Empty Card Reader appears as four drives?

madcratebuilder said:

..... I played around with the AIDA64 demo..... I'm going to take another look at AIDA64. You've assembled a impressive machine that actually does something besides bench tests.

Thank you, but it wasn't as easy as I anticipated. Finding the embedded registers and creating a patch for the fans monitor/ctl was one of the several speed bumps that cropped up toward the end of this build. Prior to that were more challenges. Since the Xeon E5-2687W was one of the faster Xeons, they also run the hottest temp at 150watts. So I knew I had to carefully plan the cooling. For safety I opted for water. I tried Corsair H100s, they didn’t work. More research revealed a newly released Swiftech water kit# H220 that held great promise. But another failure since their sink/pump assembly footprint was too wide to fit between the RAM sticks and the heatsinks nestled too close to the 2011 sockets, no matter the orientation of the sink. Dual-socket boards are quite congested even on their expanded form factor. I sent several detailed hi-def photos to Swiftech revealing the impossible fit, which they conceded.

Giving up on water, then the search for air sinks. I found two that faired close enough to water efficiency. The best one I rejected fearing the footprint may be too wide again. My second choice worked well (Dynatron R-17 @ 160watts), though I still had to shave a few millimeters off one fan to get it in between the mem sticks. To compensate for the diff between water and air efficiency, I bought two high-output Delta fans to replace the R-17 OEM fans. I opted for performance vs acoustics, and settled on Deltas @ 102cfm for each CPU heatsink (~1,384cfm total flow for case). This is when I needed the patch from AIDA64 in order to initially monitor the fan speeds, to tune them to ideal cooling speeds and temperatures — and balanced so as not having too much acoustics.

The box I used has separate left and right-wing bay compartments (in a cube cabinet). If you notice in the video, the mobo bay (left wing) has no HDD/SSDs in either drive bay; instead I put large fans. All drives were placed in the adjacent right-wing of cabinet to reduce heat generated in the mobo bay. This helps cooling significantly. Except under full load, there is always cool air coming from the rear exhaust fans. Under full load it exhausts warm air, but not hot. Mission accomplished.

So it hasn’t exactly been a stroll through the park making this system perform according to my original plan to accommodate massive amounts of fast rendering and throughput. It’s like every woman knows — it often takes a considerable amount of exerted effort to make the independent self-confident charismatic male vertebrate to behave in a manner befitting her taste. This dual Xeon system was no exception.

P.S. - I encourage you to reconsider AIDA64. They are good people. And their product is unsurpassed in comprehensiveness and thoroughness in my opinion. They are very skilled and very honest. And for the money, even though there are many free products available - theirs is well worth it I think. It has many extra features that the others don't have. Good luck on your project.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

...... Going back to RAM, my curiosity got the better of me and I posed the question on the ASUS forums. Here is the reply I got. Just FYI since we don't know the brand and part numbers of your RAM.

J…. So many questions; I missed this one because it was so tiny. Sorry. Actually the brand – Kingston – has always been displayed in my “system specs” (button in lower left corner of my posts). As for the model#

2ea Kits — Kingston KVR16R11D4K4/64 (4x16GB 240-pin) DDR-3 SDRAM 1600 ECC Registered Server Memory…… [it’s Intel certified]

http://www.kingston.com/dataSheets/KVR16R11D4K4_64.pdf

(I don’t know why the above link puts out a “signature” warning — this link is virus free. If Norton or Microsoft Office flags it — ignore it. The PDF is safe)

OK, your board is rated for the amount of RAM you have since it's registered. I've had good luck with Kingston products.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

OK, your board is rated for the amount of RAM you have since it's registered. I've had good luck with Kingston products.

I do appreciate your feedback, and encourage it.... but if you only knew me well enough to know how much research I put into these component choices, you likely wouldn't bother verifying my component compatibility. In this area, I likely rival you on your "Backups obsession." I know you’re trying to help, so I don’t mind. But I meticulously triple check everything from a variety of different sources before dropping the dime. But sometimes mistakes still happen.

I hate making too many mistakes, so I’m careful. But this board was the exception; there was no way to know in advance about the foibles and driver bugs. Since I'm aware of its vulnerabilities, I've learned how it runs best; and better yet as ASUS adds updates. When you happen to buy the board hot out of the oven, there’s not yet enough available feedback from other users. However, I find some consolation in the fact that even Intel R&D uses this same board to test their Xeons, although I know Intel is still a fledgling ma&pa operation in its infancy stage. Ha-ha. But it never hurts to get others’ opinions. So thanks! Good to know you have good luck w/ Kingston.

Intel link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMictlPOrQw

Plus it’s way too late to change the RAM memory anyway……. I super-glued it into the sockets. Joking! :)

Below is a diagram I drew up amongst the voluminous records I keep for this system, if you are interested. It shows my idle and full load temps under stress; and in case any other Z9PE-D8 users are interested in comparing. Kingston confirmed they are in-range and fine since on-die max is 85C. Are you able to detect your temps?

Why are your DIMMS numbered so?

garuda said:

...But this board was the exception; there was no way to know in advance about the foibles and driver bugs...When you happen to buy the board hot out of the oven, there’s not yet enough available feedback from other users...

That's one reason why I don't like to buy anything "hot out of the oven". I prefer to let others be the Guinea Pigs and give the manufacturers time to debug the product.

garuda said:

...Are you able to detect your temps?

No, I don't have any software for detecting RAM temps. I'm not worried about it, though. I have checked them using my high tech, calibrated finger to see how warm the modules get and didn't get burned, for whatever that is worth. I check MOBO temp every once in a while and it runs only 10°C over ambient. I do monitor CPU temp in the tray since cooling is somewhat less than stellar in my tight case but I haven't really thrashed the CPU yet.

Not to drift (too much) but I was looking at workstation boards last week and noticed that the Intel boards support 512GB of memory on 8 channels for a memory bandwidth over 800GB/s. That's smokin'! Add quad Teslas and 8 displays and I could probably get caught up on my emails. :) It seems a shame to hog-tie a system like that with 6GB/s disk drives even if they were SSDs. I can hardly wait for the new drive technology to hit the market.

Oh yeah, back on topic; My reader has had the drives assigned since day 1.

Britton30 said:

Why are your DIMMS numbered so?

I have no clue why ASUS numbers them this way in their manual; tech support doesn't know why either. I copied the Asus numbering from manual and then cross-ref'd it to the AIDA64 numbering system so I could interpret the temp readouts for each stick. Then condensed it in this chart. Two sticks were running hotter under load, and I wanted to identity which two.

As far as the ordering, CPU#1 is on the right, #2 on the left. The sequence numbering may have something to do with the way the circuits are arranged. Not sure. The numbering may have technical significance to help engineers trouble-shoot boards, instead of helping us poor peons figure out which slots are which.

And thanks for info on sigs. I tried my first one, as you can see, but it didn't turn out that great. I photoshop it on the desktop, then xfer it to laptop connected to web. During the xfer some of the pixels must have fallen out of the file since it's much smaller than yours. I'll have to look around; I've got some extra pixels around here somewhere. Don't you hate it when you can't remember where you put stuff? And they're so small!

garuda said:

...And thanks for info on sigs. I tried my first one, as you can see, but it didn't turn out that great. I photoshop it on the desktop, then xfer it to laptop connected to web. During the xfer some of the pixels must have fallen out of the file since it's much smaller than yours. I'll have to look around; I've got some extra pixels around here somewhere. Don't you hate it when you can't remember where you put stuff? And they're so small!