After some patient several months of collecting hardware i have finally been able to assemble my SR-2 rig.  The SR-2 was my ultimate goal but worked on my E760 (Arsenal) until i could make the SR-2 possible.  I spent three days building the case and piecing together the system.  Finally on Saturday it was finished enough to fire up and explore the new found power of a dual Xeon system.... or so i had hoped... The system so far gets stuck at "Checking NVRAM" which after some research on the forums was due to my use of two Engineering Sample E5530 Xeons.  So now with a bit of disappointment I shall wait another month or so until i can get some retail chips and finaly see some life in my new system.
 
System Specs:
Case:  Danger Den Tower 29 "Nightmare" color scheme with Quad 140mm front and 360 bottom plates
PSU:  Antec 1200 (the original version)
HDD:  2X  WD Caviar Black 1TB 7200RPM SATAii
RAM:  12GB (6x 2GB sticks) Corsair Dominator GT 1600 (1st set is V2.1 and 2nd set is V3.1)
CPU:  2x  Intel Xeon ES E5530 (will be Upgrading to dual E5620 soon due to incompatibility... Live and Learn)
CPU Cooler: 2X Thermaltake Frio (the back bracket needed to be modded to avoid some chips under the socket)
VGA:  2X EVGA GTX295 Co-Op (From my Original Arsenal System)
Optical Drive:  Basic DVD-RW IDE (dont have long enough SATA Cables for my SATA DVD drive yet)
Misc:  Single braided PCIE 6pin and 8 pin Cable Extensions, 24 ATX single braided Extension, Dual 12" White Cold Cathode lights, Black Momentary Vandal switch with red LED
 
Upcoming Modds:
 
Cable management Mod---> Going to be spacing the back panel out another 3/8" to 1/2" so i can hide the PSU cables behind the Mobo support wall and just use single braided cable extensions which in the end will save lots of time and money from converting the PSU to a full single braided PSU.
 
Relocating HHD Mount--->  Right now the HDD Mount is over the first CPU cooler which would IMO reduce airflow through the cooler.  When i get longer SATA cables i will move the HDD cage over to the left in its proper place freeing up some airflow.
 
CPU LC setup--->  Later down the road I will be Liquid Cooling the Mobo and CPUs with a 360 rad that will be place at the bottom of the system.  More detals will com... (6-12 month time line)
 
Optical Drive Painting--->  One of the more useless mods simply for beautifying the system will be painting the later coming SATA Bluray Drive to a gloss black to match the case or a Red to match the theme.
 
Case Graphics Mod--->  Will probably send the back case cover off to be laser etched with my Arsenal Mech Graphic






 
Here are some pics of the system as i was building it.
 

 
 
The IMHO of the system:

I have realized that a system like this with lower end Xeons such as the 5620 or 5530 (even if OC'ed) can't compare to a good i7 920 chip for gaming (due to games relying more on CPU power vs amount of cores/threads).  But I simply wanted to build a more challenging system and one that would be great for 64bit Cad, Photoshop, and various 3d rendering as well.  I plan to use this more as a workstation for my art and engineering than a gaming system.  I'm confident that it won't slack to bad in the gaming department, but  IMHO if you're a gamer stick with a good i7 based system and OC it to H3ll.

***PICS and more updates to come!!!!
 
 

__NaZ

OOOOOOOOOOOH SWEEEEEEEEEET

i love monsterous rigs. If i could afford/use one I would build a such a rig myself. Make alot of pics.

one question though. you want to cool 2 cpus and the motherboard with one 360 rad ?

Well I figured i would save the massive Quad 140 for the VGAs if/ when i upgrade my cards.  I'm kind of waiting for the top Fermi cards to be released (GTX485, or hopefully the GTX495 if they can manage such a monster card).  Water cooling is still a long way for me to get too.  Right now i would just be happy running a low OC or stock clock on air until then.

Dude that's amazing! Give this man blue ribbon!

AwEsome!

Very nice setup Gold Leader!  I actually built an ASUS "Quad Father" AMD system for some one a few years back.  Technically that was my first real Dual CPU build but it wassn't my system and I never really got to mess with it to much beyond building it.  I never thought flight sims would be so demanding on a system but I can see why.  I am more of a First Person Shooter gamer myself.  I really like those GTX 295 RE's.

Well I now have one E5620 on the way.  Hopefully the ETA will be Friday.  Also will be working on how i will accomplish my Cable Management Mod and relocating the HDD rack.  Will be updating pics later on this week to early next once i get some work done.

ahhh two of these :)

Intel Xeon E5620 Westmere 2.4GHz 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 80W Quad-Core Server Processor BX80614E5620

Hmm 2x 2.4Ghz Westmere Quads is about 40% faster than 2x 2.5Ghz Shanghai Quads, nice man, yeah can join the FSX fun too, I'd say give it a go man

Found some info about them here:
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=47925

It seems you have the same ram bandwidth for 1 CPU as where I ahve for 2 heh. interesting then, but still ram bandwidth does play a large role with FSX + SP2 + REX in DX10 with UTX so yeah I'd be interested to see how your system does there.

Since you have newer cores and 100Mhz less per core, I ashume that the difference will be moderate, but it's worth finding out as that goes.

When I bought my two Shanghai CPU's they were like EUR 1000,- if i wanted the same performance out of Xeons, they would of cost me over EUR 2000,- which just was not worth my cash. for that extra EUR 1000,- I went for 16GB [4x 4GB DDR2-800 ECC Reg Kingston Value Ram] of ram instead

The only device your mobo could advantage from is the IPMI slot, a sockted Failsafe Bios chip and two PCI-X Slots. The IPMI 2.0 card is very handy to keep your temps, rpms, and voltages of all counterparts of the entire system up to date, the IPMI runs alongside the entire system, so it needs no IRQ, it has 16 MB of Flash SDRAM which houses it's O, which is needed to reach the card via the Ethernet and the Internet it also stores all the needed information in the memory.

here my gallery of my IPMI card:


This is what can be measured with it:


The PCI-X slots are handy for older Raid cards or special devices that only use this connector as where the socketed failsafe bios chip is a must have for any 2CPU systemboard, if the bios chip die die in the future and it's after warranty you can replace the bios chip without removing the entire motherboard, since EVGA did not place this on their board it did dissapoint me a bit.

The mobo I would of taken was probably the Supermicro X8DA3, hence the IPMI 2.0 support it has:

http://www.supermicro.com...ard/QPI/5500/X8DA3.cfm

The advantage the EVGA SR2 does have is SLI support, this is something Supermicro missed out so likewise you did make the better choice if wanting 2-Way or Quad SLI support and OC support, which I still think is importnat in 2CPU land, that would only make the system more unreliable for liong term runs at extremely high loads, Overclocking is irrelevant in 2CPU & 4CPU land

So yeah both boards have ups and downs, you have twice the amount of cores, likewise all programs made for 2CPU and up always seem to do well, the large L3 Cache, the amount of cores which is doubled since you ahve 2CPUs and the wide ram bus make these systems very powerful, if a program is only supporting 2 or 4 cores the system with use 1 or 2 cores from both CPU's,. this is how Dual Opterons work, dunno with Dual Xeons , but I expect the same, so overall you will always be faster than a 1CPU system using the same chipset in basics.

My 6 year and 7 month old Dual OpternMP 850 CG still runs every new-gen game on the market today @ 1680 x 1050 x32 + FSAA x4 & AF x16 heh, which is this one:


Anyways if it's about 2CPU and 4 CPU buids, man I can go on and on about them heh, once the 2CPU feeling gets in your blood, this feeling shall never leave, I really hope you will enjoy this build a lot man, just becasue, I can tell ya that it's worth every penny that went in to it, systems like we have, have a much longer life span as apps go over the years, the Dual OpteronMP 850 CG is a very good example.

And yeah forgot to mention that this Duallie is deffinitely worth two Blue Ribbons if you'd ask me, as being a 2CPU build right

Very nice build, cable management is already clean and I like how you keep the color scheme.

What do you think about the DD Tower 29 overall, any issues with the case? Also, what does the non-windowed panel look like, is it just a black acrylic panel?

I've been on the fence on the SR-2 build combined with the Tower 29, but deer lord that thing is gorgeous, not to mention 8 core braggings rights!

that case is sweet.
looks great with that red/black motherboard.

TOWER OF POWER!! Sweetness

I like the DD Tower 29 but its just extremely easy to scratch the parts.  for the most part i built the case with latex gloves to keep from getting finger prints and kept some of the paper attached also until it was finished.  I gave up with the finger prints when it came to installing the hardware.  Right now i have done some more work with the cable management.  I bought some 1" spacer washers and 1 1/2" long screws to extend the right side panel out allowing me some room for the larger cable to be secured out of the way.  ATM it looks kinda bad but it will suffice until a more permanent case mode will be put in place.  Once i can sell of those E5530 Xeons I can get the second E5620 to finish my system.  More pics will be coming soon!  and thanks for the posts!

Ok so here is my cable management mod... Still has some tweaks to fix but for the most part it is good to roll for now.  The basic concept was to put most of the bulk cables behind the mobo frame of the case so they remain out of sight and more importantly streamline the airflow in the case.  My first step was to remove the right side pannel which was a solid black piece of acrylic, and begin to determine the arrangement of the power cables.  The red single braided extensions are made by Mod Right and can be found on www.frozencpu.com for about $6 each.  I found these necessary since the massive size of the case makes most PSU cables unable to reach vital components.  This also goes for SATA cables, which I had to buy as well (36" is what i used, you might be able to get by with 24" for the optical drive but the hdd rack will need the full 36").  Once i figured the best "path" for the cables to be ran i bought some Nylon Clamps (3/4" and 5/8") which can be found at Lowes or other home improvement stores for about $2 for a pack of 4.  I used 4 5/8" clamps and 5 3/4" clamps.  With a 1/8" drill bit I drilled the holes and used some of the extra HDD/side panel screws from my DD case to secure the clamps and cables.  Since the clamps are not supposed to be visible i never cared about the white color but you can get difrent colors depending on where you look to buy them.  The case design origonaly gives you about 1/8" to 1/4" of space between the mobo frame and the side panel which for large power cables is not enough space.  My answer to this problem was some nylon 1" spacers (1/2"x .194"x 1" to be exact and cost about $2 for a pack of two, I used 4 of them) and longer machine screws (6-32 thread X 1-1/2" SS Philips Head screws, pack of 4 for about $3).  Granted as the Mod stands it leaves a gap just under an inch on the side of the case.  A future mod will fix that with some 1/8" Acrylic strips with an etched EVGA SR-2 back lit by a cold cathode.  Other than a few tweak s to the cables behind the case for better aesthetics the mod does its job in removing an ugly massive mess of cables that would other wise choke the systems needed airflow.







Thanks for reading!  More mods and pics to come!

nice build niccocortez.

Thanks juanP!  :D
 
m3thod- The case comes from danger den with out a radiator.  The case was designed for them but wont come with them.  its about $429 i think for the exact case i got and they build to order so it took about 10 days before it was shipped.  I think they can accommodate custom needs as well if you email them.  the web site is www.dangerden.com
 
Going to have an upcoming post on a dual Corsair H70 mod for the two CPUs.  waiting for them to show up as of now so expect some posts later this week to end of next week on the build.