Topcat's Other Misc Weird Build Thread

[Topcat]

I just thought I'd cap off the XPS build. Everything worked....but not without a weird quirk. I added 64gb of PC4-3200 and saw it's only running at 2400, which is stock speeds for a v4 e5-2600 series xeon. All attempts to bump the RAM clock up to 3200 failed; BIOS would not lock in the settings and I noticed the really good overclocking tabs in the UEFI were missing.... Board had the latest BIOS on it....so I emailed a contact I have at Supermicro. He reveals that when Xeon CPU's are used in this board, all overclocking abilities are disabled and can not be enabled. The only way I can get the overclocking functions is to swap the Xeon out for a skt2011 I-series.... I'm not going to do that, so I'll just live with the RAM not running at its capacity....

Anyway....



Flash off....



Super cool lighting....





My plan was to take the removable side panel and cut a window in it.....but some other stuff came up, so that got scrubbed for now....no idea when/if I'll ever get back to it....

Supermicro C7X99-OCE-F skt2011
Xeon E5-2687W v4 @ 3GHz 12C 24T
ASETEK 650LX Liquid cooler
64GB Gskill Ripjaws RAM
EVGA 1070TI GPU
Dell M.2 adapter w/ 1TB M.2
Win10 Enterprise

[sam_sam_sam]

Nice work

[370forlife]

A new (to me) soundblaster PCI512 came in and it worked immediately, so there was some sort of weird low level incompatibility with the X-Fi and the X6DAL-TB2 motherboard.

I also designed and 3D printed a cowl for the two heatsinks to have a single 120mm fan pulling air through both at the same time. That fan ejects straight into the rear 120mm case fan, which I also upgraded to a 38mm thick Nidec TA450DC to help pull more air though the case and especially over the ram and northbridge. Keeping CPU temps around 75C at full chooch now which I am really happy with.

[370forlife]

I remember seeing those Dell XPS and the similar Precision machines in MaximumPC back in the day and drooling over them. So cool looking.

[Topcat]

If anyone remembers the C7X99 from THIS POST, keep that in mind for the next few weeks.....a build is developing! 🙊

Ok, I promised a build, and it's been a little slow this week in the shop, so I started it yesterday.

The case for this is going to be that XPS 630i that was dropped off. As mentioned before, it didn't have the water cooling option like the last one I got had. The water coolers for these are simply non-existent, you'll never find one; atleast the OEM one.... Since this isn't going back together in its original state, I'm not too worried about originality in a any way!!

...so let's begin!!





First up is to remove the HDD cages, they are being deleted. Came from a smoker's house. That dust is sticky, stinky, and corrosive!





The old guts. Works, but not being reused.



The corrosive nicotine sludged dust ate the paint off the front mesh....





We'll get back to the paint later....but for now, lets shift gears to my cooling idea. The cooler I chose was an Asetek 650LX, for skt2011/2066. These were used for servers in datacenters. Thick core radiator.



After trimming up the lower 120mm fan shroud, the radiator attached to it nicely





Spacers to shim the radiator out to the outer lip of the shroud.



...and attached!!






Very nice fit. Like it was born there....but now you know why the HDD cages were deleted.



Fan installed.





Now disassembly for cleaning.







Now for cleaning.... The best way to remove a COA....soaked in warm water for a good hour, it just falls off....otherwise you're poking & scraping....and frucking up the plastic..... This way, it just falls off....and a clean microfiber cloth with some mineral spirits on it to dissolve any remaining glue....and gone without a trace!





Now to touch up the mesh that the corrosive nicotine sludge dust ate up....





Like it never even happened.



Tested the lights....they work.










That's where I left off for today....and most of you probably think it's just a matter of reassembling...well, it's not!! More later!

[370forlife]

Supermicro says Nocona or Irwindale only. These things are such a pain to install with the heatsink brackets I made anyway 😅.

I did figure out the bios flashing. I found a utility from AMI to do it. It flashed successfully. The version number is still the same, but the build date is about 2 years newer. Anyway, it didn't fix the issue with the sound card.

[Topcat]

Irwindales, nice!! It might run Paxvilles if it can do Irwindales!

[370forlife]

Second CPU finally showed up, popped it in and it booted up no problem.

Had to run a classic 3Dmark06 CPU test and see what kind of improvements we get.

Single CPU installed:



Second CPU installed, CPU-Z action:



Dual CPU result:



Nice. Close to doubling our CPU score there. Watching it run the test, I think this did a little better than my old 64x2 5000+ back in the day.

The amount of heat coming off the processors is monstrous. I think I'm going to have to come up with a better solution to pull air across both heatsinks. Right now, there is a single 120mm fan sandwiched between them, so one of the CPU's is effectively huffing the other's (hot) farts.

Still waiting on a new PCI sound card to come in to try. In the mean time, I did by total luck find what seems to be an updated bios image for this board. I was looking at the supermicro FAQ pages that were tagged with this board (basically, resolved support tickets), and one of them had an updated bios image attached that appears to be dated to 2006, and my bios is dated 2004.

I don't know the actual way supermicro wants you to update the bios, though. I cannot find any utility from supermicro to do it. This board has a feature to recover from a corrupted bios by inserting a floppy disk with the bios image on it, and then holding CTRL+HOME while powering on the system until the floppy drive begins to seek. If successful, it will reboot itself, however, I don't think I could get it to successfully run. It would seek the floppy, beep a few times, seek the floppy, beep a few times, and then eventually just sit there spinning the fans and not rebooting itself. If I manually powered it off and back on, it reboots but the bios is still the old version. I verified the floppy drive and the floppy itself were good. Looking online it seems this feature is very hit-or-miss with supermicro, and many people just wind up having to remove their bios chip and flashing it manually. I bought an EEPROM programmer and I will try to update it that way.

[Dan81]

Thankfully the 3dfx chip didn't take much damage. Just a bit of small dents that don't affect the chip.

[lti]

There's a lot of cool stuff here. I haven't had a chance to mess around with computer stuff for a while. I would need to buy more stuff (starting with a spare power supply for testing), find a place to store it, and answer questions from people who just want to scrap everything that won't officially run Windows 11.

In the meantime, the MSI 6168 w/ the 440ZX chipset showed up. Clearly off the scrappers as the whole bunch of SMD resistors on the 3dfx chip's side were absolutely OBLITERATED .

Unfortunately, the pic I have is after I managed to rebuild the whole side of resistors.

I see some damage on the side of the Voodoo 3 chip, so it's good that it still works.

[Topcat]

If anyone remembers the C7X99 from THIS POST, keep that in mind for the next few weeks.....a build is developing! 🙊

[Dan81]

Some moar work on the beautiful MSI mobo from my previous post. I just wasn't happy using 16v 1500uF Rubies... so I switched to smaller 1500uG 6.3v Nichicon HN and a lone Panny FJ of same value to complete the count.

The MS-Industrial (Sun Pro) PSU you see was also recapped prior for a MSI 850 Pro5 build (with the AT styled Auxiliary connecto that ultimately fell flat due to the board's AGP being dead I'm in negotiations with two of my friends for Slot A board instead... but if anyone has an ABIT KA7 laying around they'd be willin' to part to, I'm open to offers. I ordered a Pluto Athlon @ 700MHz thay should be here next week... it's one of those monsters with TWO fans.

[Topcat]

I took great joy in decrappling another 27" iMac. It aggravates me to no end to see Apple forcefully sunset hardware like this.

I upgraded the CPU from an i3 to an i7, it's always a joy getting the 'logic board' out of one of these....





Of course a SSD upgrade....which of course deletes the old HDD's internal temp sensor. This causes the motherboard to think the HDD is overheating and runs the fans up to an obnoxious full speed. Nothing a 1K resistor can't fix.


Some heatshrink and tucked away inside the case.




These will run Win11 natively or Linux. I opted for Linux on this one....but these will run both very nicely.



Forced obsolescence defeated!! This has been one of my favorite hobbies for Mac Pro's, Macbooks, and Intel based iMac's....but it seems anything made past 2014 is just a nightmare to do anything with in this regard....but I'll save what I can....

[sam_sam_sam]

Bios images are not available for this motherboard, and any I can find are the same version that is already on it. The whole X6DAL series of motherboards is missing from Supermicro's support website, so if there is later bios versions out there, they are long gone.

That sucks because that they are no longer available the only hope you might have is if this company send install disk that came with the motherboard when purchased new otherwise however it might be difficult to find someone who might still have them if they were available in the first place otherwise I think your out of luck

One a slight different note I have several old computers that I might see if I can bring them back from the dead but I also realize that I might have difficulty finding the drivers for the motherboard if I can not find them and they still work other than this issue they might end up on eBay and sold for parts

[370forlife]

When I use to use XP I ran into issues finding the right drivers for certain devices either it was not the right version or it would not be recognized correctly or just plain did not work correctly at all and even if you had the install disk unless you allow the software/firmware install the driver it would not work correctly why it was that way who knows

One thing to check do you have the right drivers for the motherboard because I have had issues with some motherboard to find the right motherboard driver package do you have any other device driver issues that have not been resolved

See if there are any bios updates for this motherboard if so see if it mentions anything about fixing driver issues with sound cards or just device compatibility issues

Did you see this when searching for drivers for this sound card

https://support.creative.com/downloa...b0460&nPage=2#

Here is a case in point I have several HP elite 8200 and 8300 with different generation versions and if you try to use the wrong factory recovery disk it might let you reinstall the system but when you look in the device manger it has devices that are not installed correctly and will not even let you install it if you have the driver for the device

Now if it is totally wrong it will have a message saying that it is not compatible with this install disk a good thing that I have both 8200 and the 8300 factory recovery disk for both versions so also be aware of this issue as well

I tried both Creative's driver disk and Daniel_K's drivers for this card. Both work fine in the P3 machine, but both fail to detect the card in the supermicro motherboard. This card is an actual Creative card, not an OEM/Dell card.

Bios images are not available for this motherboard, and any I can find are the same version that is already on it. The whole X6DAL series of motherboards is missing from Supermicro's support website, so if there is later bios versions out there, they are long gone.

[sam_sam_sam]

When I use to use XP I ran into issues finding the right drivers for certain devices either it was not the right version or it would not be recognized correctly or just plain did not work correctly at all and even if you had the install disk unless you allow the software/firmware install the driver it would not work correctly why it was that way who knows

One thing to check do you have the right drivers for the motherboard because I have had issues with some motherboard to find the right motherboard driver package do you have any other device driver issues that have not been resolved

See if there are any bios updates for this motherboard if so see if it mentions anything about fixing driver issues with sound cards or just device compatibility issues

Did you see this when searching for drivers for this sound card

https://support.creative.com/downloa...b0460&nPage=2#

Here is a case in point I have several HP elite 8200 and 8300 with different generation versions and if you try to use the wrong factory recovery disk it might let you reinstall the system but when you look in the device manger it has devices that are not installed correctly and will not even let you install it if you have the driver for the device

Now if it is totally wrong it will have a message saying that it is not compatible with this install disk a good thing that I have both 8200 and the 8300 factory recovery disk for both versions so also be aware of this issue as well

[Dan81]

Technical difficulties on the seller's side (a friend of mine) with the KG7 so it may be delayed.

In the meantime, the MSI 6168 w/ the 440ZX chipset showed up. Clearly off the scrappers as the whole bunch of SMD resistors on the 3dfx chip's side were absolutely OBLITERATED .

Unfortunately, the pic I have is after I managed to rebuild the whole side of resistors.



Finally, the "rebirth" of the Voodoo board







And a 3dmark99 score w/ the onboard V3 2000.

[370forlife]

The sound card showed up today, a Soundblaster X-Fi pci, SB0460. I cannot for the life of me get it to work nice with this motherboard though.

I popped it into another machine, a P3 with XP 32bit installed, drivers installed just fine and it works great.

In this machine, windows detects it, it appears in Device Manager but needs drivers. Any drivers I can find flat out refuse to detect it, though. I read that some Soundblasters had issues with 64bit systems and systems with more than 4GB of ram, so I reinstalled XP 32bit on it and removed half the ram for a total of 2GB, still no dice.

I tried every PCI and PCI-X slot on the motherboard, no dice. I popped in a generic PCI NIC I had laying around, and it was detected and drivers installed no problem for that, so I think all the slots are working as they should.

There are jumpers on the motherboard to enable or disable the SMBus and SMClock to the PCI slots, tried with both enabled/disabled/one enabled one disabled, etc... no change. Tried changing the PCI latency timer in the bios, makes no difference (and from what I read, it doesn't matter as XP will set the latency for PCI devices itself).

Stumped, I need to get a different PCI sound card to see if its some sort of compatibility issue with this card. Anyone have a crappy PCI sound card laying around that will work with XP?

[Dan81]

Just for fun I found a BIOS that works and is retail on the Micron board you sent me. It's a Freetech branded AMI BIOS, chipset SiS 460.

The only small downside - it's DX2 only. DX4 boots as well but only at 66MHz.

[Topcat]

Dan81 👍

Ask and ye shall receive. Had another red bezel XPS 630i dropped off last week (same customer that dropped off the other one). PSU bad; heard something *snap* in it when I plugged it in, no powerup and no STBY. I was not able to identify what snapped. Fuse good....all sink'd transistors good (not shorted at least, no smoke, no stink, nothing visibly burnt). Not going waste much more time on it, they can be had all day long for ~$30. This case can also take a standard ATX PSU....but anyway, retested the board with another PSU, and it works....but I'm not going to restore this one to original condition. This one did not come with the liquid cooler....and I can't seem to find another one.... Just going to store it away until I figure out what I want to do with it. Case is in fabulous condition, just the usual dirty for something approaching 20yrs old.

I think I found a good candidate for this extra case. It'll be liquid cooled but not by the stock cooler....had to improvise.....but it'll be a neat one.