Fried a m/b this morning.

[Brucifer]

Just had a GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard draw an arc close by the 9850BE cpu. Happened to be sitting in front of the thing when it happened too. Don't know if it hurt the cpu as I don't have a spare m/b, or the P/S. A sad way to start off a day, was just sitting there sucking on my first diet coke of the day for my caffeine fix. So decision time now... buy another m/b and take a chance, or put the money into a gpu for another system instead. I rather think I'll just go the gpu route. I don't have any other stuff around here to check out the CPU to see if it's good. So much for my Phenom days....

[Danish Dynamite]

would mother board still be under warranty?, if so RMA it.

[Brucifer]

would mother board still be under warranty?, if so RMA it.

Nope, it's out of warranty. Went out looking at boards and cpu's and sorta sitting here with a bit of sticker shock. There's some low priced amd duals, but the quads aren't cheap, nor are their m/b's and memory. And I took a gander at the intel stuff too, and a bit of sticker shock there as well. Didn't see any Q6600's. I guess they are still in the mindset that they'll just keep shoving out the new stuff rather than keep selling the older good selling stuff.

And the reality is that since I started crunching with the gpu's, they just totally outclass the standard cpu's in projects they can both crunch in. So why put money into a new fancy quad with m/b and mem, when the same bucks will buy a 280GTX or 295. And those will work with an older system with a cpu to just feed the gpu. It has really changed the equation.

[NeoGen]

It's still early days for GPUs but in a couple of years I'm sure that at least half of the projects out there will have GPU support.
Betting on a GPU now may restrict the number of projects you can run, but with the developments in the boinc platform, the future is promising.

[Brucifer]

At this point in time, I don't get involved with much in the way of projects other than nplb, rc5, ogr, and d2ol/tsc. Lately it's been more distributed.net than anything.

Who knows, I may just spend some bucks on a new m/b, and hope the cpu is okay. And if it is, then the 9850be can go back to work. If it isn't, then I guess I can either pick up a new Phenom II's or just get one of the fast low power duals...

The new way they rate the things really has befuddled my mind.... what one of the new one's is better and lower power consumption than the 9850be, and what board too that will still use the DDR2800 memory?

[Bok]

Bruce, I picked up a combo PhenomII 940 (3Ghz) + Asus mobo from newegg last week. Just brought it online last night.. Combo deal

Black Edition, so the multiplier is unlocked. Looks like it overclocks nicely, though I've just got it at stock right now.

I'm using some DDR2800 I had laying around. Goes in fine.

I tend to install CentOS on my boxen, but for some reason the latest 5.2 did not find the sata drivers on this one. Wanted to get it going quick so I just used Ubuntu 8.10 and that worked ok.

Nice processor and mobo so far

Bok

[Danish Dynamite]

looks like my msi k9a2cf-f mobo is joining this list
appears to me as soon as chipset under red heat shrink gets to hot thats the end of the mobo (this is the 3rd one) when comp under 100% load it will reboot at random, i have not tried it under nil load so far

[Brucifer]

Sorry to hear that. My lesson out of this was to just buy the cheapest m/b's I can, like ECS. I've had better luck out of them than anything else for 24/7 crunchers.

[Brucifer]

Ended up buying a Q9400 2.66 45nm and an Intel DG35EC motherboard. Used the 4 gigs of Crucial DDR2800 memory from the failed Phenom/Gigabyte system along with the Barracuda drive. Stepped back to a 450w p/s and loaded OpenSuse 10.3 on it. It is running much much cooler than the 9859BE system did.

Not exactly an AMD system... but at least the hard drive and memory used to be in an AMD system. LOL

I debated about just buying another m/b for the phenom but as it was a cap that blew right next to the CPU on the m/b when it failed, and the system put out a lot of heat, I decided to just move away from the heat.

And I also thought long and hard about just buying another GTX260 gpu, but in the end figured that I had enough gpu's as they are power hogs, and at the moment the only thing I use them for is rc5-72. Maybe if I was in to boinc it would have been different as I could have gone for seti@home or gpugrid, etc.

So that leaves me at the point now I'm only running a few older AMD X2's that I have gpu's installed in them. All quads are Intel.

[Brucifer]

Finally tore apart the non-working 9859BE system and set the cpu/fan aside. Had a spare X2 m/b and cpu w/mem so I plugged the P/S into that and fired it off. So the p/s is still good. So it's either the m/b or cpu, but since I saw the sparks fly I know the m/b bit it, and just hope the cpu didn't. So this afternoon I ordered another m/b and 4 gigs of memory for it and hopefully it will arrive tomorrow late afternoon. And hopefully I'll have another quad back on line.

Assuming it works, I plan on putting it on NPLB as I'm back in the math kick for a while.