Xeon workstation funkiness

I just put together a dual-Xeon workstation for the express purpose of running a specialized 64-bit PCI card. I've never put together a Xeon system before, but they seem to be very odd. Here is what's in it:

2 Xeon mPGA604 2.80GHz Irwindale 2M processors, active HSF.
Supermicro X6DVL-EG2 motherboard (E7530 chipset)
2x 1GB Transcend DDR2-400 ECC registered RAM
WD800JB SATA-150 HDD
Samsung DVD burner
Athena Power 520W EPS12V PSU
A floppy drive*
Raidmax ATX case (the $25 special)
3 80mm case fans

1. I was floored when I opened the processor boxes. The heatsinks are $EXPLETIVE huge!! They weigh about 2.5 pounds each and are solid copper. The processor and HS/HSF are just in a blister-pack and I wonder if anybody has broken one of the bloody chips when they tried to get it out of the blister pack. I kind of like AMD's approach to put the CPU in a little container on a foam pad. But their green disintegrating box kinds of stinks.

2. The heatsinks are so heavy that they require being screwed *through* the motherboard into a steel backing plate that bolts directly to the case. This makes you mount the heatsinks while the board is in the case instead of being able to do it outside the case when the HS is just cam-locked to the board.

3. An IDE channel crapped out on me and forced me to use IDE2 to recognize my DVD drive after the second boot.

4. EACH CPU puts out a maximum of 120W of heat, which makes for a system that idles at 37 C with three 80mm (3500 RPM) case fans near to the CPUs, not to mention two fans in the PSU. Those case fans are noisy, but Intel's HSFs are REALLY noisy. This thing would make MadModMike's unit sound quiet and rivaled my Harrier-engine-for-a-fan notebook for decibels.

5. The floppy drive sparked and burst into flames when I turned the power on. Thankfully the side was off the computer and I saw the sparks and flames within a second of it starting. I yanked the cord out of the PSU and it quit, damaging only the floppy and a FDD power-supply cable.

6. I was able to fix the above problems and get Fedora Core 5 installed per the professor's instructions. FC5 crapped out on me when it refused to talk to the switch and get a DHCP address, while the Ubuntu live CD I stuck in it worked just fine on the Intel GbE connection. Performance seemed to be okay, but I really didn't have much time to put it through its paces.

Did anybody else has as bad of a time with that kind of system as I did? My desktop (see sig) went together in 1/3 of the time and had only one issue with the rear faceplate that goes around the ports not having a hole properly die-cut out.

No, I don't think I did. I think that I might have accidentally hooked the connector off by one pin. That or it was a very old floppy.

PM MU_Engineer, he'll explain it.

a) Ask MU_Engineer / Check your mobo stats, I suspect not though

b) No, Not in the Tyan K8WE S2895, it only has 'normal' PCI-X slots, not 'pre' PCI-X (PCI-64) slots.

He said the PCI-64 card was for very expensive camera hardware and it couldn't really be replaced.

Yeah except PCI-'64' and PCI-X at 66 MHz are electronically pin incompatible.

PM MU_Engineer

Yup, Tabris is right. I *certainly* checked that out as PCI-X boards are very common and much nicer for the price than the dual-Xeon board with 64-bit PCI slots that we had to get .