On Thursday, August 13 I finally got my computer case back from CoolIT Systems in Calgary. It looks like my photos and measurements paid off cause everything fit perfectly. It also helped that they put one of their best builders on the case - Sean Mutlow - because he really understood what to do.
Friday, the next day, I set forth to get everything working. This was my first time ever building a system from scratch - let alone something as exotic as this. I was mostly worried about installing the CPUs (at $1,500 a piece) and attaching the water blocks. When you attach a cooling system to your CPUs you have to use some kind of thermal paste to make a good thermal connection between the CPU heat spreader and cooling device. I had read a lot of articles and decided on Arctic Silver Ceramique as it showed the best conductive properties for CPUs. I had to remove the thermal grease from the water blocks that CoolIT has installed, then I had to prep the surfaces of both the CPUs and water blocks. I had to further prep the water block surface with Ceramique per the instructions, but it did not seem to make a difference as the surface of the water blocks was like a mirror. Finally a laid down a thin strip of Ceramique on the CPU and attached the water block. This was a bit tricky because the WS-240 cooler had all the hoses attached and it was awkward settling the water block on the CPU with the hoses trying to pull things ever which way.
After finishing what I considered to be the hardest part then came the tedious part of connecting all the power and data cables everywhere. This was extra challenging because the S5520SC is a big board and I really had to stretch some cables and connections.
Finally I had enough together that I could power on Gemini for the first time. This was rather distressing because after powering it on - nothing happened - there was nothing on my computer display to show that anything was working. I did this a few times and still nothing. Whenever I powered it down there was this beeping from the motherboard -which I discovered was the diagnostic beep codes. I looked them up in the manual and it said "DC Power Missing" so I fiddled with the power connectors a little and powered it on again. This time the boot sequence showed on my display and I breathed a sigh of relief. In hindsight I don't really know why nothing happened the first few times I power on Gemini, because every time I power it down I get the same beep codes.
Now that I was finally able to get into the BIOS settings I started exploring the disk system. To my surprise one of the disks was not working. Fortunately I had bought an extra disk as a spare so when I connected that one everything was ok again, and the ICH10R southbridge could see all 5 of my disks.
Next I tried configuring the RAID. I had thought this would be easy because I have configured RAID before on the ICH10R southbridge using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, but this turned out to be a nightmare. It turns out that the S5520SC board does not use the Intel Matrix Storage Manager like every other civilized computer, but some other piece of crap called Intel® Embedded Server RAID Technology II (ESRTII). I design and implement computer user interfaces for a living and I can say with all expertise - the user interface on this utility is total crap. Let's just say that this whole process used about 2 hours of my time and involved a great deal of swearing.
After trying to configure the RAID I could not get Windows to install. I tried using the Intel Deployment CD to set up the RAID, and this was even worse crap. Then I made a bad decision. Because Windows would not installed I enabled a BIOS setting called "EFI Optimized Boot" and restarted Gemini. After that Gemini was a "brick" - that is it was nothing more than a very big paper-weight - it would start to boot - but would not even go into the BIOS setup. By the time Deena got home I was swearing like a soldier and bordering on a depressive mental break-down.
Friday nights is my night for Second Life - and lets just say that my technology woes only got worse that night as I ruined the entire beach. It took excessive quantities of alcohol and hard rock music to hang on to my sanity that night.
By Sunday I had had time to cool down enough to start thinking of solutions. My very good friend Remo (from Second Life) had suggested resetting the CMOS, so after searching through the manual I found a jumper on the motherboard that did that - and finally Gemini booted againg.
Eventually I gave up trying to set up RAID and switched back to a non-RAID configuration and finally got Windows 7 to install. Pretty well the first thing I did after that was run the Microsoft performance analyzer - which gave my a 7.8 out of 7.9 on my CPU and Memory performance. That was a very satisfying result.
My next big goal was to install Second Life and see how well it ran. Well it ran pretty crappy! Every two seconds there was a one second pause - everything froze. Needless to say I was getting pretty disillusioned by now. Not that I have children - but it's sort of like going through a challenging gestation and difficult birth - only to find out your child is mentally retarded. In spite of this limitation, I was actually able to run Second Life, which I cannot do any more on my Sony PCV-RX660; and Deena and I were finally able to be in Second Life together for the first time in 8 months. I was a hell of a lot of fun having her in-world at the same time as me.
For the rest of the week I played with various things, trying to learn more about the problems I had, and was still having. But all in all, it was very satisfying having my dream-system running after 3 years of planning, and 2 months of waiting for the case to be ready after initially ordering all the parts.
To be continued...
