that setup. Got any "before" pictures?

[AruisDante]

Cool.... but why? You could have gotten a low end dual core AMD that woudl have been (a lot) faster for probably the same price.

Still, cool looking.

[swishamane]

Yeah, here's some before pictures of the Pentium Pro setup still installed. Owner used it in production shop as telephony server I guess. Came exactly how you see in the pics.







And here's the case gutted and dremeled, ready to be put together...

[AruisDante]

Holy googles of PCIX slots batman!!!!

[Nagoshi]

ISA POWER!

How many PCI slots were there? I can see 2-3 at the top?

And man, those were real cards. People whining about their GTX260 being long never saw those old IBM rigs with dual 5.25 bays floppy drives, 50Mb hard drive and 256Kb RAM cards that were 1.5' long

[Dr. McCoy]

XP can only use around 3GB's worth of RAM.
That's why the extra 1GB isn't being used. If you have an option to run dual-channel with it, you could go that route for snappier performance but it will only give you 2GB's instead of 3 you could use.
Still, it's a good looking setup and should be fun to work/play around with once it's completed. I can only wish I had one of those Tyan's to mess with since I have some Socket A stuff of my own. Guys, don't underestimate what a properly tweaked "A" can do.

[swishamane]

Nagoshi- There were 3 pci slots, and 16 ISA slots. This Pentium Pro rig came buffed up with 128MB of RAM, which I can assume was elitus in 93 - 94 when the rig was produced. I actually wa sinterested in ruinning the PentiumPro for awhile after I got it just becuase it was interesting. Even upgrading the thermal paste from the 15 year old dried up stuff to AS5 just for giggles. I never got the board to post past BIOS tho, and it barely recognized ANY HDDs, even a measly 15GB WD I was using.

Well, its not an XP thing keeping me from using all 4 GB, its the mobo only posting with 3GB, but not with 4. I even flashed the BIOS sucessfully from its old 2.09 to 2.14 version, but that didnt help the 4GB thing. This board MUST of used all 4GB of RAM at one point, becuase it came loaded with 4gb of ALL matching registered RAM. This mobo combo was used as a control system for a huge cluster server somwhere in Alabama.

[Dr. McCoy]

You may have a bad stick but still, XP itself won't use but around 3GB's of RAM, whether the board recognizes it or not. It's simply a limitation of the OS, not the hardware itself.
Tried using 4x1GB sticks in my A8N32 and although it showed 4GB's in the POST screen, it was only using about 3.23GB's and the system in XP showed this. If you have a bad stick, then it's a mute point anyway.
You could try swapping the sticks between different slots or better yet, by installing one by itself, also swapping it between different slots with each boot and watch what happens during POST.

[Nagoshi]

He said the issue was because of the motherboard, not because of Windows.

Did you try going into Windows anyway? My P3 normal board has that weird issue that sometimes it won't recognise all my RAM (has 3x256Mb installed, but sometimes BIOS will read one as 128Mb, or not read it at all) but in Winblows it showed up all right...

[swishamane]

Hmm, I dont know. Maybe tomorrow I'll go through and test each RAM dimm in each slot.

[luckybob]

what did you do with the pentium pro stuff? I hope you diddnt toss it, can I have it? please?

also, your probably limited to the 4gb barrier. Its likely the board wont support anything over 4gb and any cards you put into the system reduce the amout of ram you can have due to addressing and thats why you are getting ~3gb. My system is the same way.

[AruisDante]

Wow. You guys fail at reading (no offence). He's saying that if he puts in all four gigs, the board won't post. Not that winwos is only seeing three.

[swishamane]

UPDATE: Fixed the VGA bug I was having. I had the incoming power messed up. For some reason, the server case came with AC power cable with european color codes. I just found which wires are which, and now the VGA is fixed! I measured all the wires befor ei came to a conclusion on how to wire it up before, and it left the machine still running, but there was on screen ground loop issues that are now fixed. I haven't had a chance to do the RAM testing yet, but getting there.

luckybob- hell yes I kept everything. I'll snap some pics for ya to see what all you may want.

BTW, AruisDante is correct. The board will post and run fine with 3GB, but it will not even post with the 4th dimm installed. I plan to run a server os once this thing is up and running completely put back together and all.

[Mr.Scott]

http://linuxlookup.com/review/tyan_t...erboard_review
Board only supports a maximum of 3 gig of ram.
Nice "old school" server. I like it.

[Dr. McCoy]

Originally Posted by AruisDante

Wow. You guys fail at reading (no offence). He's saying that if he puts in all four gigs, the board won't post. Not that winwos is only seeing three.

No offense taken and my fault for not making myself clearer/as clear about it as I should have.

What I was trying to say was not to worry if it doesn't use the extra stick. XP won't use it anyway and Mr. Scott confirmed it as being a hardware limitation and I wasn't sure if this was the case - That's why I suggested trying the sticks in the way I did. If he has a bad one, he'll find it and he'll also know if a bad stick exists among the one's he has.

He should go with what the board will use since that's really that's all he can do with it anyway with the given limitation of the hardware.
Still, I'd love to have one of those around here to mess with.
Maybe he can post some benchies when it's ready just to try it out. Should do extremely well with two CPU's kicking.

[luckybob]

Originally Posted by Dr. McCoy

...Maybe he can post some benchies when it's ready just to try it out. Should do extremely well with two CPU's kicking.

he really should. I want to see how my dual 1.4ghz p3 setup compares. I was completely surprised when I found out that "older software" ran better on my p3 than it did my dual xeon. For example I found a multi-threaded pi calculator that would start with 16 bit operations and compare that speed to 32 and 64 bit trial runs. the results were quite startling!

[Mr.Scott]

I'd like to take that rig and mod a pair of my 2800 XP-M's to MP and give it a go.

[swishamane]

I thought about in the future upgrading to the mp 2800+s, but they're so expensive still, there's no way. I'm running Windows Server 2003 on the rig right now, actually writing this response on it, and its running pretty sweet. What kind of benchies are you guys interested in besides SuperPi? I'll get ya anything you want if the software's free, lol!

luckybob - sent you a PM on the Pentium Pro stuff. You can have if you pay shipping. Probably be $10 in the end or so... I would just send it out to ya for free for help on that P3 months ago, but I'm barely making it now, can't afford the few bucks.

Additional Comment:

Well, it looks like i might be gettign a couple 60gb scsi disks and the cable for free from a friend of a friend who got his hands on some enterprise lvl disks. This should be sweet.

[runlinux]

try the benchie in my sig - i want to see how this scales on all platforms.