The MASM Forum
General => The Soap Box => Hardware Corner => Topic started by: hutch-- on July 09, 2020, 12:45:05 PM
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My main dev box is now over 4 years old and while it works perfectly, building another makes sense. This board has just turned up from Hong Kong, a socket 2011-3 with 4 channel memory, NVME support and plenty of SATA and USB3 ports.
I am waiting on an i7 from West Australia to turn up, another Haswell E/EP i7 5820k and have ordered 4 x 16 gig 2400 modules so when it all arrives I can power it up and see if it all works OK. You can get a bit tired of building hardware but as my main box has been running perfectly for over 4 years, if you do it right, you get reliable performance for a long period.
(http://masm32.com/files/board.jpg)
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I sincerely hope it will not be your last new box, Hutch. Remember your life expectancy is around 90 years - we count on you :cool:
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He he, I have ambitions of making 150 but I will be potty enough over 100 if I don't make it that it won't matter much.
I know my way around building computers but you can get tired of it when my real use of computers is writing code. I am just hoping there are no problems with this new board from China or I will have to go look for another one and socket 2011-3 boards are as rare as hens teeth in OZ.
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Nice! :thumbsup:
That thing will have grunt :dazzled:
Nice that you have an LED display, makes it easier to keep tabs on things.
Sorry, what's the mobo name and manufacturer - cannot see it on there.
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Its an obscure Chinese board that I hope is fully functional, the best I could get off it was a part number and that tracked down a few equally obscure references but at least the board seems to have the right facilities on it. I get the memory on Monday and the processor is supposed to turn up middle of next week.
I will learn the good news or the bad news once I put it together and test it, at the worst, I may have to hunt up an x99-sli board that will keep me poor for a while.
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If it works well then maybe it's a good buy.
What's the part number ? :mrgreen:
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This is the number I could ID the board from but I did not get any more useful info from it. ZX-99EV3_V1.23
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My main dev box is now over 4 years old and while it works perfectly, building another makes sense. This board has just turned up from Hong Kong, a socket 2011-3 with 4 channel memory, NVME support and plenty of SATA and USB3 ports.
I am waiting on an i7 from West Australia to turn up, another Haswell E/EP i7 5820k and have ordered 4 x 16 gig 2400 modules so when it all arrives I can power it up and see if it all works OK. You can get a bit tired of building hardware but as my main box has been running perfectly for over 4 years, if you do it right, you get reliable performance for a long period.
Nice :thumbsup:
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At about the speed that paint dries, the i7 5820k turned up today from West OZ. I am hoping by the end of the week that the other two memory modules turn up and the water cooler I ordered so I can actually put it all together and see if the board is any good. Funny part is you forget how big a socket 2011-3 processors is.
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Last new Box, Hutch???
Nahhh... you’ve got many future new last boxes ahead!!
:greenclp: :greenclp:
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Hi Alex,
Its relative, last one for a while (I hope). Once you could buy all of the bits in a hurry, screw it all together and you had a running box. These days you are getting bits here and there that turn up from a slow boat from China and if you are lucky they arrive while you are still alive.
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Put it all together today and sad to say, the board will not boot with an i7 5820k and 64 gig of memory. I don't know if it is incompatibility with the processor and memory OR if the board is a dud. I bit the bullet and paid for a Gigabyte socket 2011-3 board which should be here sometime next week. Its a pain as I have to untangle the water cooler from this board and the Gigabyte power supply has been full of surprises but it seems to work OK.
The Chinese board came with no technical data at all and I had to search all over the internet to find even the most basic stuff whereas the Gigabyte board has full documentation and full driver support. It means I pissed about $180 AU against the wall but I may have a while to the vendor. :rolleyes:
On the bright side the Gigabyte board will take 128 gig of memory and as I already have 4 x 16 gig simms, at the risk of poverty and/or starvation, I may add another 64 gig to it is it turns out OK.
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The Chinese board came with no technical data at all and I had to search all over the internet to find even the most basic stuff whereas the Gigabyte board has full documentation and full driver support. It means I pissed about $180 AU against the wall but I may have a while to the vendor. :rolleyes:
Agg.. sad news.
That's a lot of beer money :sad:
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Phark this has been a pest, after the first one was a dud, I bought an expensive Gigabyte board from Melbourne which arrived this morning and it was a dud as well. Just started the "get a refund" method on eBay and it will depend on how the other end drags it out. I wonder if you can program assembler on an abacus ?
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:biggrin:
You can have a win occasionally, I had the Gigabyte board packed up and ready to send back but thought it was worth a try, I downloaded the latest Gigabyte BIOS for the board, put the BIN file on a USB stick named gigabyte.bin, plugged it into the white USB port on the board, powered it up with no processor or memory and BINGO, it ran for some minutes with a flashing light that when the light stayed on, it had finished.
Rebooted the board and up came the BIOS. It did some BIOS copy process and was then up to date. After wasting a week, all I have to do now is build the box. The 64 gig of memory is recognised and the i7 5820k is running at the correct frequency so it seems that all is well.
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Where's that 'white' usb port.
Is this a bios upgrade only port ?
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Yep, its the same as my old box, you take the memory out of it and processor as well. Download the latest BIOS from Gigabyte, rename it as "gigabyte.bin" and put it in the root of a flash drive. With the power turned off, put the flash drive in the white port then turn the power on. If its working properly, a small light flashes on and off while its writing and when its finished it stays on. When I rebooted the board, it went straight into the BIOS and the dual bios routine copied the new settings.
I have only run it for the BIOS so far, will steal the Radeon RX580 out of my Win7 box and will try and set up the OS on a 1tb SSD I have. As long as it all works OK, the rest is building the box, installing software and effectively making it a clone of my current box.
Not sure if it will drive me nuts but its full of flashing multi-coloured lights as the board is pointed at gamers. Might have to cover the clear side of the case so it does not act as a distraction.
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Not sure if it will drive me nuts but its full of flashing multi-coloured lights as the board is pointed at gamers. Might have to cover the clear side of the case so it does not act as a distraction.
Shouldn't do that so you can turn off the house lights and.. 'Night Fever, Night Fever...' :biggrin: :biggrin:
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Been trudging my way through the build. Water cooler radiator is installed, board is in the can, can't use a DVD read/write in the top front slot as it fouls the radiator so I may have to delegate the DVD reader to an external pair of cables. Put in the 1tb SSD but not connected yet. I have decided to gut my Win7 64 box for all of the 4 tb disks as it is already a clone of my work box which will cut down the re-install of a lot of stuff.
Just a little tired as all of the diagnostics wear you out. As long as this all builds OK I will at a later date add another 64 gig of memory as this allows me to do a number of useful things. I currently use an 8 gig RAM disk which is really useful, with the extra 64 gig I can safely run a 32 gig RAM disk.
I don't mind LED fans as you at least know the box is running but I will have to see what the rest looks like, the board lights up and the Radeon RX580 has a rotating colour display and I think the water cooler head also lights up.
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:biggrin:
It runs. Got it going this morning, install of Win10 has been a real pig, all of this password bullsh*t for a Microsoft account that I don't want. Have not cleared all of the network crippling yet but moves some diagnostic tools across to it and the win with the double fan radiator is it idles at 20c.
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I seem to have most of it under control, slowly untangling the mountain of CHYTE that came with a retail version of Win10 pro. The flashing lights are easy enough to make behave, options are OFF, STILL, slow PULSE or BEAT, the first 3 worked OK, the last one must be for music ?
I have tweaked the BIOS to run at the same speed as my current box, the CPU is a default 3.3 gig, press F7 in the BIOS and it runs at 3.6 gig and as it did not raise the CPU temperature, I went to 3.8 which was stable and did not raise the core temperature. I did try 4 gig but the temperature just started to go up so I dropped it back.
I normally don't like overclocking a CPU but the board/CPU combination is actually designed to do this and it works OK and is stable. The dual fan "Deep Cool" radiator works particularly well and it run at about 10c cooler than my normal box, even though the board and processor are nearly identical.
I do see the humour in Gigabyte marketing, my main box is a very slightly earlier board version and it was directly pointed at the high end desktop market using server class bits with a socket 2011-3 processor where the new one with a nearly identical board using the same hardware is pointed directly at the gaming guys. Ad a few flashing lights and you have a new market. :tongue:
This is actually legacy computing, with later i9 hardware and AMD thread rippers, this is old tech but it performs well and is really reliable and that is the final factor I am after, something that runs for years.
I just stuck in an old Nvidia 710 2 gig video card to get it going. The old video card actually works well, its a passive cooling card for things like home video setups where you must keep the fan noise down.
I have to start cannibalising my Win7 box as I need the 4tb disks and the Radeon RX 580 video card for this one. I recently hooked a video card that has 2 DVI outputs on it and while its only 2 gig of memory, where I have tested it on a Linux box, it seems to work OK and it gives me the option of running 2 monitors on the Win7 box if it looks like it could be useful.
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Very nice project and you share it for us :thumbsup:
I work for industry, so i have to work with even MS-DOS and try to use SSDs in an old systems.
I run temporary form PCs with CF-card in IDE/PATA, while i wait to find a usable small SSD for it.
SanDisk U110 16 GB is quite good for an old Award BIOSes.
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What are you doing, it sounds like real mode process control. I know of guys in the past who were using MS-DOS to control things like radio stations and it was a fully closed system with no network access and they would run just about forever until some hardware failure.
Its been too long since I worked in DOS but I kept a couple of oldies as I paid a fortune for them long ago. I have 2 ESDI drives that worked for 5 years with my 486dx and one was 300 meg which was very big way back then. I wonder if you could get adaptors to interface PATA with SATA ?
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Put the rest of the disks into it today and its close to being a clone of my normal work box. One interesting comparison, I keep a directory on my normal box for remote video processing so from the new box I processed about 20 4k small videos and with Core Temp running it loaded all cores to close on 100% for about 10 minutes and the core temperatures came up from a bit over 20c to middle 40s which is something like 15c cooler than my normal box. It starts off at about middle 30s and peaks on all cores at a bit over 60c.
Seems the double fan radiator really does do the job well. When I get a chance I will do some work on the normal box to fully clean out the radiator at the back of the case which is a single fan size.
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Hi Hutch,
Sorry if I missed to ask, did you recover your Linux installation?
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I wonder if you could get adaptors to interface PATA with SATA ?
I test Delock Converter IDE >SATA / SATA>IDE (https://www.delock.com/produkte/S_61635/merkmale.html)
Now i have to find a proper SSD for it. I already ordered a Transcend's 32GB 2.5IN SSD370 SATA3 (https://www.transcend-info.com/Products/No-631) for test.
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I test Delock Converter IDE >SATA / SATA>IDE (https://www.delock.com/produkte/S_61635/merkmale.html)
Don't have ligths! :biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:
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Hi Erol,
The last one I installed works fine, its Mint Linux 19.3 and it seems to work well. Each time I install Linux I get better at it and with the release of Mint 20.? when I get the time I will clean the box out and try the later version. Seems to run fine on an older processor and with 16 gig of memory it does not run out of puff performance wise so generally I am very pleased with it.
Apart from x86-64 development for Windows, a properly set up Linux mint box has enough software to do most things from sound to video, runs video well enough, sound is OK. Audacity is close enough to the same, Inkscape works well but I have not had enough time to learn it properly. The only thing stopping me from using "ffmpeg" is I don't have a method of building interfaces to run it on Linux, on Windows I already have MASM interfaces to run ffmpeg for a range of tasks.
A guy from Brasil has done a Win10 clone with Linux and it looks interesting enough but the interface on Linux Mint can be configured easily enough and you can do most things with it so there is no great rush to change.
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Works here with an old AMI BIOS and Trancsend SSD :thumbsup:
MB HDD light works normally.
This area needs it's own thread.
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I had a look at the adaptor you are using and it looks fine. Are you running the PATA from an old computer board ? I did a Google on the conversion gadgets and there are plenty of variations, PATA to SD memory card as well so it depends on what you need as a storage medium.
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Last new box.
That is funny.
Humans and me, always want the latest and greatest.
:-)
Andy
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The right term would have been "most recent".
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Ok.
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Are you running the PATA from an old computer board ?
Exactly, an old PC's have special interface cards, in ISA or PCI form, and a some software works only in Win95-98.
A SSD is also a requirement.
Other adapters in first aid room:
Delock Converter IDE 40 pin > 1 x Compact Flash (https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_91620/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en)
Delock Card Reader IDE 40 pin to Compact Flash (https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_91645/merkmale.html)
Would be nice to hear how others solve similar problems.
BTW: a some of control computers are in virtual server, if only a serial connection was used.