D201gly2: product and SPCR review discussion

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MikeC
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Re: OK. Here's the scoop

Post by MikeC » Tue Nov 20, 2007 2:42 pm

derekva wrote:Yeah, that's how Intel is rolling with the D201GLY2 - a board in an antistatic bag with a CD, an I/O shield and chassis stickers. It's odd that the -T variant is using a 1.33GHz CPU, though - I still suspect that you have a Yonah rather than Merom CPU, so power ratings will be artificially high.

What's the stepping info?
No CD, I/O shield or stickers. Like I said, just the board. No time either... will post later.

vimaxus
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Post by vimaxus » Wed Nov 21, 2007 2:28 am

Because SPCR has the T version I'm even more interested in derekva's board because I can't find the T near me or anywhere that will ship it here.

Can it boot from a usb stick? (for total silence -finally-)

syburgh
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Post by syburgh » Wed Nov 21, 2007 5:42 am

Received D2012GLY2 over the weekend-- it does boot from USB flash disk. It seems to boot quickly (1GB DIMM) from SATA, IDE, and USB. The BIOS seems to be evolving rapidly, though the board seems stable. Arrived in unmarked box containing:
  • D201GLY2 board packaged in a static bag
  • Jumper diagram sticker
  • SATA cable (latching)
  • IDE cable
  • ATX IO gasket
  • driver CD
Not planning to install Windows, but it does run Linux and BSD (FreeNAS) well. No crashes, but I am not (yet) comfortable letting it run without a fan as it quickly reaches 61-67C (reported by sensors, have not verified) and the heatsinks are both too hot to touch. Don't have a case for the board, so it's mounted on an aluminum plate for now. I know the junction temperature for the Celeron 220 CPU is 100C, so maybe this temperature is OK. Fortunately the CPU and case fan headers seem to be variable speed and the CPU needs only minimal airflow (fan is connected directly to header, and slows down to about 1400RPM once the BIOS hands off to boot loader).

Am also somewhat concerned about the lack of clearance for the picoPSU-- one of the yellow colored housings is in contact with the LAN+USB motherboard header. While it does not seem hot, I would prefer that it have clearance. The D201GLY2 PCB is likely the same as the D201GLY, which is benchmarked on the picoPSU site-- hopefully they are aware of the situation from their testing ("D201GLY Power Consumption" article). Sent inquiry to the picoPSU support email yesterday, awaiting response.

Board will reportedly fit in an Mini-Box M200/M300 chassis, though I am waiting for mine to arrive (on back order until next month).

Sorry about the missing URLs, seems I need "1 posts" before I can properly format links...

dougz
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Post by dougz » Thu Nov 22, 2007 1:58 pm

Good info, syburgh.

I assume that the link you intended was http://resources.mini-box.com/online/MB ... ption.html

What video resolution did you use for Linux? Distro & drivers?
syburgh wrote:I know the junction temperature for the Celeron 220 CPU is 100C
I wonder about the Northbridge in the M200/M300 boxes, though.
derekva wrote:...
2. The CPU cooler runs warm, but the northbridge chip runs HOT. You gotta have a fan (I'm running a 92mm Nexus while I breadboard this) running across this motherboard.
viewtopic.php?p=379453#379453
Of course, derekva may have been doing something video intensive and that might be irrelevant for a headless server/gateway/NAS, etc. I don't think I'd want to use this board as a mini workstation in a fanless mini case without doing more thermal analysis.

pfft
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heat and usb booting

Post by pfft » Fri Nov 23, 2007 12:26 am

I have mythbuntu backend loaded and without any graphics intensive anything the chipset heatsink is hot enough to elicit an involuntary withdrawal when touched. The processor heatsink is cool but the case has a thin 80mm fan blowing at half of that heatsink. I believe the board definitely needs careful consideration with respect to cooling.

The iStorm power supply is flat out inadequate. It has trouble booting this board with just an old travelstar, pci nic, and usb mouse. It's still a nice case and may merit a better power supply but I'm going to load this system so I'm looking at a different case with sfx power supply that still meets my space constraints.

About booting from a usb flash drive. The bios has many options that I remember from playing with puppy linux. It has specific options for usb removable, mass storage emulation ,zip emulation and boot from usb first.
I haven't tried myself but the bios options seem promising that way. If anything there are too many options that concern usb flash booting and it may get complicated deciding which options to enable.

I suspect that the storagereview figures for power draw during spinup for the WD 1TB GP drive may actually be understated. The drive gave me problems on a 430 watt earthwatts with a WD 500g drive, 2 120mm fans, 1 70mm fan, biostar TA690G motherboard with AM2 4000+, dvd drive and a few usb peripherals. An old samsung that the 1TB WD had temporarily replaced for testing gave no problems in the same configuration cords and all.

The pci nic has been giving intermittent boot trouble in general. It is not yet installed in software. I don't know if it involves the riser and bad connections or the nic draws more than 10 watts on boot or the board doesn't like 2 nics or the hot chipset is responsible or what. I'm going to yank everything from the case and piece things together in stages on a plywood board with a brute power supply to rule out and isolate difficulties.

Mythbuntu seems nice at first glance.

jrscherer
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Post by jrscherer » Fri Nov 23, 2007 5:07 pm

Have been a long time searcher and reader of the forums and website in general, have just started to get totally into the silent/low wattage computing, even with gaming, and have been enjoying seeing what can be done for it.

Figured, instead of adding another topic out there and know that this one is mainly about this motherboard, which I have just bought and have been enjoying, except the slight heat issue. I am wondering what people have done to add in fans onto the heatsink. I know one thing I was able to do was take one of my old P3 heatsinks and take the fan off that and "clip" it onto the heatsink. Any thoughts for this?

hans007
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Post by hans007 » Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:53 am

jmk wrote:derekva

http://www.amazon.com/3-Port-Serial-100 ... B000I2DRE6
(3-Port Serial ATA & 10/100/1000 PCI Combo Card)

this is somewhat of a waste anyway. Max bandwidth of pci bus is no where near 1 GBps its 133MBps so its barely faster than 100 ethernet anyway.

i believe you wuold actually be better off using a USB 2.0 gigabit card.

floffe
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Post by floffe » Sat Nov 24, 2007 1:37 am

hans007 wrote:this is somewhat of a waste anyway. Max bandwidth of pci bus is no where near 1 GBps its 133MBps so its barely faster than 100 ethernet anyway.
No, PCI is 133 Mbyte per second, which is just above 1 Gbit (which is 125Mbyte/second). Keep in mind that MB != Mb, and network speeds are defined i Mb.

pfft
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Post by pfft » Sat Nov 24, 2007 5:52 am

Everything is working now. Both nics and the wd + laptop drive. The system is snappy for websurfing. I believe that power was the issue I had earlier.

Right now I have the board in an old mATX case open on its side with an antec smartpower 350. The cooling is a medium speed panaflo kind of laying across the atx power cable at an angle so that it blows some air on the processor and chipset. A finger on the northbridge feels at or just above body temperature. A little airflow goes a long way. The raw southbridge is about the same. the processor requires sliding my finger down to the level of the board before giving a slight impression of warmth.

A few notes about questions others have asked.

Using this board for puppy linux seems great at first but the mythbuntu linux video drivers aren't good. There is a line of short black segments running from top to bottom of the screen(1024x768) about a quarter of the way from the left of the screen. This doesn't matter for a backend headless server of course. I'm running a front and backend to get aquainted with mythbuntu right now. It's what I'm using to type this post.

As far as cooling. Well, a little airflow has made a great difference. If you want to attach a fan to the existing heatsinks then this will probably be adequate as long as the case itself has some ability to breathe. Elastic bead cord such as stretch magic or the cheap stuff on a card from sewing and craft supply stores might work. My thought is to tie the cord to a fan mounting hole and stretch the cord a bit and tie it to a heatsink spring loop on the motherboard. One on each side. This should work fine. As mentioned in an earlier post, a fan blowing in from the side of the case that covered just a bit of the cpu heatsink kept that heatsink cool. In this situation just a small fan tied to the northbridge heatsink should be ok.

I am now pleased with the board's ability to run two nics, the wd drive and to run cool with a bit of airflow. One thing that grabbed my attention was the power draw specs fom Intel. They list over 100 watts potential draw on the 5volt rail alone from a fully loaded system. I guess the greater processing potential of this board vs a via board does come at a power consumption price.

The case now on order for this system is here: http://short-circuit.com/product/APEX-MI-100.html

I think it is an interesting small mini itx case. It will actually fit screwed to a 2'x2' plywood sheet lag bolted into the concrete basement wall also holding a dsl router, telephone distribution, cat5e lan distribution, coax tv distribution and amp, router, switch and HDhomerun.

yamawho
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Post by yamawho » Sat Nov 24, 2007 5:54 am

jrscherer, still waiting for mine to be delivered ...

What case did you use for your build ?

yamawho
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Post by yamawho » Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:02 am

pfft, I have been looking at this case as well.
My worry is that the power supply might be in the way of the heatsink.
Apex has a new case MW-100 coming out which does not have this issue.

http://www.apextechusa.com/products.asp?pID=157

pfft
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Post by pfft » Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:17 am

Yes the power supply impinging on the heatsink is a concern. Newegg sells a coolermaster 1U heatsink that should solve this problem. There is also an alpha novatek wingfin from plycon. Both of these heatsinks have slots down the middle offering the potential to reuse the existing processor heatsink spring clip to secure them. The alpha comes without a fan. The coolermaster has a fan but newegg reviews say that it fails after a few months. So one of these heatsinks with a quality 40mm thin fan should work with this case. With an 80 whirling just above the heatsinks, going without a fan on the heatsinks may be an option. Thanks for the mention of the new case but the order is already placed and I am impatient. :D

yamawho
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Post by yamawho » Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:26 am

I have been thinking of building a custom case something like this and have a 80mm fan blowing from the top ...

http://slipperyskip.com/page18.html

pfft
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power draw

Post by pfft » Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:52 am

yamawho,

Watch out for power requirements with this board. The minibox article showing this board with a pico psu was interesting but given my experience the power requirements of this board are worthy of careful consideration. The Intel data sheet mentions 108 watts just of 5 volts fully loaded. This includes all usb controllers inhabited but still if you imagine subtracting watts from this figure based on your particular reduced hardware implementation then there is still the potential of significant draw. Even if the typical draw is moderate a power supply will have to perform during temporary peak draw. I think that examining the 5 watt spec on the power supply for this board and ruling out anything below 40 at least is a good idea. I am pulling that 40 watt figure from thin air, but as an excercise, subtract the 15 watts from usb, another 15 for the usb controller and what is left to subract from that whopping 108 watts of five volts? The 40 watt figure may be too low.

syburgh
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Post by syburgh » Sat Nov 24, 2007 8:14 am

yamawho wrote:I have been thinking of building a custom case something like this and have a 80mm fan blowing from the top ...

http://slipperyskip.com/page18.html
My test stand is similar, if a bit less ambitious.

yamawho
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Post by yamawho » Sat Nov 24, 2007 8:33 am

syburgh,

Nice job 8)

Thats more in line with what I have in mine except I might add an extra level for a dvd-rom drive (full version) at the bottom.

What power supply components did you use ?

What have you tested so far ?

syburgh
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Post by syburgh » Sat Nov 24, 2007 8:55 am

Currently testing the board

Some preliminary thermal results seem to confirm that this platform will definitely require a some cooling.

Methodology:
  • Kill-A-Watt EZ to measure energy usage
  • Multimeter thermal probe to measure CPU and North Bridge temperatures
  • Software sensor thermal and power data
  • FreeNAS 0.686b2 (FreeBSD 6) OS environment with no load (does IDLE CPU)
  • Board powered by picoPSU-120 (SPCR review)
  • 1GB DDR2-667 DIMM (Kingston KVR667D2N5/1G)
  • LAN, PS/2 Keyboard, and CRT ports connected
  • CF-IDE adapter is only peripheral (5V, uses floppy power connector)
After 17 minutes of operation without a fan the system appears to have stabilized. The temperature reported for CPU_0 matches multimeter measurement for values >60C (below 60C it is -1C):
Sensors:

Motherboard Temperature: 51 ° C
CPU_0 Temperature: 71 ° C
CPU_1 Temperature: 4 ° C
VCore: 2.59375 V
Vit: 3.625 V
Vio: 3.1875 V
+5V: 5.29703 V
+12V: 14.125 V
-12V: -0.8125 V
-5V: -5.08828 V
Fan 1: Not Available
Fan 2: Not Available
Fan 3: Not Available
  • Ambient Temperature: 22C
  • North Bridge (not reported by sensors): 93C
  • Watts: 31 (after boot was 28, slow rise)
System has been stable throughout testing despite temperatures. Not sure what the thermal limits of the north bridge are, but I am concerned.

Will see what the afternoon brings... :)
Last edited by syburgh on Sat Nov 24, 2007 9:12 am, edited 2 times in total.

yamawho
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Post by yamawho » Sat Nov 24, 2007 9:12 am

syburgh,

Which power brick are you using with the PicoPSU-120 ?

Judging from your pics, it would be easy for you to install a fan in the top plate of your case blowing down or sucking out.

I'm running FreeNAS on a old PII 350 mhz with 64mg of ram. It's been running since April ... solid as a rock.

jrscherer
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Post by jrscherer » Sat Nov 24, 2007 9:31 am

Right now it's actually in a uATX case until I work on slowly being able to create my own type of case at some point.

syburgh
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Post by syburgh » Sat Nov 24, 2007 9:35 am

yamawho wrote:syburgh,

Which power brick are you using with the PicoPSU-120 ?
Brick is 12V 6.67A.
yamawho wrote:Judging from your pics, it would be easy for you to install a fan in the top plate of your case blowing down or sucking out.
Agreed-- normally run it with a loud, inefficient 92mm fan sitting next to the CPU, which brings the temperature down to +3-4C at the expense of 3W and some noise. Have ordered a Mini-Box M300 chassis for this box, but it's on back order until next month, so it will be awhile before I have to make a decision on cooling.

Some FreeNAS reported Information:
  • OS: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p8 (revison 199506)
  • Platform: i386-embedded on Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 220 @ 1.20GHz running at 1200 MHz
And results running the platform with a 92mm fan for 30 min (temperatures stable after 2-3min), same testing conditions:
Sensors:

Motherboard Temperature: 25 ° C
CPU_0 Temperature: 22 ° C
CPU_1 Temperature: 23 ° C
VCore: 2.60938 V
Vit: 3.625 V
Vio: 3.17188 V
+5V: 5.29703 V
+12V: 14.125 V
-12V: -0.8125 V
-5V: -5.06219 V
Fan 1: Not Available
Fan 2: 2766 rpm
Fan 3: Not Available
  • Ambient Temperature: 22C
  • North Bridge: 52C
  • South Bridge: 36C
  • Watts: 30 (no rise after boot)

vincentfox
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Post by vincentfox » Sat Nov 24, 2007 10:36 am

What are the heatsink attachment methods?

Wondering about possibility of replacing factory heatsink with something better. I would think to focus on the NB more so than CPU, are they independently attached?

Also very curious if a 2-gig RAM will work, as reported it did for previous model.

syburgh
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Post by syburgh » Sat Nov 24, 2007 10:49 am

vincentfox wrote:What are the heatsink attachment methods?

Wondering about possibility of replacing factory heatsink with something better. I would think to focus on the NB more so than CPU, are they independently attached?
Heatsinks are separately attached using compression clips that bisect the heatsink-- both HS are aluminum. The clips are held in place by loops soldered to the board itself.

jrscherer
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Post by jrscherer » Sat Nov 24, 2007 11:11 am

What I was also thinking was seeing if there is a good northbridge heatsink, seeing they usually attached the same way, that could be used for this motherboard also, just the funds and time have not been fully there for me lately.

yamawho
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Post by yamawho » Sat Nov 24, 2007 11:37 am

It would be interesting to find out what the save operating temps are and if Intel expects OEM's to add case cooling for this board.

syburgh
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Post by syburgh » Sat Nov 24, 2007 3:54 pm

Here are my results testing D201GLY2 in open environment (as posted earlier, photos of test setup).

I stopped testing after the North Bridge reached 93C. There appears to be no sensor for North Bridge temperature...

Note that the CPU fan header runs the fan at a constant (high) speed, where the REAR header varies speed based on temperature (not sure which sensor it monitors). The REAR fan is nearly always at low speed. It runs at the speed of the CPU fan when during POST and slows down as the boot loader starts.

Anyone know the upper limit for the SiS662 North Bridge temp?

frank2003
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Post by frank2003 » Sat Nov 24, 2007 4:26 pm

Vcore = 2.6v? That seems insanely high!! I admit my experience is limited to AMD processors, so maybe this level of VCore for Intel processors is normal...

derekva
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Post by derekva » Sat Nov 24, 2007 5:09 pm

jrscherer wrote:What I was also thinking was seeing if there is a good northbridge heatsink, seeing they usually attached the same way, that could be used for this motherboard also, just the funds and time have not been fully there for me lately.
I've been thinking about putting a ThermalRight HR-05 IFX on the CPU and some other heatsink (perhaps the CPU heatsink) on the northbridge.

Alternately, I was going to try and find one of those Zalman PCI slot fan mount brackets and suspend a 120mm Tricool (I've got scads of 'em) over the board. Since this is a server that lives in the garage (and sees 90+ degrees in the summer and 15-20 degrees in the winter), I'm not as worried about noise - just power consumption and reliability.

-D

jrscherer
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Post by jrscherer » Sat Nov 24, 2007 7:24 pm

I can only imagine how much cooler that would run with a heatsink like that on it. Now the issue comes into play the size of it, but maybe it gives me all the more reason to make my own case.

derekva
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Post by derekva » Sat Nov 24, 2007 7:34 pm

jrscherer wrote:I can only imagine how much cooler that would run with a heatsink like that on it. Now the issue comes into play the size of it, but maybe it gives me all the more reason to make my own case.
Not a problem in my case. The board is in a 4U shallow-depth rack mount server chassis. :D

On the other hand, I was thinking that this board would work great as a server in a 4-bay external SCSI enclosure. Replace the four 5.25" drive enclosures with a DVD-ROM and a 4-bay hot-swap SATA array (you'd have to use a SATA multiplexer), replace the standard PSU with a high-efficiency PSU, dremel out the 80mm fan mount for a 92 or 120mm fan and dremel out the I/O shield and build a motherboard tray to mount the DL201GLY...

OK, this is getting complicated. But dammit, it would be fun. Especially if I could get one of those enclosures from a PC Recycling place and do it for cheap.

-D

mcoleg
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Post by mcoleg » Sat Nov 24, 2007 8:18 pm

syburgh wrote:Here are my results testing D201GLY2 in open environment (as posted earlier, photos of test setup).

I stopped testing after the North Bridge reached 93C. There appears to be no sensor for North Bridge temperature...

Note that the CPU fan header runs the fan at a constant (high) speed, where the REAR header varies speed based on temperature (not sure which sensor it monitors). The REAR fan is nearly always at low speed. It runs at the speed of the CPU fan when during POST and slows down as the boot loader starts.

Anyone know the upper limit for the SiS662 North Bridge temp?
that's some nice test bench you've got.

seems a bit high. have you checked the temperatures of the northbridge sink with a thermometer of some sort? there are some cheap thermocouples availiable, something like this will work:

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/ ... s_id=22022

btw, this sink should fit on the cpu's retention loops. 7-volt it and it's quiet.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185039

alternatively, it can take Scythe's 40mm fan:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835226019

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