My Dual Harper - Asus Z7S WS living review *56K warning*

I've been having a lot of fun with the Z7S since this weekend. I started off the installation with 2 E5410s, but unfortunately these are not supported by the 0302 BIOS which was shipped with the board. Asus told me to get a supported CPU. I found the only place in town that sells xeon processors and picked up a E5405 so I could flash my BIOS to 0401... no dice. In both situations I was getting 3A from the diag. card when I tried to enter the BIOS, 60 when I did nothing during boot. Asus support tells me to RMA the board...

Fast forward to today... Since I asked them nicely to flash the 0401 BIOS before sending the new board out, I was hoping to have it on there already. I start off with one E5410 in CPU0... SAME ERROR CODES. I take it out and insert the E5405... SAME ERROR CODES.

What the **** is going on here... could I possibly have a graphics card that is screwing with this board? Video comes up fine, but always freezes at POST screen. I'm using certified memory and CPU. All I have plugged in are video, one stick of memory, CPU0, power, and keyboard. Can anyone provide some insight as to what I've done wrong? This is the first painful installation experience I've ever had.

Your 5405 could be an E0 stepping, check it.

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Originally Posted by STEvil

Your 5405 could be an E0 stepping, check it.

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Sorry for asking what is likely a newb question, but how do I figure this out?

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Originally Posted by jcool

I can get FBDimm for pretty reasonable prices :)
You can ask around here, most EU guys have bought something off me (yes, my job is building custom computers ;) ). Usually I buy Transcend or Buffalo with Mac style heatsinks, but I got something new: Compustocx 2GB 800Mhz FBDimms with flat heatspreaders, 45€ a piece (as many as you need) :up:

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Sounds great jcool:up: will just find out from the supplier if they only ordered the ones i ordered, or if they also got some extra for their own supply. Very desperate, have a machine for 1,300 EUR collecting dust for the last 3 weeks:mad: while waiting for the ram. If they didn't, then i will order some from you tonight. How long will it take to get to me, and how will you send it?

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Originally Posted by STEvil

Your 5405 could be an E0 stepping, check it.

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Originally Posted by komseh

Sorry for asking what is likely a newb question, but how do I figure this out?

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I have the same Q. Can't find much info on the web, only what the difference is between E0 and C0

Check the stepping. Should be a sequence of 4 letters of something along the lines of "QFUB" printed on both the IHS and the retail box.

Dump that in google and you can usually find out in a few minutes from poking at the intel processor identifier thing or somewhere. QFxx is a guaranteed E0 I think but i'm not 100% positive on that.

Just finished migrating my Windows install onto a RAID0 array (what a horrible job!!!) using 2 x GB OCZ Core V2 SSDs. Check out the screenshots comparing the speeds to a Raptor and 2 x Hitachi Deskstar 7,200RPM drives also in RAID0!

The real world increases are evident, applications pop open, Windows loads faster, everything is much more responsive. It's possible I'll get another two SSDs and an Adaptec 5405 or 5805 dedicated controller to boost the rates even further!

SSD RAID is the perfect combo for our V8 machines as it lets the CPU run wild without having to wait for last millennium's storage media...

2,571.9 :up:

Actually 0,5ms access time is rather bad for an SSD array - ICH9R isn't the best option here.. ok for 2 drives but for 4 drives, get a 5405 if you do a lot writes and care less about initialization time, if reads and fast bootup are all you're interested in go for the highpoint 3510.

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Originally Posted by jcool

Actually 0,5ms access time is rather bad for an SSD array - ICH9R isn't the best option here.. ok for 2 drives but for 4 drives, get a 5405 if you do a lot writes and care less about initialization time, if reads and fast bootup are all you're interested in go for the highpoint 3510.

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These are budget SSDs, but probably the best in the budget range from the research I did ;) My initial desire was to go for MTtron Pro 7500s but I couldn't justify the price - more than £2k for 4 x 32GB and a hardware RAID controller. Then I saw the Intel X series, but again the price was prohibitive. Having said that, 0.5 ms compared to 8.6 with the Raptor is a massive improvement and my Hitachi's are running 17's...Time to move all those tiny php files off the spinning array :)

The rated access time of the individual drives is 0.2-0.3 ms, so there's barely any real world latency for the array, even on the relatively rubbish (but free!) Intel controller.

My machine has a typical workstation IO pattern majority data read, minimal writes. I will look into the Highpoint - thanks for the tip! I was tempted by the idea of having a dual-core RAID on chip controller with the Adaptec...

angelshonnny: buy at www.shg.dk -> Produkter -> Hardware -> RAM -> DDR2 ECC Fully Buffered
I use varenr 2113838 with my Z7S WS and it works great
SHG should be able to get it for you well before Christmas.

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Originally Posted by STEvil

Your 5405 could be an E0 stepping, check it.

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Thanks for pointing this out... My Processer indeed uses E0 stepping, which is not on the list of supported CPUs for this board... I'll see what Asus has to say and probly rma again. I asked them to flash 0401 for a friggin reason.

Edit: Getting them to overnight me a BIOS chip with 0401 on it. God bless removable BIOS chips.

@STEvil: Does this also mean that my E5410 with E0 stepping will not work with 0401 since its not on the supported list?

Just picked up an Adaptec 2405 on eBay for less than half the going price - should tide me over for now...

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Originally Posted by komseh

Thanks for pointing this out... My Processer indeed uses E0 stepping, which is not on the list of supported CPUs for this board... I'll see what Asus has to say and probly rma again. I asked them to flash 0401 for a friggin reason.

Edit: Getting them to overnight me a BIOS chip with 0401 on it. God bless removable BIOS chips.

@STEvil: Does this also mean that my E5410 with E0 stepping will not work with 0401 since its not on the supported list?

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No, any E0 CPU works with bios 0401, whether it's on their list or not.

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Originally Posted by jcool

Actually 0,5ms access time is rather bad for an SSD array.

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I managed to get the seek times down to 0.2ms by tweaking the caches and by using SuperCache from www.superspeed.com to act as a kernel controller cache - multi-tasking speeds now are unbelievable! I used to use it with the Raptor and it cut the audible drive activity by around 60% so it's more than a gimmick. I've given it 1GB of RAM to use for increasing the array performance.

SSpec
Give me the info thats engraved onto the IHS and I'll tell you whether it's a G0 or C0.
Send by PM so I don't miss this.
Thanks

I found it via: http://processorfinder.intel.com/

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Originally Posted by komseh

Thanks for pointing this out... My Processer indeed uses E0 stepping, which is not on the list of supported CPUs for this board... I'll see what Asus has to say and probly rma again. I asked them to flash 0401 for a friggin reason.

Edit: Getting them to overnight me a BIOS chip with 0401 on it. God bless removable BIOS chips.

@STEvil: Does this also mean that my E5410 with E0 stepping will not work with 0401 since its not on the supported list?

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0401 or better is required for E0's. You can make 0302 work but you need a non E0 CPU to make it into the BIOS to configure the board for the E0's.


If you get a chance berate ASUS for not mentioning that E0 stepping CPU's (all models) are not supported pre-0401.

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Originally Posted by komseh

I found it via: http://processorfinder.intel.com/

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Hey komseh,
How did you get Asus to send you a chip? My E5420s are also E0 stepping and i simply have no possibility of getting a non-E0 cpu to flash the BIOS.
Wrote them yesterday and the answer i got was

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Unfortunately, we have no BIOS chips to sell or provide you with

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. They have a contact number here in Denmark, although they don't answer. When you try and phone you get an answering machine that says that you have to find answers to your questions on their website:confused:, and then you open a tech ticket and get these very short and shortcoming answers from their tech department. They don't bother to read the whole thread of the tech enquiery, so you have to ask them the same thing over and over, don't think i'll ever buy Asus again:mad:
Sorry for the grumble
Have a great day:)

Angelshonny: I can lend you a Xeon dual core 1.86Ghz; you should be able to boot with that CPU and update the BIOS...

Or I can send you a bios-chip with 0401 so that you may boot up to DOS with that BIOS chip, hot-swap your own BIOS-chip in and flash from DOS the 0401 onto your own BIOS-chip using the engineering version of the BIOS-flash software...? A bit risky but do-able (I did it).

BTW:
shanems3: does OS X recognize all 8 cores with bios 0401 or are you using the 0302 from http://osrom.net/biosmod/ ?

if i remember correctly yes, it has been awhile since i messed with it, since i got the new video cards, i have since deleted osx, installed it on my AMD rig.. that bios does give a bsod in windows though, so be careful... once ati/apple releases 4000series drivers, ill jump back into osx.. ill be more help then..

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Originally Posted by colombodk

Angelshonny: I can lend you a Xeon dual core 1.86Ghz; you should be able to boot with that CPU and update the BIOS...

Or I can send you a bios-chip with 0401 so that you may boot up to DOS with that BIOS chip, hot-swap your own BIOS-chip in and flash from DOS the 0401 onto your own BIOS-chip using the engineering version of the BIOS-flash software...? A bit risky but do-able (I did it).

BTW:
shanems3: does OS X recognize all 8 cores with bios 0401 or are you using the 0302 from http://osrom.net/biosmod/ ?

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Thx colombodk, would be great if i can lend the cpu:up: Have also PM'ed you, don't know if you saw it?

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Originally Posted by angelshonnny

Hey komseh,
How did you get Asus to send you a chip? My E5420s are also E0 stepping and i simply have no possibility of getting a non-E0 cpu to flash the BIOS.
Wrote them yesterday and the answer i got was. They have a contact number here in Denmark, although they don't answer. When you try and phone you get an answering machine that says that you have to find answers to your questions on their website:confused:, and then you open a tech ticket and get these very short and shortcoming answers from their tech department. They don't bother to read the whole thread of the tech enquiery, so you have to ask them the same thing over and over, don't think i'll ever buy Asus again:mad:
Sorry for the grumble
Have a great day:)

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I live in the US... I was talking with tech support and they transferred me to the "BIOS" department. I had to pay $25 to have it overnighted.

I'm pretty frustrated with Asus too. If the first tech wouldn't have told me that the BIOS chip was not removable we could have avoided a lot of wasted time with the RMA.

Edit: Oh also everything is working great now... except I can't get my USB devices to show up. One of the devices is receiving power but not working.

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Originally Posted by komseh

I live in the US... I was talking with tech support and they transferred me to the "BIOS" department. I had to pay $25 to have it overnighted.

I'm pretty frustrated with Asus too. If the first tech wouldn't have told me that the BIOS chip was not removable we could have avoided a lot of wasted time with the RMA.

Edit: Oh also everything is working great now... except I can't get my USB devices to show up. One of the devices is receiving power but not working.

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Great that you got it working:up: pitty about the USB devices. Luckily, one of the other guys on the forum, colombodk, is willing lo lend me a Dualc. Xeon, so I can update the BIOS. Great bunch of folks on on this forum.

angelshonnny: look in the mail tomorrow for letter with a bios chip with 0401 on it and a xeon dc 1.86ghz ES cpu. Enjoy.