Posts Tagged ‘mobo’

Bleeding Edge

Monday, December 1st, 2008

I think I’m hemorrhaging!

I just picked up a pile of parts for a new desktop machine. I got the new Intel core i7 920 to go on the new ASUS P6T Deluxe mobo with 3G of Patriot DDR3-12800 memory. I had to get a video card for it as well as there is no on board video with the P6T Deluxe. I got the ASUS EAH4550/DI/512MD3 Radeon HD 4550 512MB 64-bit GDDR3 video card. I also decided to splurge and get a new case and 450W power supply.

The only problem is that after I assembled the system, which took about an hour and a half, it fails to complete POST and I can’t even get to the BIOS :-( . I get a message that says Express Gate on the screen for about a second and then one single short beep and then nothing. The screen is black and the keyboard is dead. According to the P6T mobo manual the single short beep means that the VGA was detected, the quick boot has been disabled and no keyboard was detected. Certainly the VGA was working because I did get one short message displayed and the keyboard seemed to work for a while and then it fails so the single beep does make sense. I am thinking that there might be a problem with the mobo and the PS2 keyboard connector. The keyboard does work as I am using it right now to write this post. The mobo only has one dual purposed PS2 connector. It supposedly works as both a keyboard and a mouse connector but only for one of them at a time. I don’t have a USB keyboard to try so I will be taking the system in to PCCyber to see what they can do for me.

I really want this system to work as the i7 CPU is a quad core hyperthreaded CPU. This means that it should show up as an 8 CPU system when it works. It is also supposed to be a good CPU and mobo for over clocking. The i7 920 runs at 2.66GHz but it can be OCed to 3.85GHz according one guy I was talking to at PCCyber. I just might try that when the system starts to work.

BOINC Farm

Friday, June 27th, 2008

So I’ve started the BOINC farm I want. The first step is building the PXE server. I got a Core 2 Quad 9450 CPU with an ASUS mobo and 4G of RAM to be used as the PXE server. I need to configure this as a DHCP server and some other things at this time unknown. Part of the research I still need to do. I also just picked up two VIA 2500E mobo with a C7 processor built in and 2G of RAM each. These two systems will PXE boot to a minimal Ubuntu system and will just run the BOINC client.
The Core 2 Quad system went into an old case I had lying around. Actually my old Dual PIII 550 system that died a while back. I got a new 500W power supply for it but used an existing hard drive, DVD drive and floppy drive. The VIA mobos will be stacked together and will share another 500W power supply. I hope to have at least 4 VIA mobos sharing the one power supply eventually.
The server is running Ubuntu and still needs to have some critical components installed. The first thing I know I need is to configure it as my DHCP server. This means that the current DHCP service being provided by the router will need to be turned off. I think I need to configure a DNS server as well and then setup the PXE environment and OS that will get downloaded to the VIA systems. All stuff that I need to research. I need a TFTP server to download the OS files.