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Whilst investigating a problem with the Socket 775 to 771 Xeon hack machine I found it would no longer boot, it then would no longer post, and finally would no longer even accept power (indicated on the 3v rail LED)... This was a disaster, I've been sorting out the network at home for the last few weekends, and yesterday morning was meant to be a delve in & fix session (at 830am on a Sunday, this is a feat).
Unfortunately it immediately escalated, the motherboard showed distinct signs of corrosion, which is really strange as it's been in a dry airy room, there looked like (and tasted) like salt condensed on the board... I do wonder if this board had had a life near the coast in former days (it was second hand), and the salt just slowly precipitated out of the fibre glass?
Whatever the reason, there was salt all over the board, I cleaned it all with isopropyl alcohol to no avail, it would not post.
So I stripped it out and went to my junk pile, two other motherboards were already dead, the third... Well I know it works, after a fashion, it's an EVGA nForce 680i SLI board, my previous main workstation board actually... But I retired it for my Core i7, and it had been off with a friend of mine, it has at least one faulty RAM slot too...
Inserting my test Celeron D it came on, and I could run a memory test until it overheated and thermal shutdown occurred... So, I pulled out the Xeon from the hack board and got it into the nForce... Nothing... Dead... But, a BIOS patch later (with a floppy disk!) and everything was working...
So the Xeon went into the EVGA nForce 680i no problem! 4GB of RAM installed in the two working slots, and with new thermal paste I left it soak testing... Everything seems fine...
And this is equivalent (if not better) than the previous board, because I know its history, it's got six SATA headers dual gigabyte LAN... It's actually the perfect little server board, except for the lack of the working memory slots.
A new one of these boards is still like £50, so that was out of the question, I did order a new one from ebay a Gigabyte branded on, which can take up to 16Gb of RAM but only has a single LAN connection, it will have to do.
Until then though, the server is getting re-installed on the EVGA nForce 680i, and I'm going to keep my eyes on ebay for another of these boards to replace the already dead set from my junk pile.
On the topic of drives, I wanted to set up a series of physical mirrors with ZFS, however, I don't have matching drives, so I'm wondering what's the best order to set up the disks...
I've been conducting an experimental project, one I've seen all over the net by others, but which had lots of different information... This is the conversion of a socket 775 motherboard to a socket 771.
First of all, why?... Why would we do this?... Well, the socket 775 is a commercial socket, supposedly sold to us mere mortal customers who buy one machine and one CPU at a time, and the motherboards and processors in the class were/are quite expensive.
We're talking about the Core 2 era, Celeron D, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad. I remember the Core 2 Quad machine I put together was really rather expensive at the time. So, between six and eight years on, we're retiring those machines; yet they cost us a lot of money, and despite depreciation rates we users can still make use of these machines. They can be useful as render farm nodes for 3D or movie work, they can be used as servers, to host basic information, or upload/download points, even as firewalls. All roles they can fall into easily.
I personally am going to be using the machine I've got as a quiet webserver, retiring a venerably serving Pentium 4 Prescott for this old Dell machine.
So, what is the base machine?
Well, it's a franenstein, the in-laws have had me build them a new machine, so they had an Intel D31PR motherboard holding a Celeron D 450, and one gigabyte of RAM, a totally unhelpfully slow machine. Even they noticed it was extremely slow.
From my spares they had enough parts to basically rebuild their machine, which I did, and it left me with their old motherboard. I wanted to upgrade the processor, expand the RAM and add a RAID array controller card, but my budget is extremely low, we're talking £20.
Well on Amazon, I can get a RAID controller card for £13.. This left me £7... Hmm.. Luckily, the IT Department at work were able to donate to me some old DDR2 RAM, so I had the maximum 4GB the board can handle.
£7... Upgrade the processor?.... A challenge... Ebay... Core 2 Duo's and Quads, going for over £25 a pop, most of the Quads were going for £30+. Way out of the budget.
But there were dual core Xeons for around £4... And I saw this hack out there on the wires, so I set about working.
The first step is to strip everything down, clean it perfectly, and get a scalpel. The first part of the modification is to remove the tabs from the processor, these tell the user which way to orientate the CPU for insertion, they do nothing else... A consumer CPU is orientated horizontally, so there are tabs top and bottom to stop you inserting the wrong CPU.
And the Xeon has gaps left and right, meaning it'll bounce off these tabs on the socket 775.
Taking the scalpel, I started to cut the tabs, now I DID THIS WRONG! A much better approach is to leave the current CPU in there, with the tabs engaged into the socket 775 CPU, and then cut between the CPU and the edge of the socket. So the CPU acts as a guide and the delicate socket pins are protected out of sight below the CPU.
And clean the cuts you make up.
Remove any debris...
Then you need to go back to ebay, and buy a Xeon Socket Modification sticker, this is a little sticker, which will cover two rows of connections on the bottom of the CPU, it will allow most of them to pass through the plastic, but two pins are headed with a little connector, and behind the sticker these connectors actually swap the two pins over.
So, two pins, and the orientation, that's all that's different about a Socket 771 and a Socket 775 CPU.
The stickers are bar shaped, so they indicate which pin to swap, but lay the CPU down with the notches to the top, and from the bottom count 10 connectors from the bottom right, moving left... Voila, stick it down carefully.
Insert into the Motherboard socket now, so the notches are to the "top" of the socket, add the heat-sink assembly, and build it back up on your work bench.
Now, some videos and advice says you need to go to sites, and download patches for your motherboard. During my project here I've found most Intel brand motherboards do not need any patching, only third party boards. It seems Intel include all the microcode for all their processors (this is only a guess, I have no proof other than using five different intel boards, and two none-intel boards and always having to patch the non-intel branded ones, whilst the intel ones just work).
Then powering on...
It worked, I've gone from a Celeron D 430 to a Xeon 5130. They're very similar processors, but the Xeon has dual cores and a much faster FSB.
