My ongoing Dual Socket 603 RDRAM Build (Aiming for: Dual 3GHz Gallatin's, HD 3850, GT 430 PCI, Voodoo5 and SB Audigy 2)

[Irinikus]

Today, while scanning eBay, I came across this little beauty going for the hefty sum of EUR 30.00, so I grabbed it!

So this will be the start of my next build! (I've always wanted a machine featuring RDRAM, so now's finally my chance to build one!)

This will still have to be shipped to me from Italy via the snail mail, so it will take me some time to get into it! (I'm currently still busy with my dual PIII build anyway!)

Thinking ahead as to what case I'll use for this build, I'll probably end up going for the black version of the Corsair 7000X RGB case, as the white version has worked so well for my Dual PIII build featuring a supermicro board with the same form factor! (There are very few respectable looking cases that can house these full-ATX boards!)

 

[Irinikus]

I may end up going with ATI on this one, but I first need to receive the motherboard and confirm that it works!

This would be a journey, as I've pretty much always stuck to Nvidia!

Slotting one of these little cards upgrades the onboard SCSI to SCSI RAID:

A super cool option!!!

 

[Irinikus]

My board arrived today and it's unfortunately damaged!

There are some deep scratches on the back of the board which have completely cut through quite a few traces:

There's also a missing decoupling cap:

All of this will have to be repaired before I apply power to the board in-order to test it! (How annoying!!!)

 

[Irinikus]

I have an avionic technician at work doing repair work on the damaged board, but as a precaution I've managed to purchase another, this time a brand new unused one! (I'm going to be spending a fair amount of money on this build, so I don't want a sketchy motherboard!)

The seller has two more boards for sale: (this ones's an example)

Mine is still sealed:

I also got these specs from the seller:

From these specs, it's apparent that neither of the two boards were actually rated for the 3GHz 4MB cache CPU!

So I'll end up installing two 2.4GHz 2MB cache CPU's in mine in order to remain within the original design spec for the board!

 

[Irinikus]

It appears that the highest I'm going to be able to go here is a 2.2GHz chip with 2MB L3: (As the 2.4GHz chip doesn't come with L3, but has the same TDP of 65W!)

 

[Irinikus]

The broken traces on the board have been repaired and covered in a layer of epoxy:

Seeing that I've ordered a brand new board, this one will serve as a spare.

 

[Irinikus]

Here's a quote from a member on Vogons who's running this board:

I have a Supermicro P4DCE+ with the newest bios it works with the 3ghz gallatin's. I put heatsinks on the vrm to keep it cool works great

So this is good news!

Here's the VRM on TheOkMan's board:

 

[Irinikus]

I've just assembled my Dual P4 Xeon Voodoo5 RAMBUS system! (This thing is large heavy and LOUD!!!)

The Voodoo5 5500 at least has a home now! (This system will receive future upgrades in time to come, but at least it's built!)

With the SC5300' there is a perfect space for the motherboard and plenty of space in the front for drive cages and the like!

This system is running the Voodoo5 5500 PCI graphics card in order to free up the AGP slot so that I can use it to flash AGP cards for Mac in the future!

 

[Irinikus]

Here's what the system looks like when it's all closed up: (Just look at the length of this thing!!! )

 

[doc]

What PC case is that in the end? (Doesn't seem like Corsair 7000X )

 

[Irinikus]

Here's what the system looks like when it's all closed up: (Just look at the length of this thing!!! )

It'a an Intel SC5300 Server Chassis.

 

[Irinikus]

I've just managed to do something interesting with this machine, as I now have the Voodoo5 5500 running together with an Nvidia GT430 (The fastest PCI graphics card available by ZOTAC) The only downside is that I've had to plug the Voodoo5 into a standard 33MHz slot in order to give the GT430 enough breathing room! So there is a slight penalty to performance on the Voodoo5!

In the future I'm going to see if I cant slot one of these into the AGP slot as well!!! (The fastest AGP card!)

This will make this system little bit more interesting!!!!

I've put some heatsinks on the VRM's FET's in preparation to fit a pair of 3GHz Gallatin's

I put the system through its paces with a Blender test, and with the enormous amount of airflow going through this chassis, the VRM remained super COOL! (Warm to the touch.)

It's still running a pair of 2GHz CPU's for now!

Interestingly the Voodoo5 5500's actually performing slightly better in the 33MHz PCI slot??? (Take note that I'm not running Quake 3 in an SMP mode at this point, just in case anyone asks!)

It was only doing 68FPS in the 66MHz slot when I first tested it!

It's so nice to be able to easily switch between the GT430 and the Voodoo5 within Windows XP to carry out direct comparisons between the two cards! Hopefully I'll also be able to get the Radeon HD 3850 AGP running as well (3DFX, Nvidia and ATI running together in a single system! )

 

[doc]

We need and other positive reaction icons in addition to just the "Like" button

 

[Irinikus]

I've neatened the system up a bit:

Here's the rear panel:

Here are the current system specs according to 3DMark 2001:

Here's the current GT430 result:

Here's the current Voodoo5 result:

Here's the current GT430 Quake 3 result:

 

[Irinikus]

Here are the latest results that I have for the GT430 with this machine still fitted with 2GHz CPU's (Can't wait to see the result when the 3GHz CPU's are installed!)

I'm actually pretty impressed by this result, considering that this is just a PCI card!

Here's it's latest Quake 3 score @ 1024x768 with Max settings and SMP enabled:

The main experiment here will be to see how this PCI card stacks up against the HD 3850 AGP card! (The Voodoo5 5500 is just along for the ride! )

 

[Irinikus]

I've just done a bit of research on the HD3850 AGP card and it seems that the GT430's actually 2% faster!!! I'd however have to assume that this is the PCIe version. So it will indeed be interesting to see how these cards compare in this system with the 3GHz CPU's installed!

 

[Irinikus]

I ordered one of these this morning to house my IDE drive, as I eventually plan to have SCSI RAID 0, SATA RAID 0 and an IDE drive in this thing!!!

This is my plan as to how things are going to go together, at least for the SCSI RAID and IDE anyway:

It just so happened the the unit arrived today too: (Brand new in box!)

It's really cool that it has a flap which closes the slot when the drive sled is removed!

Drive fitted in sled:

Unit fitted in the machine: (edited)

A front view: (It actually looks rather COOL! )

When I initially tried to power it up, there was no power to the unit and I couldn't understand why???!!! (I spent about an hour trying to troubleshoot it, until I took a look at the manual and found that the KEY POSITIONS actually meant something!!!)

Note to self: JUST READ THE FRICKIN MANUAL IN FUTURE!!!

 

[Irinikus]

These are the additional cards that I still need to slot into this machine:

I have chosen the AMCC 3ware 9550SX-8LP to give this machine a SATA RAID setup, as its a very low profile card which will have to fit between the HD 3850 and the GT 430 and give the HD 3850 the best breathing room possible under the space constraints which I have here.

The Adaptec ASR-2005S/48MB 64bit Pci Ultra160 Scsi Raid Controller will give the system onboard SCSI RAID.

The Audigy 2's just a good period specific sound card. (If you can suggest something better in this department, I'm open to suggestions! )

 

[Irinikus]

After doing some more research today, I found that I in fact need to fit a SAS controller, as the other drive cage option for this machine is SAS and not SATA!!!

Here's a look at the 4-disk array which sits above the 6-disk array:

Here's a look at it's backplane:

So I in fact need one of these controllers by LSI:

For interest sake here's the 6-disk SCSI drive cage:

And here's its backplane:

 

[Irinikus]

My latest plans for this build!

It really starts to become expensive when you have to order in all of these individual parts! (So this project's going to take some time to complete!)

I've already ordered my LSI SAS Controller!

I'm going to have to order in a pair of these in order to mount the SAS SSD's into the hot-swappable drive caddies: