80 plus rubycon's on one board!

[iesaunders]

hi all,

I just purchased a tyan i7501 s2721-533 new off of ebay really cheap. It is a dual 604 xeon board. I had come across this site awhile back while looking at power supplies so I know what to look out for in general when purchasing stuff. Anyway I was really reassured when I could see from pictures that this board had tons of rubycon's. OK so I get it in the mail yesterday and there are over 70 mbz's and about 20 others that are another rubycon line(can't remember name) and some sanyo's. this is all good. I'm starting to wonder though, you can see from the picture that there are many areas where caps are lined up and wired in parallel or series (not sure). Is this in general a good practice or bad. It seems like tyan shelled out alot of money to put over 90 caps on a board. or did they just cheap out by buying lots of smaller caps instead of a few large caps (whats more expensive). I know the caps are all great quality but I'm curious about design. I have a degree in physics and circuits was the only class I got a D in. I wish I had paid more attention. I'll post a pic from the web untill I get home tonite and take some better shots.

thanks guys. especially curious what willawake and topcat think. you guys are really good at explaining stuff. keep up the good work.

Ian

[Topcat]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

Tyan is notorious for using ZL series Rubycons. I have actually seen them fail, on one rare occasion. The board/server was not adequately cooled, and the obvious happened after time... When you build the system, make sure you accommodate for plenty of fans. As for Rubycon and Sanyo caps, you have very little to worry about with them.

No capacitor is indestructible, not even Rubycon.......but their failure rate is a lot lower than a lot of others I've seen.

[iesaunders]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

most are mbz. I'll check to see if the others are zl. board will be going into a 4u case so heat/ventilation will not be a problem.

what about the fact that they used so many small capacitors? is that a good or bad practice? that was my main question. board has twice as many caps as a similar intel board.

also are the ZL's officially on the bad list or just this isolated instance. thanks again.

[Topcat]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

No, the ZL's are not on the bad list. I have on occasion seen a bad MCZ as well, typically on Dell GX270's that had Nichicon HN failures, which lead to the MCZ failure. I have never seen a bad MBZ. Any cap will fail if it's overheated, as the Tyan board with the ZL's I mentioned above.

[willawake]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

uuuh i want it (but with all the other expensive useful bits attached and sitting in a datacenter with centos and cpanel installed )

what is this server for?

if caps are in rows near the cpu they are most likely to be connected in parallel for higher performance smoothing on the vrm output. when they are in parallel their capacitance is added so you can use smaller caps, but also the overall esr is lower.

[willawake]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

and i think those nocona chipsets and procs were probably one of the hottest (as in heat) things intel made.

[iesaunders]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

thanks willawake. I knew you'd have the answer. I suspected it was a "good" practice. It's actually only a 533fsb e7501 chipset. no noconas for me. I'm going to put a single 2.0 xeon (55watts) and 1gig of registered pc2100 in it for my home file server. mobo, chip, and ram will come out to 155.00 all together, off of ebay. a real deal. of course I already had the server case and Zippy ps. Oh yeah, I still have to get some drives to go with my 3ware 9500s sataraid. I'm a poor ass college graduate looking for my first real job (anyone need a linux sysadmin?) so I really shouldn't be buying this shit.

Oh yes, I'm becoming a big centos fan. I put it on our production server at work (U of wisconsin library), because it was the only distro that would work with the funky sas card in the new dell poweredge that I speced out and CONVINCED the director to buy. Almost shit my pants when one by one linuxes wouldn't install. Thought I might have to "learn" server 2003 and convince director to buy 200 licenses :-). centos saved the day without patching. glad to see someone else who appreciates it. Its slowly pulling me away from debian at home since those folks can't get their act together very well anymore. Its perfect except for one thing. I don't like to use VI as the default editor so I issue...

export VISUAL=/usr/bin/nano

to change the default editor to nano. works great untill four hours later or next day or next week when it has spontaneously switched back. I know nitpicking...thanks again. I'll let you know how centos plays with this board. It will come up again on ebay and you'll be able to get the stuff cheap.

[Topcat]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

On a little side note, I have a 7505 chipset in my daily use dually xeon system, which is very similar to the 7501. VERY reliable! My dual xeon servers are serverworks chipsets, which are also very stable, but I'm told not as fast (I never benchmarked them). Looking forward to some pics of the finished server.

[willawake]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

if you know how to admin webservers then you can probably find some work on the net. Particularly in the areas of server hardening, hack cleanups and also optimisation of apache,MySQL,PHP for CMS, boards etc.

anyway i think there is good prospects for linux admins. it will become more and more popular. the VPS scene is amazing, running little servers on so little resources.

yeah i would recommend fedora for home for the same reason. driver support is very good indeed. The more user friendly linux gets, the more people will get into it. I think with microsoft shifting heavily towards DRM etc with vista and bios vendors introducing bios level drm the future is obvious and people will find that its just too much eventually and switch.

[iesaunders]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

yeah. tried out vista release through work. it was the full enterprise version which is basically the "ultimate" package. I've already switched back to xp. vista is gonna be big trouble for microsoft. of course big trouble for microsoft isn't really that big a deal. they will get over it. it definately looks pretty, but I don't like much else. the registration is so invasive and stupid. I should start another thread.

linux is gonna make strides now that they are trying to put together a standard platform. biggest issue with linux is having to deal with installing crap. this will take care of most of that. five years down the road and we will start seeing the benefits hit the mainstream.once again vista sucks. xp is pretty solid though will all of microsofts support of it. I will cry the day they pull the plug on it if it means more vista style crap. I wanted to like vista soooo mucchhhh. I was so pumped for it for 3 FRICKIN YEARS. what a dissapointment.

anyway, I'll post some photos of the board when its done and report on the stability. its all mbz's zl's zlh's and sanyo ca's (never heard of those sanyos but they look like wg's).

[gonzo0815]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

Using more caps is a comon method to archive an lower ESR. This improves the transient response of an VRM and it distributes the stress upon more caps and thus more surface (e.g. the generated heat). The reason for the high demand of ultra lowest esr caps is not as the desinger did need this, but more to reduce component count and make the whole appliance cheaper. So this is for shure not a bad desing, it is a desing with reliability and endurance in mind.

[pentium]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

I would have nightmares recapping that thing .

[iesaunders]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

thanks gonzo, That was what I was thinking. its interesting to note that ultra low esr caps are not always good for motherboards :-)

[toastygoodness]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

Where's the tyan made?

[iesaunders]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

assembled in taiwan. why do you ask? I think all their boards are made there.

[willawake]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

is there any boards which are not assembled in taiwan/china?

[Topcat]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

is there any boards which are not assembled in taiwan/china?

Supermicro. Assembled in the US I do believe.

[iesaunders]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

ive seen supermicro boards that say designed in usa made in taiwan(not in person mind you, only in pictures). thats what this tyan board says too. all the intel boards I have had have been made in taiwan (only two).

are sanyo ca's ok. sanyo of course has a good reputation but the ca's on this board seem a little lower quality than the wx's on one of my old dual p3 tyans. I still cant believe all the blue and gold on this board. cant wait to get it up and running and get some good pics. trodas will probably warn me that my poor mbz's can not handle such demands and that I need to buy a sapphire grouper I don't mean to be mean but whenever he starts going on about that damn board I start thinking of the fat ugly fish. sorry trodas

[kc8adu]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

my favorite is the compaq p4 board with the american flag and corvette screened on it and in big letters says designed in the usa
a good ways away from all this in tiny print
assembled in china
ROFLOL!

[Logistics]

Re: 80 plus rubycon's on one board!

nevermind, what I commented on will be in a new thread.