Pictures Of Your Dually Rigs!

I might end up watercooling it. With all my spare parts, all I would need is another waterblock. But I thought about setting up these CPU heatsink fans differently, but the difference in air temperature going into the second heatsink won't really make a difference. (maybe 2 or 3 degrees, if that) I set them up so they will both blow toward the back of the case and the hot air gets sucked out the rear case fan.
 
Pretty much the same setup as w1retap, except I went with Noctua NH-U12DXi4 and have the fans blowing upward.
 
CZ0Z8sM



Don't mind the mess. Wanted to make sure everything worked first.

Supermicro x8dte-f
12gb Hynix ram
Dual Xeon
Supermicro hsf
Chenbro case
Evga psu
Two 500gb hdd
1.5tb hdd

Hard drives are leftovers from my microserver. Going to replace them with two to four 2tb drives and add at least two ssd.
 
Currently running esxi but might go to xen or proxmox. Also forgot to mention its e5630 xeons but I'll be switching those to l5630 or l5640 xeons and adding a 32gb kit. So far it's been a champ.
 
I've got a couple of X5675's on the way to upgrade one box. They're a bit pricey for a 1366 CPU but still a lot of bang for the buck. I also have a pair of x5670's in another box. 24 cores @ 2.93GHz get the job done.
 
After decommissioning my 2x Xeon Prestonia rig... Got this one set up:

Supermicro X7DVA-8
2x Xeon L5410
6x 2 GB DDR2 FB-DIMM PC2-5300F
1x NVIDIA Quadro 2000 (cut to fit in PCIe x8 slot)
2x U320 SCSI 10K RPM HDD (Seagate, HP rebranded)
1x Samsung DVD reader (IDE)
1x Samsung DVD rewriter (IDE)
1x HP DDS4 U160 SCSI tape drive
1x 3.5" floppy drive
Creative Labs Audigy 4 Sound Card (the board does not have onboard audio)

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I realize this is somewhat retro - still, this critter runs Windows 10 x64 nicely. :)

cu D2k
 
Just built a new dually system from some scrap parts that fell in my lap. Will post pictures as soon as I have time.

Supermicro X8DTi
2x Intel Xeon X5670 (6-core, 2.93ghz)
48GB DDR3-1333 (Might be upgrading to 96GB or more)
Radeon R9 290 4GB
Audigy 2 ZS
120GB AData SSD (Gotta cut corners somewhere)
2TB Seagate HDD
EVGA 750 Wattt PSU
Cooler Master Mastercase 5

This will replace my existing HP XW6400 that's been my primary gaming PC for a long time now.

HP XW6400
2x Intel Xeon 5160 (2-core, 3.0ghz)
16GB DDR2-667
Radeon HD 6950 2GB
120GB Sandisk SSD
1TB Seagate HDD
 
First of my new duallies. This one is built on the spare motherboard of the pair I bought after the first one I ebayed was faulty. Dual Xeon X5650, 24gb Ram, Supermicro X8DTL-3F, Antec P280, Asus R9 380 video. It's mostly spare parts, as I never started out intending to build 2 different dual machines.

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This motherboard had a couple of issues - extreme heat issues on the north bridge, and the PCI-E x16 slot was obviously never expected to hold a video card of any real girth.

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My fix for both

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First of my new duallies. This one is built on the spare motherboard of the pair I bought after the first one I ebayed was faulty. Dual Xeon X5650, 24gb Ram, Supermicro X8DTL-3F, Antec P280, Asus R9 380 video. It's mostly spare parts, as I never started out intending to build 2 different dual machines.

This motherboard had a couple of issues - extreme heat issues on the north bridge, and the PCI-E x16 slot was obviously never expected to hold a video card of any real girth.

I built a very similar system to that from spare parts as well. I'm using a E-ATX X8DTI and a pair of X5670's instead.

I had a number of problems getting the whole package together as well. I had to modify the CPU back plates to work with more consumer grade heatsinks I put on mine. I also had extreme overheating issues with my northbridge which was causing all sorts of problems. I tried first to replace the heatsink and fan on the northbridge all together, that worked but it was interfering with graphics cards installed. So instead I put the original heatsink back on and rigged a small fan onto the heatsink. That seems to be working.

These boards seems to be designed to only work well in rackmount cases with a ton of ventilation to make passive CPU and northbridge heatsinks work well. I thought the X8DTL's were more for desktop/workstation applications, which makes it interesting that you had the same overheating problems I did.
 
I built a very similar system to that from spare parts as well. I'm using a E-ATX X8DTI and a pair of X5670's instead.

I had a number of problems getting the whole package together as well. I had to modify the CPU back plates to work with more consumer grade heatsinks I put on mine. I also had extreme overheating issues with my northbridge which was causing all sorts of problems. I tried first to replace the heatsink and fan on the northbridge all together, that worked but it was interfering with graphics cards installed. So instead I put the original heatsink back on and rigged a small fan onto the heatsink. That seems to be working.

These boards seems to be designed to only work well in rackmount cases with a ton of ventilation to make passive CPU and northbridge heatsinks work well. I thought the X8DTL's were more for desktop/workstation applications, which makes it interesting that you had the same overheating problems I did.

It's funny. The first board I picked up was an X8DAi, which would make a great desktop board except for it's size - 2 x16 slots and built in sound. The southbridge worried me because it had active cooling, and the fan seemed a bit duff on my board, so it wasn't going to be easy to fix and not interfere with the graphics cards I was going to use. I've never seen a 40mm fan I liked. Turned out to be a non issue, as the board was DOA. Couldn't find another DAi at a decent price so I got the DTL and DT3 instead.

Both new motherboards had passive heatsinks on the Northbridge, which made me happy, but I knew they ran hot so I made sure there was airflow across it. Job's done, I said. A few minutes after posting for the first time, it was more like "What's that smell?" Checked the bios and the bloody thing had nearly hit 100c.

Tried a few solutions. The P280 has 120mm fan mounts on the motherboard side of the drive cages, but the only fan that gave enough cooling there was one of the 3000rpm screamers - less than ideal. I tried a few types of ducting - you can see one of the attempts in the pic thats linked at the bottom of the post: a 120mm x 20mm fan with the frame of an old 120mm x ~50mm fan bolted to it. An 80mm at the end of the video card worked much better, and once I saw that video card support was necessary it was easy. Northbridge stays about 60c in this config, which is hotter than the CPUs.

The Tylersburg northbridge has a heck of a time keeping up with two cps at once. I've got a couple of X8STi's, and it gets warm there, but nothing like on the duals.

As for heatsinks, the Noctua's I have work fine, but are spendy. The Corsair water cooling was chosen partly for noise, but also because they bolt directly the Xeon backplate. With some M3 standoffs, you could also use a 212 evo, and probably a Hyper T4. I'm curious as to how you modified the backplate to mount the consumer heatsinks?

I have a project coming up using X8DTTs, and that's going to require some interesting cooling.
 
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It's funny. The first board I picked up was an X8DAi, which would make a great desktop board except for it's size - 2 x16 slots and built in sound. The southbridge worried me because it had active cooling, and the fan seemed a bit duff on my board, so it wasn't going to be easy to fix and not interfere with the graphics cards I was going to use. I've never seen a 40mm fan I liked. Turned out to be a non issue, as the board was DOA. Couldn't find another DAi at a decent price so I got the DTL and DT3 instead.

Both new motherboards had passive heatsinks on the Northbridge, which made me happy, but I knew they ran hot so I made sure there was airflow across it. Job's done, I said. A few minutes after posting for the first time, it was more like "What's that smell?" Checked the bios and the bloody thing had nearly hit 100c.

Tried a few solutions. The P280 has 120mm fan mounts on the motherboard side of the drive cages, but the only fan that gave enough cooling there was one of the 3000rpm screamers - less than ideal. I tried a few types of ducting - you can see one of the attempts in the pic thats linked at the bottom of the post: a 120mm x 20mm fan with the frame of an old 120mm x ~50mm fan bolted to it. An 80mm at the end of the video card worked much better, and once I saw that video card support was necessary it was easy. Northbridge stays about 60c in this config, which is hotter than the CPUs.

The Tylersburg northbridge has a heck of a time keeping up with two cps at once. I've got a couple of X8STi's, and it gets warm there, but nothing like on the duals.

As for heatsinks, the Noctua's I have work fine, but are spendy. The Corsair water cooling was chosen partly for noise, but also because they bolt directly the Xeon backplate. With some M3 standoffs, you could also use a 212 evo, and probably a Hyper T4. I'm curious as to how you modified the backplate to mount the consumer heatsinks?

I have a project coming up using X8DTTs, and that's going to require some interesting cooling.

The X8DTL was the only board I could find that had a PCIe x16 slot and didn't cost a fortune. I picked mine up for like $90. No onboard sound though.
 
I've long been a huge fan of dual-CPU machines, all the way back to the days of running oc'd Celeron 366's at 550 on an Abit BP-6.

In fact, I have a relevant classic gaming machine I put together a while back:

k7d.jpg


That's a Tyan K7D Master-L with two Athlon 2100+, cooled by Alpha Pal 6035 heatsinks, 2gb of ram, an ATI 9600xt, and Dual Voodoo2 in SLI. That was a serious machine, oh so very long ago!

I'll have to find a PS2 keyboard and mouse to boot it, though, as my USB ones aren't detected in the BIOS screen.

I was sorely disappointed when multi-core CPUs came about. Sure, you got more CPU power than could be had on my dated Duallies, but it really just wasn't the same.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, when I found out that old Xeon equipment could be had for a song... relatively speaking. There was no going back - I'd have a duallie back in my life again!

Here's Akuma, my Cube-cased, LED-lit labour of love!

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The motherboard literally only just fits in this case

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I had to switch out the 2 x 140mm fans for 3 x 120mm. The 140mm hits components on the end of motherboard.

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The Specs:

Supermicro X8DTL-3F
2 x Xeon 5680 (3.33ghz, 6c/12t)
2 x Corsair H80i, in single fan pull mode due to clearance issues
48gb Registered ECC
2 x 480gb Sandisk SSD, 4tb WD Red
GTX 1060 for 3 x 4k LG 27UD58 monitors
Corsair Air 540
3 x Corsair HD120 RGB fans

I even made a Youtube:

An only slightly amusing demonstration of how long it takes this motherboard to boot from cold to the Windows login:



And an incredibly boring video of the glowy bits, taken by a camera that hates glowy bits. Don't say I didn't warn you.

 
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I'm glad to see I'm not the only one using old server-grade hardware for gaming!
 
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one using old server-grade hardware for gaming!

I'm not actually using this one for gaming. The GTX 1060 is there specifically because I wanted something to drive 3 x 4k displays for general workstation work and light 3d (some 3d modelling). I originally had 2 x RX 470 4gb cards, but the X8DT3 only has one 16x slot. My gaming rig is in the basement, and is a relatively standard i7-6700k with a GTX 980ti, though my 1080ti is in the mail.
 
I love my AIR540

The Air 540 is a good looking case, and the airflow on the motherboard side is superb - I didn't have to do anything special to cool the northbridge on this build like I did with the Antec case. However, I found the fit and finish a little rough, the 3.5HD options limited, and the materials were mundane. It may be the Canadian dollar, or the economy in general, but I had paid premium case money, so I was a little disappointed.
 
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The Air 540 is a good looking case, and the airflow on the motherboard side is superb - I didn't have to do anything special to cool the northbridge on this build like I did with the Antec case. However, I found the fit and finish a little rough, the 3.5HD options limited, and the materials were mundane. It may be the Canadian dollar, or the economy in general, but I had paid premium case money, so I was a little disappointed.

Those are all fair points.

I got a new job and I kinda want to try one of those 90 degree silverstone fortress cases, they all seem to be MATX thou, bummer.
 
Someting "new" has arrived today :clown:

Dell C6100
4x Dual Sockel 1366 at 2HE, currently running 2x Xeon E5620, 24-48GB Ram, 500GB HDD and Proxmox on each node.

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I've long been a huge fan of dual-CPU machines, all the way back to the days of running oc'd Celeron 366's at 550 on an Abit BP-6.

In fact, I have a relevant classic gaming machine I put together a while back:

View attachment 21874

That's a Tyan K7D Master-L with two Athlon 2100+, cooled by Alpha Pal 6035 heatsinks, 2gb of ram, an ATI 9600xt, and Dual Voodoo2 in SLI. That was a serious machine, oh so very long ago!

I'll have to find a PS2 keyboard and mouse to boot it, though, as my USB ones aren't detected in the BIOS screen.

I was sorely disappointed when multi-core CPUs came about. Sure, you got more CPU power than could be had on my dated Duallies, but it really just wasn't the same.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, when I found out that old Xeon equipment could be had for a song... relatively speaking. There was no going back - I'd have a duallie back in my life again!

Here's Akuma, my Cube-cased, LED-lit labour of love!

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The motherboard literally only just fits in this case

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I had to switch out the 2 x 140mm fans for 3 x 120mm. The 140mm hits components on the end of motherboard.

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The Specs:

Supermicro X8DTL-3F
2 x Xeon 5680 (3.33ghz, 6c/12t)
2 x Corsair H80i, in single fan pull mode due to clearance issues
48gb Registered ECC
2 x 480gb Sandisk SSD, 4tb WD Red
GTX 1060 for 3 x 4k LG 27UD58 monitors
Corsair Air 540
3 x Corsair HD120 RGB fans

I even made a Youtube:

An only slightly amusing demonstration of how long it takes this motherboard to boot from cold to the Windows login:



And an incredibly boring video of the glowy bits, taken by a camera that hates glowy bits. Don't say I didn't warn you.



All right Matrixfy:

Sorry for the inconvenience and I have a question about this motherboard supermicro x8dti that you have

I have a board just like yours with a smaller configuration
E5520
16 gb of ram
GTX 770 SC
128gb SSD
650w Source

What I want to know is only you have a performance problem with it, since I use it in 3ds max (graphics) and the set is slow I can not have an object manipulation performance since my video card is good

I also noticed that my board does not have the jumper to disable the onboard video, but this is damaging to the performance of my GTX 770

If you can help me I will be very grateful we can talk about the same and other things
 
All right Matrixfy:

Sorry for the inconvenience and I have a question about this motherboard supermicro x8dti that you have

I have a board just like yours with a smaller configuration
E5520
16 gb of ram
GTX 770 SC
128gb SSD
650w Source

What I want to know is only you have a performance problem with it, since I use it in 3ds max (graphics) and the set is slow I can not have an object manipulation performance since my video card is good

I also noticed that my board does not have the jumper to disable the onboard video, but this is damaging to the performance of my GTX 770

If you can help me I will be very grateful we can talk about the same and other things

I haven't used the X8DTL machine much, except as a stand-in desktop for the couple of months it took to actually build the bigger machine. When I get some of my other projects going, it will be a linux box so I can do my dev work.

I disabled the built in VGA on both boards in the windows device manager, as there seemed to be no way to do it otherwise. Haven't noticed issues on either computer since, other than 6gb video ram is pushing it a bit for 3x4k and 1x1080p displays on Akuma.

I have used blender on the X8DT3 and have been very happy with the cpu rendering speeds, but those were pretty expensive cpus compared to the E5520.

The problem may be your CPUs. The X8DTL originally had E5520s installed when I was actually using the machine, and I found it annoyingly sluggish at times, even just for surfing. The higher cache, more cores, and higher single core speeds on even the E5620's sped things up noticeably - though I have not tested blender on that one yet.
 
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Pic from Google image search because I'm lazy.
But this is essentially my two Z800s with 2x X5690s each, except with single-slot XFX 7750s.

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Dell Precision T7810 Workstation Bare Bones $600
Two Intel Xeon E5-2673V3 $758
Kingston ValueRAM KVR24R17S4/8 DDR4-2400 $432
Second heatsink $60
Dell SSD M.2 Card $175
Samsung 960Pro 1TB $600
Dual 8pin power cable from china $12
$2637 total not counting video card moved from old rig.
http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/5563523
( old rig http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/5548731 )

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Bit expensive, but stupid fast now + even more speed later when I upgrade to a pair of E5-2687w v4.
 
Nice - that is basically that same system as my T7910! Of course configured different... I love this machine - going to have to reboot soon for some updates. Current uptime is almost 2 months. lol
 
Retired the SR2 and put it on the wall.

EVGA SR2 MB
2 x Intel Xeon X5690's
24GB Corsair DDR3
LSI 9260 4i w/4 Seagate 600 SSDs in RAID 0
Samsung Evo 500 OS drive
GTX 970 w/ Corsair HG10 970 Cooler

This was in a Corsair 900D case with an LSI 9265 8i and an Intel SAS expander controlling these Seagates and another 8 Evo 500s in RAID 0 plus 4 HGST 4GB spinners in RAID 10.

Graphics cards went from GTX 580 SLI, 780 SLI, 980ti SLI and ended with a 1080ti. It drove Tri SLI 980ti's and SLI 1080ti's for a quick minute - just so I could say "been there, done that". Hence the 1300W PSU.

Lot's of fun driving this beast over the years.


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Retired the SR2 and put it on the wall.

EVGA SR2 MB
2 x Intel Xeon X5690's
24GB Corsair DDR3
LSI 9260 4i w/4 Seagate 600 SSDs in RAID 0
Samsung Evo 500 OS drive
GTX 970 w/ Corsair HG10 970 Cooler

This was in a Corsair 900D case with an LSI 9265 8i and an Intel SAS expander controlling these Seagates and another 8 Evo 500s in RAID 0 plus 4 HGST 4GB spinners in RAID 10.

Graphics cards went from GTX 580 SLI, 780 SLI, 980ti SLI and ended with a 1080ti. It drove Tri SLI 980ti's and SLI 1080ti's for a quick minute - just so I could say "been there, done that". Hence the 1300W PSU.

Lot's of fun driving this beast over the years.

Damn. I remember searching for one of those SR2 boards when I built my current system. They are still crazy expensive.
 
...all the way back to the days of running oc'd Celeron 366's at 550 on an Abit BP-6.

THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!

Dude you just time-machined me back to the first rig I EVER built !! I was one of the lucky ones to get a Celeron 300A running 24/7 @550
 
Retired the SR2 and put it on the wall.

Proper way to retire her. I retired mine in January of 2016 after 6 years of faithful service. Had a similar set up like yours but with full watercooling on triple Titans. OC'ed the hell out of my x5680's to 4.0GHz. Now running on another dual proc system to keep the tradition alive.
 
Here is my dual Xeon in an Air 540 case I built in December or January.

I recently added a Corsair Lighting Node Pro and 3 LED strips to the machine so I could change the colors, I had red LED strips in there when I originally built it.

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The day I assembled it,
I put the 140mm fans on the outside of the front of the case since they hit the motherboard when mounted inside the case.
The front cover has clearance for the fans and I put the magnetic dust cover on in the inside of the case.
In the above images, I removed the 140mm fans and installed 3 slim 120mm fans on the inside.
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Intel Coolers work pretty well,

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Thank you all for posting delicious dually porn. I'll get my hands on one some day, but really want to be able to OC a little. Maybe a dual Epyc when Zen2 cores are out?

We'll see :)
 
hello just a quick question : is there a chance to upgrade my old tyan
Thunder n4250QE S4985-E with 6 core istambul cpu s ? officially this mobo support only quad core cpus ....
 
The current battlewagon, Crimson Tide.

I was running a Corsair 800D, but the CPU and GPU temps under load were pretty shit during the summer. This case moves much more air and with the 140mm coolers, surprisingly runs about 10C cooler than the old case. The 800D is now my server, but sadly not dual-socket right now.

In the process of moving I was able to drop the spot cooling I had on my VRMs. Due to massive airflow potential in this case, the 750 Ti I use for my secondary monitors doesn't even need a fan on it anymore. I would have dropped it completely, but Nvidia stupidly will not fix their idle clocks when running more than two monitors on a single card.

I might do the all-core unlock, not sure yet.

I'm thinking Corsair should add some active cooling for the 3.5-inch bay on the cold side of the case, I installed a 60mm Noctua temporarily until I move my last spinning disks off to the server. Related to this, making the 3.5-inch bay replaceable with another 4-drive SSD caddy would be a nice change in the future. Also a tempered glass side panel would look great on this case.

Corsair Air 740
Asus Z10PE-D8 WS
2x QFSC 10-Core QS (Stock: 2.9 GHz base, 3.1 all-core, 3.3 two-core) at 104 MHz FSB (3.0 GHz base, 3.2 all-core, 3.4 two-core)
2x Cooler Master MasterLiquid 140mm
64GB Samsung DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz
2x EVGA GTX 1080 FTW Hybrid
EVGA GTX 750 Ti
Sound Blaster Z
Samsung 850 Evo 250GB (OS drive)
Intel 330 120GB (Scratch drive)
4x Corsair Force LE 480GB
2x WD Black 1TB
EVGA Supernova 1000P2

Old build:
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The new config:
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