Skeleton Adventure

I finally found a suitable case for the Adventure. This is is it. An Antec Skeleton. In this shot you can see the Adventure 2800 with the power supply underneath.

 

 

 

This is the supporting bar that the back plane of the cards screw into. The black mark I have drawn is where I need to cut it to accomodate the PCIe bridge card. This is in about the 11th slot if one had a normal motherboard.

 

 

 

And here it is again plugged into one of the Asus P6T's. I only have two of these left after recent upgrades to Asus P8Z77 motherboards. The short green card just below the fan is the other PCIe bridge card.

 

 

 

In this picture I am looking down on the Skeleton. You can see the 4 graphics cards starting from the left. You can also see the clear plastic supporting bar across the top.

 

 

 

Another shot, which looks a bit clearer, where you can see the graphics cards.

 

 

 

At the moment I have 4 of the GTS450SP cards installed in it. These may not be its final configuration but they will do for now. Indeed it might not be driven by a P6T even. I am looking at getting another P8Z77 to drive it.

 

I have run some Seti and Einstein work on it since installation. I had some issues with the Einstein GPU tasks erroring out when running 2 per card. I reduced them to 1 per card and they appear to be working fine now although it needs some further testing. Seti tasks seemed to run fine (using the x41z app from Jason) running 2 at a time.

 

 

Adventure testing (part 2)

So part 2 of this saga...

Yesterday I used one of the other P6T's to test with. Points to note:

1. It helps if you put the cards into the correct slot (start from the opposite end to the bridge card)
2. It likes to have a monitor plugged into the 1st card (the one nearest to the bridge card).

While opening and closing the case many times yesterday the hard disk in the machine died. Just as well I had recently put an SSD in there and backed up the hard disk before starting. Fortunately I have a couple of spare WD Caviar Blue drives I was going to upgrade machines with, but this one had a Caviar Black, well it did until it died yesterday.A quick instal of a new drive and copy the files back and it was up and running again with no work units lost.

Today its Maul's turn. You can see Maul being used with the Adventure and a single GTS450 SP at the bottom of the screen. The power supply is on the bottom right

Another shot of the Adventure and power supply sitting beside the P6T.

Here I have loaded up 4 of the GTS450 SP's into the Adventure

And just to see how it handles it another 2 GTS450 SP cards in the P6T as well

A screen shot of BOINC running a few work units on the GPU's

So this leads to an interesting thought, what if I were to get 2 Adventure's and plug both into one of the P6T's. Say 4 cards in each like I have done in this case, that would mean an 8 GPU machine is within possibility.

The GTS450 SP isn't a particularly powerful card. They are probably better running only a single task per GPU, but they only use one slot which means it can have some room either side for better air flow. They have also been superceeded by the newer Kepler-based cards.

Adventure testing (part 1)

This weekend is a long weekend, Monday is the Queens birthday public holiday. So I decided time to try getting the Adventure going, even though I don't have a case for it.

We start with Obi-Wan, the retired Jedi Knight I mean Acer Veriton V7900. Its an Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 machine with a single PCIe slot. Seeing as its retired I figured why not use it.

Next we have the old Corsair HX1000 power supply (1000 watts) which was also sitting around doing nothing. The bag is full of varous power cables as its a modular power supply.

And lastly we have the Adventure 2800 itself. The small board at the back is one of the bridge cards which the cable coming from the PC plugs into. 

After putting it together the 1st step was to see if it would power up without any add-in cards. This it did fine. There are a row of diagnostic LEDs on the front of the board that indicate it powered up.

The next step was to connect it to the PC. This bit also worked. However as soon as I added a graphics card to the Adventure the PC wouldn't boot. Probably something to do with the on-board Intel graphics and having an expansion board with a graphics card. Before anyone asks, I have run a couple of different graphics cards using the single PCIe expansion slot in it for a couple of years without any problems. Okay so it won't work with the Acer Veriton.