How to: Arima AMD Opteron Quad Core Socket F 3000 series

[D_A]

I'm not exactly an Apple iFanboi, but at least the OSs started life as a real OS (BSD Unix I believe, as compared to System V Unix which inspired Linux)

[terramir]

I'm not exactly an Apple iFanboi, but at least the OSs started life as a real OS (BSD Unix I believe, as compared to System V Unix which inspired Linux)

yepp real os and stable to boot, although right now I got stability problems but I think that is due to eye tv, or the power browning out at my apt. I haven't tracked that down yet, maybe a bump in the vcore will stablize it.
terramir

[Sparky]

iHate mac OS

[retro77]

yepp real os and stable to boot, although right now I got stability problems but I think that is due to eye tv, or the power browning out at my apt. I haven't tracked that down yet, maybe a bump in the vcore will stablize it.
terramir

Get yourself a cheap UPS that will do AVR [automatic voltage regulation]. I run all my systems through an AVR UPS. I used to loose power supplies randomly. Not anymore!

[terramir]

YES!!!!! YES!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!,


1x YES!!!!!=I just won my server psu for 99 cents LOL and the backplane for redundancy also for 99 cents and another item I want to mod for 99 cents LOL, Now tomorrow a 3 1/2 hour round trip on the bus, but heck saves me 35 bucks shipping LOL.

2x YES!!!!! =I just looked that the dang pictures of the board, what the heck, got you guys so panicked about flashing the bios, I was worried this board has some sort of stupid proprietary chip, onboard that's a standard sst press-in chip now if we can just get that one person that had the non google modified bios, that seeming would load windows, but he had driver issues, driver issues are solvable trust me if he forks over a bios image were all set. (think it was the a non google one).

Well i used Ares HD5870x2 so it should be working on this board, but doubt many people have ares card's.

I dont have those 2 led's eather, its just like anarki's board but without that OBEY bios screen and it does boot to windows.

Now just another favor can someone photograph a closeup of the 8 sata connectors make it a little wider but macro it and well also the bios chip we'll be in business in no time. There are so many ways to flash those chips and some of em are so cheap it's not even funny. I seem to remember about using a intel lan card to flash those chips, there are some other methods as well.
terramir

[AmiJIm]

You can flash these babies with flashrom .I have done it successfully .Where is the non OBEY firmware?You can grab an image file with flashrom as well.Happy new year by the way.

[terramir]

You can flash these babies with flashrom .I have done it successfully .Where is the non OBEY firmware?You can grab an image file with flashrom as well.Happy new year by the way.

Yes Happy New Year, for those of us that go by the julian calender,
rintamarotta claimed he got the windows installer to load sucessfully but ran into some driver issues, he also said he did not have the obey thing going on, So now we just need to contact him somehow, I tried pm'ing him but no dice, maybe someone knows him, or someone else that has a decent version of the firmware , or maybe a mod can e-mail him and see if he's willing to back-up the rom on that board.
terramir

[AXm77]

....Where is the non OBEY firmware? You can grab an image file with flashrom as well.Happy new year by the way.

Hi and Happy New Year to all XS community.
To make thing more "easy" looks like it is 2 revision of this board. Our boards from USA (yes I already have one) are blue PBC revision: 41-CMG020-D00G others are green and PBC revision: 41-CMG020-D01G. I think "rintamarotta" have newer (green) revision. Maybe HP was setting this newer ones for different customer? (yes HP was OEM supplier for Google).

[terramir]

Hi and Happy New Year to all XS community.
To make thing more "easy" looks like it is 2 revision of this board. Our boards from USA (yes I already have one) are blue PBC revision: 41-CMG020-D00G others are green and PBC revision: 41-CMG020-D01G. I think "rintamarotta" have newer (green) revision. Maybe HP was setting this newer ones for different customer? (yes HP was OEM supplier for Google).

Now I gotta say the boards should be identical in hardware right? if they are as long as we can get our hands on the (firmware/bios/efi) we should be able to at least test it and maybe just maybe load darwin :p
anyways
Big other question anyone know what the compatible memory modules are?
as of right now I have 2x512 pc3200 ECC REG HYS72T64001HR-5-A and one 1gb corsair PC2-5300-555 EEC REG that one 1 gb stick was an accidental buy that's been laying in my drawer for like 6 months, it was an auction where they said desktop memory and it wasn't worth sending back.
Question does this board require matching pairs to boot, or is that just necessary for dual channel?
I can always test these but I was wondering what else I should put on my shopping list
I'm still waiting for the eps adapters from hong-kong sad to say so right now it's a waiting game, cause my two arima F-3000 boards will be coming tonight, and well over the next few days all the other supplies I need should be trickling in, i.e. the tap and barbs for the bonnie heater-core, and a few other items, but one thing I have not figured out yet is what the heck I'm gonna put it in :S, I could build a sheet-metal case, or I could go with wood or plastic, catch is with plastic finding enough scrap plastic, With sheet finding the lowest price. Plastic that is sturdy enough sad to say is more expensive than aluminum these days. And well while wood looks nice and is easy to work with, it's expensive, wood really has gotten crazy even the cheap press kind go figure
Anyways any input on the memory issue would be appreciated.
thanks
terramir

[Sparky]

That's why I ended up using cardboard, everything else cost too much IMO

Not sure if the memory needs to be in pairs or not... I'm running a mixed pair, matching specs but two different brands (Hynix and Samsung). I have one spare Hynix 2GB ECC reg PC2-3200 stick here if anyone needs one of those.

[jeremyshaw]

Hey, guys, thank you for getting my interest in a quad Opty setup. I have 4 8350 and one TYAN Thunder Pro. While it isn't the same thing, this thread (and jcool's True 4x4 thread) has been of immense help to me. Thank you


p.s. I got the TYAN board OB from NewEgg for 51usd

[retro77]

Hey, guys, thank you for getting my interest in a quad Opty setup. I have 4 8350 and one TYAN Thunder Pro. While it isn't the same thing, this thread (and jcool's True 4x4 thread) has been of immense help to me. Thank you


p.s. I got the TYAN board OB from NewEgg for 51usd

Nice work! Glad the information sharing can help others Kryja did a good job on pulling a lot information from several places into the main thread. Hats off to that effort! Good job!

[skycrane]

damn man, thats a great price for the board. hell its cheaper than the arimas and just a tad bit easier to set up

btw, has anyone been looking on ebay for some more quads? there is a guy selling a bunch of 8356s for the low, low, low price of 299 each
i cant wait for the supercomputers to upgrade thier nodes again, i really could use another 12 quads for 60bucks each

[terramir]

That's why I ended up using cardboard, everything else cost too much IMO

Not sure if the memory needs to be in pairs or not... I'm running a mixed pair, matching specs but two different brands (Hynix and Samsung). I have one spare Hynix 2GB ECC reg PC2-3200 stick here if anyone needs one of those.

the more memory the merrier, well right now I got like those 3 stick I'd like to put them in one board if it's possible, like to run at least 2 gb of mem each board cause that is like the optimum for some projects (more a little better less a whole lot worse)
terramir

[jeremyshaw]

damn man, thats a great price for the board. hell its cheaper than the arimas and just a tad bit easier to set up

btw, has anyone been looking on ebay for some more quads? there is a guy selling a bunch of 8356s for the low, low, low price of 299 each
i cant wait for the supercomputers to upgrade thier nodes again, i really could use another 12 quads for 60bucks each

Most of the quads are TLB affected steppings, though... Around 50usd seems to be the going rate when they come up (I saw a few earlier yesterday, when I was considering upgrade options for the CPUs XD). RW-Everything every bootup resolves that for me. No issues so far after about 3 months of use.

[terramir]

Most of the quads are TLB affected steppings, though... Around 50usd seems to be the going rate when they come up (I saw a few earlier yesterday, when I was considering upgrade options for the CPUs XD). RW-Everything every bootup resolves that for me. No issues so far after about 3 months of use.

WHAT is TLB? and what does RW-Everything mean
anyways your talking about quad barcelona's right?
terramir

[jeremyshaw]

WHAT is TLB? and what does RW-Everything mean
anyways your talking about quad barcelona's right?
terramir

TLB bug, affects B1 and B2 stepping Barcelonas (and Phenom I CPU). It's a cache accell lookup table that was incorrect in some way. It would cause systems to hang upon error. So AMD had a quick fix by disabling the TLB (l2/l3 cache lookup?) via the BIOS for B1 and B2 stepping. B3 stepping fixed this, and was not disabled.

Unfortuneately, disabling TLB tanks L2/L3 cache performance, and some apps that were memory heavy (and by relation, cache heavy) saw a sizeable performance hit. So to resolve this, a few users on XS and other forums found ways to disable the "TLB BIOS fix" that AMD used to turn off the buggy TLB B1/B2 CPU. Vista SP1 and onwards forced the same fix via the OS. Linux Kernal 2.6xx-something had another workaround that didn't cause as much of a performance deficit as disablign the TLB, while still being safe from any possibility of a system hang.

The easiest way around the TLB BIOS patch for Windows (Vista SP1 & +) users, was a peice of software called RW-Everything that could access the BIOS/CPU MSR, and disable the TLB fix, live (realtime). And RW-Everything supports external batch operations (can use a saved list of MSR commands ), so it's the easiest to deal with. Since two MSR commands have to be done (well, 4) for ever core. And for 16 cores... that's a lot of typing :p


That's all, in a condensed, and horribly formatted article :p

[terramir]

TLB bug, affects B1 and B2 stepping Barcelonas (and Phenom I CPU). It's a cache accell lookup table that was incorrect in some way. It would cause systems to hang upon error. So AMD had a quick fix by disabling the TLB (l2/l3 cache lookup?) via the BIOS for B1 and B2 stepping. B3 stepping fixed this, and was not disabled.

Unfortuneately, disabling TLB tanks L2/L3 cache performance, and some apps that were memory heavy (and by relation, cache heavy) saw a sizeable performance hit. So to resolve this, a few users on XS and other forums found ways to disable the "TLB BIOS fix" that AMD used to turn off the buggy TLB B1/B2 CPU. Vista SP1 and onwards forced the same fix via the OS. Linux Kernal 2.6xx-something had another workaround that didn't cause as much of a performance deficit as disablign the TLB, while still being safe from any possibility of a system hang.

The easiest way around the TLB BIOS patch for Windows (Vista SP1 & +) users, was a peice of software called RW-Everything that could access the BIOS/CPU MSR, and disable the TLB fix, live (realtime). And RW-Everything supports external batch operations (can use a saved list of MSR commands ), so it's the easiest to deal with. Since two MSR commands have to be done (well, 4) for ever core. And for 16 cores... that's a lot of typing :p


That's all, in a condensed, and horribly formatted article :p

well That's reassuring that I will be using ubuntu them
so I should not have this problem :p
also I just figured out that 1gig stick I bought way back when is an FB dimm that has a different key, so that won't work for the second arima
oh well what ever am I gonna do with this CM72FB1024-667/sc hmmm ebay probably I can't use it
terramir

[karbonkid]

well That's reassuring that I will be using ubuntu them

I do not think AMD's patch ever made it into the mainline kernel. No biggie, though, I doubt you'll have any problems even with the bug exposed - it only cropped up on certain virtualization workloads, iirc. And you'll be without the ~1% performance deficit - it all adds up

[Sparky]

Yeah TLB only ever affected stuff with virtualization. I had a TLB-affected Phenom CPU a while back, my brother has one now, and neither I nor he have ever ran into issues with the TLB bug. He runs Windows 7, does video encoding, no problems.

And of course my Arima has TLB bugged CPUs but no issues with that either.

[jeremyshaw]

Yeah TLB only ever affected stuff with virtualization. I had a TLB-affected Phenom CPU a while back, my brother has one now, and neither I nor he have ever ran into issues with the TLB bug. He runs Windows 7, does video encoding, no problems.

And of course my Arima has TLB bugged CPUs but no issues with that either.

Yeah, I was running handbrake to convert my DVD collection to 4GB sized m4v files.

A mere 17 min per film, including both passes

And that was with the TLB left on, since I forgot to remove it at boot...
I had a bad experience with changing the MSR under load, so I simply don't do it unless if the slate is clean...

[terramir]

As you guys might remember I got 4x8347he during the giveaway, now for the second board I just bought 4 8346he's made an offer for 25 bucks (total of 100 for 4) each, then after he made a counteroffer of 37.50 each (150), I offered 30 bucks each, so well I just got 4 cpu's for 120 bucks
They have the bug but I won't be doing virtualization, I told him about the bug and well I also advertised that these cpu's will be used for a good cause i.e. computing under distributed computing for research and well he took my offer of 120 bucks
originally I wanted to put like 54's or something in the second board, but heck this will save some electricity and well overall for the 54's I would have spent (piece meal) one at a time 65 bucks each, now hmmm I saved $140, albeit now I gotta figure out what I'm gonna sell to make-up for that, or I need to repair a few more computers , well clients are few and far in-between even in Los angeles with the economy the way it is. Well in june I plan on upgrading my main computer to a sandy-bridge in the meantime I need to sell some computers though, I got 2 775 main boards that desperately need a home

terramir

[jeremyshaw]

Nice grab! HE CPU are really awesome for keeping down the heat

[terramir]

Nice grab! HE CPU are really awesome for keeping down the heat

LOL heat down this monster is going to be water-cooled with TC-4 bottoms and well tops from Myself (black thick plexi, threaded (g1/4 and barbs from mc-carr master :p) I'm going to use brass bspt 3/8 barbs there like 13 bucks plus shipping and tax for 10, of course I need to add my own o-rings, it's kinda wierd but it works. 8 cpu's 4x 8347he + 4x 8346he one aquaextremez-50 pump and well add to that one bonnie rad, this is nuts but it will work.

thing is I still have not figured out what box I'm putting this thing in
Can't use cardboard at work LOL
terramir

[shoota]

well if you can fabricate all that wc stuff i'm sure you can build yourself a simple metal box with standoffs, an i/o back, and whatever else