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 (
http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/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!
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brass-dual-1.jpg
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.
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brass-dual-2.jpg
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.
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brass-dual-3.jpg
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.
