Not a peripheral was stirring, not even a mouse;
The new motherboard was strewn on the floor in dismay,
In hopes that this crap Jingsha board would finally work;

The processors were nestled all snug in their sockets,
While visions of posting danced in their heads;
But motherboard back in her antistatic bag, and I in my cap,
Had just settled on giving this thing a long winter’s dirt nap…

On the surface this board seemed like quit the bargain. The Jingsha x79 dual socket board features 8 memory slots unlike the 4 in the Huananzhi board allowing me to go from 64GB of RAM to 128GB! In addition the board also has a native M.2 storage slot! All for the low low price of around $100 USD!

Neat!

While I did find that upgrading my power supply to the bigger 850 watts which certainly didn’t hurt stability, I thought that it’d be more than enough power for this new board.

And I kind of liked the idea of having a management engine that might out for ‘lights out’ when I’m traveling.

But no, it was nothing but grief. Most of the time I was stuck with error 99 which apparently has something to do with not enough power on the PCI bus? Granted I was rocking my RTX-2070, but it was running fine in the Huananzhi! Putting in the lowest & dumbest video card I had got it to boot windows up, quickly followed up with a crash.

Now for the best part, I pull the disks, as I’ve had this install going from my old Mac Pro, so maybe the HAL is stale or something else is going on like that old bootcamp error. So I make an install USB stick, with NO customizations, using the Microsoft tool. AKA stock.

And I get the same crash.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

What the Fuck. I don’t even know. Considering it’s crashing on install media it’s clearly the boards fault. The processors worked fine in the old board, and putting them back along with the memory and it’s working fine again. Something is wrong with the board.

So back into the bag, back into the box, and onto the shelf. Can’t say I’m such a happy elf.

Anyway it’s getting late. I’m off home, but a quick stop to the grocery store to try to remember how to make eggnog or something to at least make me forget this wasted sideline.

Well actually I’ve had it over a month now, I picked it up before all the talks of shutting down the internet started, along with capital flight controls and other fun things (consequences of socialism/communism. yay!), and I didn’t have any time to look, but the rear foot was crushed into the case, making it not only have a massive wobble but it wouldn’t let me mount a power supply. I tried hitting with a hammer, which only made it angry, so I used a crowbar to attempt to straighten it out. It doesn’t wobble anymore but I was unable to bash the bottom enough to get the PSU to lay straight.

I know it doesn’t look it’s best but it’s the only way I could get the thing to mount. Also I liked having the power/reset & activity leds on my desk, so I left the test harness cable bundle and just wrapped it through the case.

Somehow in the move, I managed to lose the IO shield as well. How annoying. Even more annoying is the way I seemed to have laid out the fans, as the case felt nice and toasty this morning.. It’s defiantly needing some revisiting, along with more fans, or maybe some tiny liquid cooling setup to deal with dual processors.

I pulled the window off the case, and you can pretty much tell right away when it was removed in the graph. Maybe not overheating but it certainly was a lot hotter than I liked.

I could happily live without any of the RGB crap, and I’m kind of disappointed there is no drive bays in this thing. It’s not an incredible case, but it was affordable. it’s a big MEH from me, although if it wasn’t damanged I’d probably like it better.

Amazon shows this with only one seller, so I guess it’s already obsolete/junk.

And obviously if I want to close this thing up again, that means I have to do something about the cooling. Hours of fun. …

Moved up from the old pair of E5-2620 v2’s to a pair of E5-2667 v2’s. What a big difference from a base clock of 2.1Ghz to 3.3Ghz. And yes, more cores!

And I can build DOSBox in 3 seconds using Visual C++ 6.0 Ultimate. I guess eventually I’ll get a modern machine, but for now this is pretty damned good. Which reminds me the newer processors for my 2006 Mac Pro should be arriving soon enough.

I couldn’t quite justify the more than double price for the E5-2697 v2 processor, although it has 50% more cores, but with a max clock of 3.5Ghz.

Oh well it’s as good as any update to the Huananzhi X79.

So I picked up this board on AliExpress for about $200 USD. Natrually the x79 chipset is NOT a dual CPU chipset, so yeah it’s one of those ‘not exactly 100% legit’ Chinese motherboards.

One thing about Chinese companies that many don’t sell directly to consumers, instead they sell on Tao Bao, Alibaba, or to foreigners, AliExpress. The company’s site is http://www.huananzhi.com, as they had written on the box. Yes you need the www. portion of the name, as again many things are… well dated on the Chinese internet.

The product page is currently http://www.huananzhi.com/html/1/149/150/256.html, if anyone cares. It lists the technical specs as:

• Support for Xeon E5 series processors
• High-speed DDR3 four-channel memory slot: support 1333/1600/1866MHz, maximum capacity 128G memory slot
• Desktop general purpose memory
• X79 dual motherboard supports 5.1 channel ALC887 chip
• 8-layer PCB backplane, 7+7 phase power supply
• High-speed USB3.0, SATA3.0 interface transmission speed is increased
• PCI-E expansion slot*4
• RJ45 Gigabit LAN interface
• North Korean heat sink with HUANAN logo

Yes, I don’t get the whole Korean heat sink thing either. Anyways I thought it’d be fun to try so I ordered the thing. It took 3 days to get to my office in China, and an additional week to get from China to Hong Kong. I hear these things can take upwards of a month to arrive in North America.

Also worth noting is that they will not ship with a CMOS battery, so you need to supply your own CR-2032 battery, otherwise the board will not operate correctly.

The contents of the box are VERY minimal, but they did include 2 SATA cables, some CPU thermal paste, a very bare and … well not very good manual, a CD which I haven’t even tried to read, along with an IO shield.

Oh and for visitors of the future, here is a poorly scanned copy of that manual. It really is 2 pages. For what it’s worth it makes as much sense in English as it does in Chinese.

I decided to pair this with a pair of E5-2620 v2‘s that I got for $40 USD shipped, as I didn’t want to initially spend a lot of money in case all of this just exploded or something. These were the ‘widest’ and cheapest processors I could find, I wanted a v2 E5 as they are faster then the first generation.

Also worth noting is that the board is only capable of driving v1 & v2 E5’s. And they need to be the E5-2 type, which support operating in pairs, unlike the E5-1 set. I have no idea if the E5-4’s aka 4-way part would work in a pair. Although it may be an interesting experiment to try.

The board apparently doesn’t support overclocking or anything that fancy.

Although it reports itself as an x79 based motherboard, it is in reality an Intel C602, based chipset. I don’t know if they are harvesting them off of recycled servers, or if they have located a giant cache of repair parts that have been pushed beyond 5 year warranties, so they are prime candidates for being re-purposed as end user motherboards. Nice things about these boards vs standard server boards is the inclusion of a Realtek HD Audio chip, VIA USB 3.0 controller, and even the nice spacing out of the slots so you could really use all the slots.

Since this is a dual processor board you really want a PSU with dual 8 pin power connectors, however as mentioned in the poorly translated manual, you can take a PCI-E 6 pin adapter, and place it into the 8 pin socket, just position it backwards so that the 12v+ pins are facing inwards.

It may look strange (well more so as I’m using an extension cable that is sadly more focused on aesthetics than function, but heh it was cheap), but rest assured it works!

Another thing to keep in mind is that since this board uses a server chipset, not a consumer one, just as it is using server processors, you will need server grade memory. In this case it’s REG ECC DDR3 based memory. I went with 1833Mhz parts, which are the fastest DDR3 parts they made. Although the processors I chose have a maximum frequency support of 1600Mhz, but the memory works fine when underclocked.

Another gotcha is the CPU fans. These need to fit the Intel Xeon 2011, but have support for the 2011 motherbards. Which unlike the consumer versions don’t have a separate plate to bolt to the underside, rather they screw in all from the top. I had purchased a pair of cheap heatsinks that were about the right size, but didn’t include any of the mounting hardware for a 2011 board. I picked up these GELID Phantom Black CPU’s for about $80 for the pair.

They are quite big, and include a pair of fans for each processor which will make the end build look a little crazy.

I didn’t want to spend a lot, and went with the cheapest PSU I could find to output more than 450 watts. Although it did turn on and run with the lower PSU the machine did shut off overnight for no apparent reason. I’ve been okay with the larger and cheap Antec NX 650 PSU.

Although, this is the older style ‘bundle o cables’ type of PSU which I’m not such a fan of.

If I had charged up a cordless screwdriver this would have taken a few minutes, but screwing in the heatsinks was a chore, and they really do dominate the boards real estate.

I thought I had a case, but it turns out that it was for normal ATX sized boards, and this is an E-ATX board so it simply will not fit.

Another nice server like feature is that the board has an LED readout for early post codes, as booting this board will take some time. I think with 32GB of RAM it’s almost a minute.

I took the SSD & Hard disk out of my MacPro 2010 and put them into the new machine, and it booted up right away. Once connected to the internet Windows 10 picked up the new hardware and downloaded and installed the board drivers as needed. Interestingly enough Windows 10 also wanted a new activation code as the CPU/Motherboard was changed, although it didn’t complain about it.

When it comes to jobs that can run in parallel this is an incredible build. Obviously single core performance at 2Ghz is. well. terrible. I know going to a 4Ghz max E5-2667 v2 won’t be exactly magic either, but there is something nice about having 32 threads. Running stuff like parallel compiles, compression and video encoding is a dream on these massively parallel machines.

Games, are ‘okay’. I get 60fps with Fallout 76 on this current 2Ghz build on medium settings with the 1050 video card.

I do plan on getting faster CPU’s after the Chinese New Year, as right now basically everything is shut down (it sucks being the only person in the office building, literally), and shipments wont’ resume for at least another week.

How long does the SPARC have left to live?

Or Solaris for that matter?

—edit seems they are going to keep VirtualBOX afterall!

https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/important_information_about_oracle_desktop

Going forward, Oracle’s desktop portfolio investments will be focused on continued development and new enhancements to both Oracle Secure Global Desktop and Oracle VM VirtualBox software.

Wrong.

Right now I’m taking the output from handbrake and passing it through AMV convert then copy it to the device from windows explorer and you are good to go!

It’s a shame they didn’t write on the box, that it needs this AMV format thing….

But after a LOT of googling around here is the solution.