Powering a Dual Nehalem system

daclo

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May 12, 2009
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18,510
Hi,

I plan to buy a Supermicro case to build a dual nehalem (E5520) server. I saw that the majority of dual nehalem board have have 2 8-pin connector in addition of the standard 24-pin.
Can someone tell me if this case can handle a board with 2 8-pin connector ? Does it need a 8-pin EPS12V splitter, a molex to 8-pin EPS12V converter, anything else ?

supermicro SC743TQ-865B chassis
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/743/SC743TQ-865.cfm

supermicro X8DTi motherboard
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DTi.cfm

It seems to be very hard to get the detail specs (all the connectors) of the power supply of this case. Anyone know where to get it ?

Thanks
Dany
 

martmann

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May 21, 2009
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I am working with a system I built that is embedded in a prototype system of ours (at work).

It is a Dual Nehalem (X5560) on an intel S5520 motherboard, with 2 1.5TB HDDs (RAID 1), an intel 80GB SSD, 12GB (6x2GB, 6GB per CPU) Crucial unbuffered DDR3-13333, GeForce 7200GS 512MB GDDR2 PCIe Vid Card, & a Corsair TX750W PSU, running CentOS 5.3.

The motherboard requires 1x 24 pin main power connector, & 2x 12V(4/8Pin). I have yet to find any PSU (server or workstation) with 2x 12V(4/8Pin) connectors so use a splitter found here:
SPLITTER

and an extension found here:
EXTENSION

I strongly recommend a single 12v Rail with high current capacity, as the biggest problem I have had so far is finding the correct PSU.

So far the Corsair TX750W has worked best, but did crash once (symptoms seemed lack-of-power related) while running all 16 (8 real cores, 16 virtual, with hyper-threading and turbo-boost enabled) CPUs at 100% and running our proprietary software, with heavy hard drive activity. So we're moving to the TX850W.

If you are running 2 E5520 CPUs, the TX750W may be fine (depending on your graphics cards and qty. of hard drives), just get the splitter and extension above.