Build log: storage-oriented SR-2

[[XC] gomeler]

dude, the moment I saw the SR-2 and storage-oriented in the title I immediately thought of the slot latency due to the NF200. You need to use a Rampage III Extreme for this build as it has a single X58 chipset and splits the 4 slots into x8 bandwidth which is the maximum each card can physically handle. Major bummer but at least you didn't buy a second Xeon. Try to return the SR-2 and hopefully get your money back(or sell it on a forum for ~80% retail).

It is a shame you live in NZ otherwise I'd loan you my ES RIIIE to make sure your cards function properly. Try to get in touch with Deanzo, he lives in NZ and maybe if you are lucky and he is willing he can work something out to test such a setup for you to save you the trouble. Otherwise find a normal X58 board with 3 slots and use a PCI video card for testing purposes.

Your test setup looks very similar to my test setup at work by the way Be very careful with those Intel drives. I hammered one of them with IOMeter random 4kb 10/90 write/read and another with random 4kb 100/0 write/read for a few weeks and both are effectively dead. My 10k rpm SAS HDDs are now faster in random write performance The OCZ Vertex LE I tested held up much better but it also degraded. At least SSDs are progressing fast enough that by the time I kill them the next revision is out.


edit: I'm not 100%, Lardarse would be the best person to ask, but you should see some performance gains out of overclocking the PCIe bus. Try 110MHz or 115MHz and see if the controllers or VGA hiccups. I don't know if the NF200s use a separate PLL or use the PCIe frequency, I suspect it operates based on the PCIe frequency, but it doesn't hurt to try.