Great work, also thank for some Great Tips. Bill

cp256

I'm ready to get this baby rockin' and rollin' like right NOW! What had been planned as a simple prep session had turned into A MISSION. I've come this far, I'm not quittin' until it is folding while I sleep.

I rush around gathering the remaining bits need to fire it up. Apevia 1100w PS, PCI-E to EPS 8-pin adapter cable, Seagate 160 GB SATA drive, ATA DVD drive to load Ubuntu, SATA cable, ATA 100 cable, LAN cable, power button, LEDs, keyboard, mouse, etc. I plug it all in and it's time to Go BABY GO!



I light it off and it POSTs first time. I jump into setup to load optimized defaults and check the CPU temps, just in case. The date is at the factory default, no biggie, I set it close enough to sync when Ubuntu is online. Set the defaults and the CPUs are showing at Low temp in the hardware monitor. Fans set to full, lets save it and boot. I forget why, but I shut off the power supply form some reason and when I turned it back on the date was reset to default again. Bad battery. Fortunately it is another stock item for me so I pop one out of my card of CR2032's, slap it in and boot to setup again. With the settings redone it is time to install linux.

I pop in the Ubuntu desktop 12.04 LTS CD and go through the install steps. The HD had an NT Vista partition on it so I did the manual partitioning and nuked it. Waited through the agonizing language pack load (I hate that part) and it finally tells me it is done, yay! Wait, I get a popup saying it can't install GRUB. WTH? It's not real specific about why so I hit the net and start researching the error. I find pages showing how to manually fix/reinstall GRUB after a live CD boot with grub-install and I try those to no avail. The drive ha s a boot loader on it that GRUB doesn't understand. I might have had a FreeBSD boot loader on it as part of a RAID mirror at one time, not sure. I beat on it and beat on it and still no worky worky. I finally gave up as the sun was starting to come up. No folding for me today, I must sleep. Fortunately I am self-employed so being late for work just makes me feel bad, but I don't get in trouble for it.

In retrospect, after the first manual grub-install failed I should have cut bait and slapped in another drive. I would have been folding while I slept without a doubt. it was disappointing for sure, but I would whip it in the morning.
EDIT: Typos

In your Bios setup you took the defaults after you set to optimized defaults correct?
I have the same issue with the Battery my time resets on a power off so looks like I need to replace mine as well. Thanks Bill

cp256
... and eight 2 GB DDR2 1333 mhz 5-5-3-15 (at least that's what they are running as) DIMMS for 16 GB of RAM. ...

what were they marked/sold  as ? were they DDR3?
DDR2 1333mhz dont seem to be available
I'm building a 2009 era HPC cluster with multiple H8QME s with 8381HE  for  Computational fluid dynamics  which tends to be memory band width limited and your memory config is interestiing

cp256

derekm23

cp256
... and eight 2 GB DDR2 1333 mhz 5-5-3-15 (at least that's what they are running as) DIMMS for 16 GB of RAM. ...

what were they marked/sold  as ? were they DDR3?
DDR2 1333mhz dont seem to be available
I'm building a 2009 era HPC cluster with multiple H8QME s with 8381HE  for  Computational fluid dynamics  which tends to be memory band width limited and your memory config is interestiing

It's been a year and I haven't done anything with that box other than reboot it a couple of times so I am not 100% sure, but I would hazard a guess that they are 667mhz DDR2 DIMMS that are double data rate at 1333. That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
 
Henry
 

That's what I'm guessing was standard RAM on these boards if memory serves me well.  Definately DDR2 and the speed is right there.

Something is wrong here....
put in the 8381HE but it shows Nb speed of 1600mhz.. AMD spec shows 2000Mhz
The cpu page  in my bios doesnt have the tag to swap between processors like the one shown in this thread.
The memory speed is  800mhz (PC2-6400P-666-12 with the new memory in...
The original was pc2-5300-555-12-lo
Bios is 3.5a board rev number A1.01
Any ideas???

I acquired myself 2 of these boards, so here like you, my experiences with it.
 
After weeks of waiting finally arrived a big box with hardware, It contained 2x boards with 4x CPU's and 8x Memory modules each, 2x 1100 watt PSU's and 10 500 GB SATA drives.
 
The only thing I wanted to do was turn them on, install them, play with them, however that bubble quickly burst, no cooling :(.
I decided to put on some evil shoes and turn one on anyways knowing the overheat protection would prevent damage (in theory).
 
Hooked one up found some old random heat sinks, glued them on with thermal paste lol and turned it on.
 
Both my boards had a case of a bad battery as well, luckily I also had a bunch on hand so that was an easy fix.
 
So after everything it was time to hit the switch, the fans started spinning, and with full anticipation I looked at the screen and gently touching the frame of a CPU lol heating up...no response, then finally the screen came up, getting really hot now, and boom off. Assume the thermal heat protection kicked in, but it worked!
 
The 8x coolers from china ordered on ebay did not arrive and have still not arrived to this day, another batch of 8 was ordered from the UK this time and arrived within a week.
 
I was very excited and ready to go until i realized the coolers did not fit! It turned out these SuperMicro boards use some proprietary mounting and a regular, the coolers came with a nice ring for Intel CPU's but that obviously did not fit. So the manual (should have RTFM lol) stated the required mounting bracket was a BKT-0012L, so ordered 8 pairs and now finally it seems I was ready to go.
 
After installing all the coolers and hooking up all peripherals I was ready to install... so I thought...
 
I had some issues getting them to work, they simply would not boot up / do anything, seems taking out the memory modules and given those and the banks a clean made them come on, apparently these supermicro boards are a bit picky with placement and these boards have obviously seem some use.
 
Finally after taking out all memory modules and CPU's giving everything a clean and placing it back allowed me to POST and access the BIOS.
 
Success! I was excited and ready to install my OS, so I grabbed my Debian CD put it in the drive and boot, so far so good, the installer process went without any problems, DHCP succeeded, all disks detected and the installation finished without a hitch.
 
It was time to boot into the new system, but that is where the troubles started after grub I would be left with only a blinking cursor a unresponsive system and nothing more. The strange thing was both systems did the exact same thing. I re-installed the OS several times, tried different distro's and eventually in desperation tried Windows (blegh lol). They all had the same result with the exception of Windows which would halt at the message "Setup is starting windows".
 
At this time it was deep into the night and some sleep was needed, the next day I would continue.
 
I had no idea what the issue was, a Google query on the issue showed I was not the only one but none of the provided solutions would help.
 
I decided to make some changes to the BIOS and see if that would make any difference, after several configuration attempts I disabled the quick boot and after this the system would halt during the full memory test, after taking out all modules from both systems and testing them it finally passed the memory test and voila after grub it now continued and booted the OS, it seems faulty memory sticks prevented the kernel from loading.
 
After replacing only 1 module each time into the working system it turned out that 2 of the 16 modules were faulty, hence why both systems portrayed the same symptoms.
 
More Success! Finally, both systems are working booting the OS and appear to be fully functional!
 
Enjoyed your little endeavor story to get these working, hope you'll enjoy mine and hopefully it can help someone having issues with these guys.
 
Here some pictures:
 
The coolers and my little workplace:



The boards:
 
 
I only have one question for anyone out there regarding the cooling:
 
 
Right now I am using scenario A, I figured A would be better since it can suck cold air in from the center and blow it away to the sides of the board and that scenario B would blow hot air from one CPU to the other, but I am wondering if Scenario B might be better because I would also like to add some fans to each side of the board to blow air over the chipset and board.
 
I am also wondering if A is the best approach since CPU 1 and 2 are quite close together and I am worried they will be fighting for air?
 
Unlike your EVO coolers I am unable to rotate mine the mount is fixed on to the cooler so I cannot the coolers and fans 45 degrees.
 
Maybe anyone has any suggestions (I don't have a case, do intend to get or make one eventually).
 
Temps on the first run:
 
Temps in gnome desktop:
 
 
 
When using the "stress" command to put a 100% load on all cores the temperature did not exceed 50 degrees.
 
Have you had any success in reading more sensor information besides CPU temperature?
The boards seem to have a expansion slot for a IPMI device but there must be a way to retrieve things like fan RPM, voltages, etc (shown in BIOS not in OS).
 
Happy holidays from The Netherlands.
 

Looks good!  These boards are hard to accommodate decent cooling solutions.  I tried the Hyper-V 212's but they are a bit more than I could handle machining wise.

I'd prefer A... I've run B in the past but frankly it was warmer than I really liked.  A good fan in A in the back by the inputs helps a lot.

The boards were designed to be run in 1U chassis with the air flowing from the power connector edge (front) to the VGA connector edge(rer). This ensured air flow allong one bank memory sticks to or from each  processor when the plastic ducts/covers were in place. The original heat sinks were copper fine finned and low profile.
 

I found it better heat wise to run the fans on the heat sinks.  Just my two cents worth.  Additional cooling is good but the basics are a great start.

RVC-66
I have been interested in building a workstation similar to this (i.e., based on the slightly older Socket F technology) to perform some numerical simulations at home.  Can anyone that has been involved in this discussion or, perhaps just the OP, continue the dialog here as "folding" (whatever application this is...) is not likely to be on my radar.  I am generally interested in this hardware but, need to know it can accomplish what I need it to do.  While I would like the idea of building the i7-4770k barebones systems have become quite affordable so, I must give this consideration as well
 
Thanks

Hi RVC-66 and welcome.
I've been playing with 4P socket Fs and G34s for a few years myself, and I do emphasise playing. I'm no guru here, just giving my 2c.
I bought several reconditioned Supermicro F boards to start and recommend you buy new instead if they are still out there. I found the bios quite temperamental to get started, bricked a few chips trying to get the things running but ended up reordered new chips which helped. The ddr2 runs hot so fit heat spreaders and possibly their own fans if you are going barebones. If you are looking for rack mounted or even in a case prepare for a lot of noise from the air flow needed to keep that puppy cool.
After moving to G34s it was a breeze. Quieter, cooler and just easier all round. I have four F boards three are back in their boxes. However both the G34 boards I have are running 24/7.
I'm sure a more tekkie person would have made a far better job but I don't consider myself a nube either. You will need more patience with socket F.

Anyone have any 8439's pm me. still on quad cores an e-bay is too high