X8DTH-6F, PC-P80, LSI RAID, many SSDs

[AceNZ]

(this is partly a repost from the end of the SR-2 thread)

I've decided to try the SuperMicro X8DTH-6F, with its dual 5520s, to see if it performs better than the EVGA SR-2 for this storage-oriented build.

Here's the X8DTH-6F with the CPU, heatsink and RAM installed:



Close-up of the heatsink and RAM:



Note that I'm using 6 ECC RAM sticks now * 4GB each = 24GB.

The board's mounting holes lined up well with the ones on the PC-P80, with the exception of the one in the upper right, which happened to be the same place that the SR-2 needed one of those adhesive plastic pins. So, I left that one in place, and re-used it for the X8DTH, and removed one other. In the process, I found that the adhesive on those pins is amazingly strong; my earlier worries about them possibly coming loose were clearly unfounded.

The board is now up-and-running. One detail for people not familiar with server boards: the BIOS comes pre-configured to use the VGA port on the back panel as the console. On first boot, nothing is displayed on the video card. I had to hook up a VGA display and change the BIOS settings from "Onboard VGA" to "Offboard VGA" to have it use the main video card as the console.

I'm not using the onboard LSI controller yet, and in fact had to disable it in order to have enough option ROM to boot from the HDDs. It uses two SFF-8087 connectors that you can see in the lower-right corner of the board.

The HDD configuration was preserved with the switch-over. In fact, I didn't have to reinstall Windows; the OS was smart enough to reconfigure itself (as a former OS developer, I found that to be very impressive).

The video card is too big to fit in the usual top slot, closest to the socket for the second CPU (it hits the RAM). The bottom three slots are on the 5520 that's directly connected to the first CPU, so I put the video card in the third slot to hopefully minimize latency. The RAID cards are in slots 1, 5 and 7 (numbered from the bottom up; pics to follow).