Ordering soon - last check!

AreEss said:
And that's an H8QC8, which you were warned on, which PCP&C and I both could have told you wouldn't work, and which is NOT an H8DCE and not at all relevant to this discussion!
What the hell is wrong with you? Seriously? Why do you have this burning need to spout off with this crap when you clearly do not have an inkling of understanding with regards to the requirements? I mean for the love of the gods, you're trying to say that a PCP&C 1KW is bad for an H8DCE because you were too stupid to check with Supermicro, PCP&C, or anyone with a clue before ordering one for an H8QC8. That's your own stupid fault, get over it.
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I didn't only check with PCP&C about using it for a H8QC8, I talked to PCP&C for quite a while and got a custom build specifically saying it is for the H8QC8. They didn't catch the mistake.

Supermicro is very fuzzy about their stated requirements for both PSU and RAM, at least what you get on paper is not really workable as such. When I started the build I knew I had a rocky road ahead of me both with PSU and RAM and that was OK.
 
BTW, your claim that NForce4 is so power-hungry is not true. I measured my socket 939 and 754 NForce boards against Via boards and there's just a few watts difference, and usually one is better without load and one better with load. The AMD-chipset based K8W in the office also doesn't seem to be any lighter than NForcepro based ones.

If people want a nice non-NForce dual socket 939 board then check out the Tyan Thunder K8W with AMD chipset. But it has drawbacks, for example the only SATA in it is that junky Sil311x which really hold the system back. The newer revisions are dual-core capable.

The Iwill DK8X is also a nice AMD chipset board and I think all Iwill dual-940 boards are DC capable.

However, even I decided to go NForce. There is always bitchingwhiningcomplaining about teh drivers, but NForce GbE and NForce SATA perform very very well when you have the drivers and you have clockgen control at least in Linux. The high power consumption of NForce is an unsubstanted rumo, probably started by the same people who take the TDP for power consumption.
 
Hypothetically, if I were to get a custom-wired PC P&C PSU...how much of a premium would I pay for custom wiring + ordering from them over say, newegg/monarch/etc?
 
Search around and see if you can find the PSU separately. I'm 95% sure that it's an Ablecom PSU that comes in that superserver model (I see that chassis at work all the time). Not to mention that the Supermicro 743 case sucks incredibly hard (in addition to being a waste since you're buying a Silverston case).
 
Volkum said:
Search around and see if you can find the PSU separately. I'm 95% sure that it's an Ablecom PSU that comes in that superserver model (I see that chassis at work all the time). Not to mention that the Supermicro 743 case sucks incredibly hard (in addition to being a waste since you're buying a Silverston case).
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Yes, Supermicro sells them as Ablecom, though I honestly don't know who makes them. It is not designed for workstation use, it's designed for server use with non-staggered startup for max-bays + moboard and CPUs being the design spec. The 743 doesn't suck if you're packing in lots of drives; it's vastly better than everyone else on the market by leaps and bounds. Especially LiLi and Silverstone. But if you're not packing in 8-10 drives, it's wouldn't be my first choice either.
 
AreEss said:
Yes, Supermicro sells them as Ablecom, though I honestly don't know who makes them. It is not designed for workstation use, it's designed for server use with non-staggered startup for max-bays + moboard and CPUs being the design spec. The 743 doesn't suck if you're packing in lots of drives; it's vastly better than everyone else on the market by leaps and bounds. Especially LiLi and Silverstone. But if you're not packing in 8-10 drives, it's wouldn't be my first choice either.
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Well the row of fans (which are louder than my vacuum might I add) inbetween the mobo area and the drives make them an extreme pain in the ass to work on the drives unless you very very small hands. The only 2 features that I like on the chassis are they you can get a backplane for it (SATA/IDE/SCSI) and that you can rotate the 5.25" bays for use in a rack or as a tower. For the price (anything Supermicro is damn expensive as we all know), a Lian Li or a Silverstone will be *infinitely* better. And with it being that expensive, it's steel, not aluminum :(
 
Volkum said:
Well the row of fans (which are louder than my vacuum might I add) inbetween the mobo area and the drives make them an extreme pain in the ass to work on the drives unless you very very small hands. The only 2 features that I like on the chassis are they you can get a backplane for it (SATA/IDE/SCSI) and that you can rotate the 5.25" bays for use in a rack or as a tower. For the price (anything Supermicro is damn expensive as we all know), a Lian Li or a Silverstone will be *infinitely* better. And with it being that expensive, it's steel, not aluminum :(
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You don't understand the purpose of the Supermicro cases; they're integrated turnkey solutions. Add CPUs, RAM, drives and go. You have the cables and such preinstalled, so you don't do all that. They're also much better in terms of thermal design than Silverstone or LiLi - and no, your CPUs being 3C lower in a LiLi versus a hacked up Supermicro doesn't count. The SM stuff is full package; your LiLi 1200 will cook off your PSU with the same number of drives as the Supermicro. All the cost goes into the backplanes and build quality as well; I wouldn't trust a Silverstone to stand up to someone tripping over it. The SM, I'd expect to break their foot. Those things are unholy beasts, almost as good as the old PCP&C chrome-monstrosity. (Which, for reference, was more expensive than anything I've seen on the market lately.)
 
AreEss said:
You don't understand the purpose of the Supermicro cases; they're integrated turnkey solutions. Add CPUs, RAM, drives and go. You have the cables and such preinstalled, so you don't do all that. They're also much better in terms of thermal design than Silverstone or LiLi - and no, your CPUs being 3C lower in a LiLi versus a hacked up Supermicro doesn't count. The SM stuff is full package; your LiLi 1200 will cook off your PSU with the same number of drives as the Supermicro. All the cost goes into the backplanes and build quality as well; I wouldn't trust a Silverstone to stand up to someone tripping over it. The SM, I'd expect to break their foot. Those things are unholy beasts, almost as good as the old PCP&C chrome-monstrosity. (Which, for reference, was more expensive than anything I've seen on the market lately.)
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I work for an OEM appliance builder and we almost exclusively sell Supermicro parts. Only a very small portion (> 10%) of the builds that we see in production are super servers. The cost difference is way too high to justify using superservers all the time. It costs the customer far less (especially when they're buying double and triple digit numbers of machines) to purchase components separately and pay us an extra assembly fee to put it all together.

They might cable the system for you, but if you add anything like a RAID card, you're better off not buying something precabled as you'll have to redo everything. Not to mention that they aren't designed to accomodate 6 pin PCI-E power connectors so you'll have to use molex adapters and reroute a bunch of molex connectors for your video card(s). Superservers are great if you're using on board video and just adding CPU(s), RAM, and hard drives...but that's it.

As for thermal design...the only reason they perform decently is because of the high CFM fans. We could all put 100+ CFM Delta's or whatever in our computers and say they're just as good as SM's stuff. If you don't mind having a jet plane taking off in your room the entire time you're on your computer, then sure 3C might be worth it to you.

I'm not going to go into build quality as I've seen such a volume of these that I could go on forever about things that have gone wrong. Since I don't actually have any statistics, I could just be throwing out worst possible scenarios rather than probable situations.
 
I ordered the parts today, pretty much exactly as listed in my original post. I went for the 4 sticks of corsair ram, the suggested m-audio soundcard, and two opty 248's. I haven't ordered the psu yet, but I'm going to call PCP+C on monday. I'm leaning that way again because I would really like the upgrade room.
 
Volkum said:
I work for an OEM appliance builder and we almost exclusively sell Supermicro parts. Only a very small portion (> 10%) of the builds that we see in production are super servers. The cost difference is way too high to justify using superservers all the time. It costs the customer far less (especially when they're buying double and triple digit numbers of machines) to purchase components separately and pay us an extra assembly fee to put it all together.
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Not disagreed there; not much demand seen here either, in large part because most of the builds I do, the Superservers don't have the physical capacity for what the customer needs. (Really high spindle-count with tight space requirements happens a lot. Thankfully there's AIC - Chenbro's backplanes are so shoddy I wouldn't even use them for scrap parts.

They might cable the system for you, but if you add anything like a RAID card, you're better off not buying something precabled as you'll have to redo everything. Not to mention that they aren't designed to accomodate 6 pin PCI-E power connectors so you'll have to use molex adapters and reroute a bunch of molex connectors for your video card(s). Superservers are great if you're using on board video and just adding CPU(s), RAM, and hard drives...but that's it.
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Nah, it's a hell of a lot easier to unplug from motherboard and move to card than to route from scratch, believe me. Had to do it both ways before. But no, they're not workstations, and it really bothers me when they push them as such. Yes, that's a workstation board; but that's as far as the 'workstation' side goes. Their new 'silent' fans still aren't.

As for thermal design...the only reason they perform decently is because of the high CFM fans. We could all put 100+ CFM Delta's or whatever in our computers and say they're just as good as SM's stuff. If you don't mind having a jet plane taking off in your room the entire time you're on your computer, then sure 3C might be worth it to you.
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You're confusing 'forcing air through' with 'no hotspots.' The Supermicros are designed so they don't develop hotspots, which every other case does without major tweaking, no matter what fans you have in there. That's why they work so well, relatively speaking. Things are not in a position where your drives are at 60C and your CPUs at 32C. Almost no other cases that I can say that for with even half the drives.

I'm not going to go into build quality as I've seen such a volume of these that I could go on forever about things that have gone wrong. Since I don't actually have any statistics, I could just be throwing out worst possible scenarios rather than probable situations.
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I usually find that as the fault of shippers and resellers. Two trips through UPS can wreck the most sturdy of chassis, speaking from many experiences. By and large though, the Supermicros are exceptionally sturdy. Especially the hotswaps when compared to say, AIC or Chenbro. Every time I work an AIC hotswap bay I'm afraid it's going to break in my hands, and Chenbros usually arrive half broken and don't make it through installation. That isn't to say sometimes they really screw up a case, but by and large I've had no problems not proven to be caused by mishandling.
 
movax said:
Hypothetically, if I were to get a custom-wired PC P&C PSU...how much of a premium would I pay for custom wiring + ordering from them over say, newegg/monarch/etc?
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I payed $18 more than the price in PCP&C's website for the customization to have two native 8-pin EPS12V. PCP&C's website was the cheapest anyway so basically nothing.

They were very helpful, but unfortunately the current 1 KW has a very unfortunate rail design. They are working on getting a 1 KW with a better rail split, so I hear.
 
I talked to PCP+C today and the guy told me to just use the 4 pin molex to 4 pin mobo adapter, so I ordered one stock. I guess we'll see what happens. They're out of stock though, so it's not going to ship 'til wednesday. Sounds like I'm going to have a few days where there's a pile of brand-new pc goodness sitting around in boxes.

I also answered "yes" to some unknown question because the person on the phone talks with the receiver lodged in her ass (that's how muffled she was). Sounds like this will be an adventure.

Maybe I'll cancel with them and just order from newegg with quick shipping.
 
uOpt said:
And as I mentioned, with 4x 875s and the Zippy 700W the total power drawn out of the AC is 361 watts, octa-priming.
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I just spotted this. It's actually 461 Watts. But that doesn't chance the original point.
 
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