Last message on previous page: 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
---------------
all i want to do is bleed blue, but since that wont happen ill be playing video games till i die
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?
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. 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!
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.
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.
> The PSU is also one of the hotter devices in a case, so it'll be radiating heat up past the vid card
Not really a BIG issue if (a) the PSU is very efficient e.g. 85% and
(b) a slot fan can handle any radiant heat emitted by a PSU
that is mounted at the bottom rear. Heck, cut up a big mouse
pad, and glue it to the top surface of the PSU in that position:
that would insulate any radiant heat from entering the case interior,
no?
I think a bigger issue is that all slot fans will need to exhaust
OUT, rather than to intake air from outside the rear panel e.g.
Antec's VCool product, because the PSU's hot exhaust air
will be rising up the rear panel when it is mounted at the bottom.
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).
Lithotech: I think I might have preferred the top PSU placement as well, but then again, I'm not sure that the air from the very hot parts on the mobo would be exhausted well enough. As is, it'll be OK. Also, the Galaxy has 60cm ATX12V and 2x8-pin 12V connectors, while the TJ10 is only 52cm tall! I checked that. So I think cabling might work well, actually, in this particular case. I was thinking about running the main power cables behind the motherboard tray. The power connectors for that Tyan are all located in great places and I can do exactly the same that has been done in this picture for the ATX Power connector:
Great, huh? But I need those 60cm that the Enermax Galaxy has to offer. The only thing I still don't know is something that could solve your other complaint about heat: should I really mount the galaxy so that cool air gets sucked from under the case, through the bottom grill?... I'm guessing yes, and in that case, hot air from the PSU would get exhausted directly outside the case by the 80mm fan. Remember, the galaxy actually has 2 fans!
Also, on the issue of cooling these xeons, the thermalright coolers are obviously much better than the chunks of bladed copper that Intel sells with those xeons. The stock coolers don't even have heatpipes, for crying out lout! The heatsinks will be enough. If I have problems with heat, it'll only be because of insufficient air flow.
Amiga500: We've done extensive tests that show C2D to be a much greater performer than any of the 65nm K8-derivatives, but we have not had the opportunity to test barcelona, nor is it readily available in any of the local stores. I'm very skeptical about it in its current iteration, so I'm very reluctant to advise getting a barcelona over a well-established and mature 45nm, 1.6Ghz dual-FSB workstation like this. Also, we're not interested in graphical work: this will be a number cruncher.
On the issue of OSs:We do not use commercial scientific code, we write our own code. You're probably using CentOS (more likely) or Fedora (less likely), right? I'm considering CentOS for this workstation, but that decision is still a long time away.
Thanks for your input, everyone.
Message edited by Mephistopheles on 01-20-2008 at 07:39:20 PM
Cooling System
Front..1 x 120mm fan slot Rear...1 x 120mm exhaust fan, 1200rpm, 21dBA Side...1 x 120mm mid-section fan, 1200rpm, 21dBA Top....2 x 120mm fan slots Bottom -- Internal --
We looked at that excellent chassis, but
we have a specific need here for 2 PSUs.
The TJ07 is a great case too... I actually considered it first, but then moved on to the TJ10 because it became available and it's also quite beautiful. The store is out of TJ07s but has TJ10s in stock.
The advantage of sticking with the TJ07 would be that the lower intake could be used for getting fresh air from the outside for the wind tunnel effect. Also, it's worth noting that the TJ07 can be had for roughly the same price as the TJ10.
I'm still somewhat more inclined to go with the TJ10 because of its overall construction. The TJ07 won't be as forgiving for the motherboard cables: they cannot be routed easily behind the motherboard tray and then suddenly appear right where needed because there's no opening on the upper part of the motherboard backplate as the TJ10.
I hope I have this thought out right. I'd be disappointed to find my theories to be wrong by the time of assembly.
Yep, the SR-109 and a nice PC P&P 750Quad PSU... /sigh
