Back on Christmas Eve I struggled to get this board to do much of anything. When it did boot it’d bluescreen Windows with a useless ‘ IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL ‘ error. I took it that the board was crap, and just shelved it.

Today however I’m working on another project and I need to emulate a ‘datacentre’ deployment so I’m stuck looking for machines with RAM, and of course cores. They can be slow I don’t care, but I need to run a TONNE of VM’s. I need egress, ingress, routers, policing, domains, email, servers, various databases, some container infrastructure to provision some other apps and all kinds of crap. I’d planned on maxxing this board out to 256GB or more, but it wasn’t playing nice. And now that it’s like the end of the world out here, getting more RAM from China really isn’t going to happen.

So this time I tried something different.

I have this Dell r710 server with a bunch of memory but it’s CPU’s are frankly lacking. I took the 32GB I had reserved for the Jingsha and swapped out 64GB from the Dell to put into here. I also picked up some massive GAMEMAX GM-1650 power supply which I figured would be more than enough for the dual processor board. The PSU clearly was built for a miner, and I had to use some really lame Y cable for the CPU power. I wasn’t sure what would happen if any of it even worked. My expectations were pretty low, and the first few times the board didn’t appear to do anything at all.

Then suddenly it beeped!

I shoved in a Windows install USB, and it actually booted this time!

I bought some more of those ALSEYE 120mm cpu radiators as they couple with socket 2011 just fine.

Although finding an E-ATX case that isn’t some ‘bling surprise’ is kind of difficult. It’s annoying all these ‘glass window’ cases, and other nonsense. What was wrong with IBM AT BEIGE?!

The lack of a boot diagnostic LED display really hurts this board. Clearly there was something about the memory I had it doesn’t like. It ran fine in the Huananzhi dual x79 board, and it runs fine in the Dell r710.

So yeah. Now I have 3 machines with 64GB of ram, and one with 96. It’d be easier to order but here we are.

So 6 weeks later the Jingsha finally did something useful.

One thing to mention as well is that like others have mentioned while running Linux it’s not uncommon to freeze, reboot and other fun things. Meanwhile Windows is fine. What is going on here?!

I enabled NUMA thinking if something was going wrong maybe it’d be isolated to a single NUMA node, and not take down the entire machine. I’m not convinced I was right, HOWEVER I did capture this error message!

Feb 19 07:31:27 rancher kernel: [    5.820094] mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check: 0 Bank 7: cc00008000010093

Feb 19 07:31:27 rancher kernel: [    5.821328] mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 0: Machine Check: 0 Bank 7: cc00008000010093

Feb 19 07:31:27 rancher kernel: [    6.812122] mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check: 0 Bank 7: cc0069c000010093

Well that’s not good. So what is more interesting, is that I entered the BIOS after hammering F2/DEL like a typical end user and found this in the memory settings:

As you can see the current memory speed is 1333 MHz.

However as you can see, I’m using hynix 8gb 2rx4 pc3-10600r-9-11-e2 memory sticks, which means they should be clocked down to 1066 MHz. It’s probably a bit premature to write this, but I’m 30 minutes up, which is a record running Linux on the Jingsha.

It feels like RAM is the new Lupus. it’s never Lupus, but it’s always Lupus.

My GTR Power Com PS530 Plus ‘Chinesium‘ PSU blew up.

Well, Roy called it. It’s a shame I don’t have footage as I didn’t really expect anything to happen, but I let the system run for a few days nothing much to report, I had mostly left it to idle, until the kids came in, and it became a YouTube, music machine. Again nothing much to report, I loaded some program to report CPU temperatures, and it was hovering under 30c. Not to bad.

With the kids gone, I thought I’d run FurMark to see how the GPU cooler is scaling as I suspect I should disassemble the video card, clean it up some, add new paste at least. So basically at 600×400 it was scaling about 1c ever second, just going vertical until it was in the 80c range. I’m not sure of the exact temp, but it was at least 80c and then the PSU shorted, shot electricity out the back, and let out some magical blue smoke. I yanked the power cable, and pulled the PSU, which was still hot to the touch.

Yikes!

Now granted the TDP of the E5-2620 v2 is 80 watts, and what I suspect is the killer, the graphics card, an ASUS Radeon R9 290x can consume up to 300 watts. I don’t know how much 4 sticks of RAM, and a M.2 drive will hit, but considering the PSU says 550 on the box, 530 on the sticker, I suspect going anywhere near 450 is really pushing it to the limits.

I pulled the card, and cleaned it up, and put in an ANTEC 650 PSU, and was amazed that the system powered up just fine. I even reran FurMark until it hit 75c, and killed it, and let it drop back to it’s idle temperature of 35c.

So yeah, the GRT PSU killed itself under load. I though that disclaimer in FurMark was a bit crazy, but no really it really can kill hardware! And I got lucky the only thing that died was the PSU, the machine is still happily running.

Im going to detail it later, so all of this will change, but I was back in my favorite “junk” mall and a few places are selling new kit!

So I thought I’d do one of the Xeon boards up with what I thought looked good, but new. However they don’t offer remanufactured GPUs so the Radion 200 something is a used card I picked up for $350 Hong Kong dollars.

While I’m not the biggest fan or all that knowledgeable about ATI/AMD GPU’s this Radeon R9 200 (something) seems to perform okay. At the least it ran FurMark for a minute without catching fire.

Going with this idea, that means the PSU, case, motherboard and all in one liquid cooler are brand new.

I think the overall cost should be below 200$ USD but I need to go through my receipts and check. Although it is a cheap build for sure. More than enough punch for excel, and enough graphical punch for some gaming.

While not the cheapest case, the aigo Mini case was the least terrible looking one I could find. And at $160 HKD, that puts it in at around $20 USD. Nice

For cooling I found the Alseye H120 cooler for a cool $280 HKD or about $35 USD.

While I’ve used multiple AIO’s before this one really didn’t feel all that different from the rest. And it was the cheapest one I could find.

Contents were pretty much what I’d expect. The cooler block, radiator, and some adapters and whatnot to connect it to the CPU. What is nice about this one is that it includes mounting hardware and explicit ability to mount to the socket 2011. I’m pretty sure that this AIO is technically cheaper than the fan kit I have on my dual processor board.

I picked the 550 watt ‘POWER COM’ GTR power supply, since they bothered with a box. There was a 650 that just came plastic wrapped for cheaper, although I think I should have gone that route.

While the machine does power up, I really have to wonder about the overall power budget. But this is a cheap machine so…. I’m more so happy it powered on.

And amazingly the machine not only powers up, but after a few minutes inside the BIOS the CPU is running at a cool 21c. Nice!

So from what I can recall:

• Motherboard / CPU / RAM 450RMB
• Case $160 HKD
• PSU $150 HKD
• GPU $350 HKD
• AIO $290 HKD

So this puts me at a mere 187 USD. I could have gone cheaper with a discount air cooler, and a very simple 2D graphics card. But I was thinking of going with the ‘best of the worst’ type thing, so that means going with the water cooling, and the best looking graphics card I could find on the cheap. As you may have noticed storage is missing as I had expected some M.2 drives to have arrived by now. But for sub $200 prices this little box packs quite a good little punch.