Kirk Bocek wrote:
I had my eye on the Tyan dual-Opteron mobos for awhile. I tried to find a posting *anywhere* sharing experiences with these boards under Linux. No such luck. So placing myself under the heading "Where Angles Fear to Tread," I went ahead and built a system anyway. Here's what I've learned.
The specs: Tyan Thunder K8SE S2892, BIOS 1.01 2x Opteron 270, 2Ghz Dual-Core, retail package with fan 2GB RAM (4x SuperTalent 512MB P/N D32RB12P3) 3Ware 9500S-4LP 4 port SATA controller 4x 200GB Segate ST3200826AS 7200.8 SATA (attached to 3Ware controller) 1x 80GB Wester Digital WD800JD-00LSA0 SATA (attached to onboard controller) Antec Truepower 2.0 550W PSU Chenming 901A-0-0 RTL Case Supermicro 5-drive SATA HD Cage CentOS 4.1 x86_64
I thought I bought a plenty large case. Turns out the CPU heat sink at the front of the motherboard sticks up far enough to interfere with the drive bays at the bottom of the case. I had carefully mounted the CPUs, heat sinks and memory before mounting the motherboard. When I tried to insert the motherboard, the front heat sink hit the shelf that supports one of the two internal hard drive cages that come with the Chenming case. I had to peel off the heat sink to get the board in then reinstall it -- something I didn't want to do. If the case was 9" wide instead of 8", this probably wouldn't be an issue.
The heat sink sticks up far enough to keep me from reinstalling the internal hard drive cages. Not a problem since I'm using the Supermicro SATA cage, but it bugs me to lose expansion possibilities. Can anyone recommend a "low-rise" Opteron heat sink?
Monarch lists 3 1U all-copper-no-fan heat sinks that I bet would work. Please note the speculative nature of that recommendation !!!! I have been aiming for an Opteron based system for a while now, that's why I joined this list :-).
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