A quiet dual xeon system
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 12:44 am
Hi all, so here's my latest crazy creation. I wanted something that bordered on insanely high powered, so I got an Asus Z9 PE-D8 WS motherboard, which is one of the latest dual E5 Xeon motherboards. I got a pair of E5-2687W Xeon processors, 3.1GHz base clock at TDP of 150W, 8 cores, 16 threads. Now it's a tricky motherboard, because it's extra long, 12" by 13", so it won't fit in a normal case. Luckily, it fit in my big brass case (viewtopic.php?f=14&t=59803&hilit=brass), although I lost one feature. When I made the big brass case, I pulled the motherboard tray from an old coolermaster stacker case, so it was fairly big. I was surprised to find that there were mounting holes at the bottom that fit, and the ones at the top fit, but the middle row didn't fit. For those, I used some plastic motherboard mounts that seem to be about the right length to keep the board fairly flat. I did lose one feature, there was a big vent near the bottom of the tray, and I used that for routing some cables to the power supply and hard drives on the back of the motherboard. I have some space around the sides to route them, but it's a little messy at the moment. I've been able to do some overclocking by running the BCLK up to 103 MHz, but I'm still optimizing things, so I haven't put the case back on yet. In terms of cooling, I started with a pair of prolimatech megahalems, but then I did some measuring and decided that noctua nh-d14s would fit. It was a little tight, but it worked! And it got the cpu temps down from the 70s to the 60s! Anyway, time for pics!
View above the motherboard. The fans may seem a little extreme, but they all seem to be important, I've tried removing them, and temps go up.
One great thing about the motherboard is the large number of sata ports. I'm still using an add-in card because I've got a few more drives to add, but I used to have two cards.
One tricky part of the dual socket setup is the need for dual cpu power connectors. It's easy enough to get an adapter, but I've had some trouble with a few. The psu is an Antec signature 850, so it seems pretty stable, but the total system draw is 575W from the wall, according to a kill-a-watt.
And I'll try to add some system monitor info too.
View above the motherboard. The fans may seem a little extreme, but they all seem to be important, I've tried removing them, and temps go up.
One great thing about the motherboard is the large number of sata ports. I'm still using an add-in card because I've got a few more drives to add, but I used to have two cards.
One tricky part of the dual socket setup is the need for dual cpu power connectors. It's easy enough to get an adapter, but I've had some trouble with a few. The psu is an Antec signature 850, so it seems pretty stable, but the total system draw is 575W from the wall, according to a kill-a-watt.
And I'll try to add some system monitor info too.