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Project ilogic - named after the relatively illogical component/platform choice, and a short lived Spanish electronic group from 96.
This isn’t a build log per say in the sense it’s already built and running solid, more of a log consisting of all the part choices that led up to its current iteration. It'll also be more text than images, so sorry for the wall of text however if the knowledge I've picked up during this build can somehow help another builder out there then it's worth including.
Straight off the bat I’ll prefix this entire log by saying yes, I know the part choices might be illogical; could’ve got better, should’ve saved for a better platform, etc. For context when I originally built this machine I could only work part time as the rest of my time was looking after my grandmother, and money was tight. Prior to this rig up until the end of 2016 I had an X58 board with an X5650 at 4GHz which unfortunately entered hardware heaven. When I first started paying attention to enthusiast hardware, the 771 Skulltrail platform was hot on the scene and the concept of dual CPUs enthralled me. With a few years of X58 experience still fresh in my mind and somewhat of a loose idea floating around, I had a browse on the bay to see what I could snag. 95% of the components were used.
Initial Parts List
CPU choice instantly was the x5650’s; cheap as chips, knew how they’d perform at stock, could upgrade later if needed.
Motherboard choice was a strange one; had to avoid HP etc because although they were cheaper than most of the Supermicro motherboards I found, HP’s boards such as the Z400/ML350’s take some jerry rigging to run by using PSU adapters and I wanted to avoid any OEM/Proprietary issues that could arise. The two board series that seemed to be relatively normalized in terms of connectors etc would be Supermicro’s x8 boards, and Intel’s SS5520** boards. All of the Intel boards were still asking a pretty penny a few years back, and the only cheap Supermicro boards were those oddly shaped ones for specific chassis - I briefly considered one of those boards and building a chassis out of wood which would’ve been an even more interesting project, but then I stumbled across a Supermicro X8DTL-iF for £40 and snagged it.
RAM was 24gb Generic Kingston stuff because why not.
PSU was the CoolerMaster V750W Gold - cheapest PSU I could find with two dedicated EPS 8 Pin connectors. If you’re doing a build like this for whatever reason, spend the extra on a proper PSU. Lot of horror stories about people adapting cables to 8 pin connectors and burning stuff out.
Case - Fractal Define R5, listed as an unbranded whitebox case - £20. Turned up and it had a Corsair H110i AIO inside it!
GPU - EVGA GTX 970 ACX 2.0 - £120, not much to say about it.
Will leave out coolers and other tidbits as they’re a headache and will be explained later. Here’s some random pics of iterations of the build during testing/building etc. Sorry the earlier pics aren’t too great, in 2017 I didn't think I’d be doing a log of it 4 years later.
And here it is in a somewhat final built form:
At this point it was mostly done aside from some nagging flaws; two of the DIMM slots were blocked by the Arctic cooler, the chipset ran warm, airflow wasn’t exactly ideal in an R5 plus the storage setup wasn’t too great either (2x500gb HDD’s in a RAID0, another 500gb and a 120gb ssd). The spec at this time was dual x5650s, 16gb of ECC DDR3 and the 970. The rig worked great, and I kinda lost interest/motivation to fiddle with it so I just left it as is.
Upgrade time?
Around April 2020, the GTX 970 just gave up the ghost with artifacting/black screens galore. I needed a cheap card to tide me over until I could get something better, found a Sapphire Nitro RX 470 4gb going for £55. Great little card and now that I’ve used it for 9 months and know how it performs, I’ll probably be using it for the foreseeable. Aside from cleaning the rig periodically, I hadn’t really opened it up/tinkered with it but after putting the 470 in I realized just how many flaws it had that I never sorted, so I set out to rectify those flaws and basically get the best (within reason) performance out of the platform.
Xeon prices had tanked in the 3 years between originally building it, so I figured I’d opt for an upgrade. X5675’s seemed to fit the bill; 3.46GHz turbo whilst still having the 95w tdp (well closer to 110-120w when you factor in turbo) - chips above that such as the X5680/X5690 have a 130w TDP, and you pay way more for marginal clock speed boosts. I put a little spreadsheet together a few years back with all the specs from Intel’s ARK pages, prices are outdated on it now but the rest of the info is the same.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/111cMhn1CqFZ7ZYXOOnEPaMr9RXP4ovdsTDrFr5kY6Jo/edit#gid=0
The 16GB RAM was irking me given it’s a triple channel platform, so to use the rest of the RAM to get it to 24GB I’d need a new second cooler. Noctua have some specific coolers for this platform; LGA1366 server boards have their own backplate that provides M3 threaded standoffs for coolers to screw into. Of course, that doesn’t stop you jerry rigging pretty much any cooler within reason to it and there’s a great thread on the ServeTheHome forums about this. Ended up grabbing a Noctua NH-U12P SE166 for the second cooler.
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...rmarket-heatsink-selection-installation.5003/
With all of that in mind, the rig ended up looking something like this:
You’ll notice the PSU changed from the CM V750W to an EVGA 750WGQ - this was because my uncle built a rig that wouldn’t boot so I offered to lend him my PSU and I’d test his. Obviously with the pandemic he had to drop his off/I left mine outside, the EVGA PSU he’d bought was fine and we just never got around to swapping back. 50mm Fractal Fan on the chipset, I’ll get into that later.
Fixing more flaws.
So now we’re rocking Dual X5675’s, 24GB of RAM and a 470. Just when I thought I was done, more things started irking the life out of me. Mismatched heatsinks were the main flaw, I was also using a USB audio adapter that started going flaky and still had the stupid RAID0. Another trip to the bay for some bargain hunting.
Another Noctua cooler, although this time it was the NH-U12P SE2. This one required some jerry rigging in the way of standoffs on the existing standoffs to give the mounting bracket the correct height.
Threw in a Soundblaster Fatal1ty Recon3D - didn’t want a sound card that had the circuitry underneath exposed, and it was cheap. Replaced the RAID0 with a 2TB WD drive. I’d also stumbled onto a seller who was offloading server components on the cheap and picked up a 48GB kit of Hynix 1600MHz RAM. In no way, shape or form do I need 48GB of RAM but for £27 it was too good to pass up. The old X5650’s and 24GB RAM kit got sent to a friend down south to live a happy life somewhere in his server rack, so that was a simple way to justify the upgrades.
Home stretch.
The thing with clearing up these irks is that they always reveal more issues. Obviously these boards were designed to be in server chassis with high RPM fans keeping them cool. Even with the fan on the chipset, I’d still see it reach into the low 80s which whilst being in the thermal spec for the 5520 chipset, didn’t fill me with confidence. This is in part due to Intel’s spec for the chipset providing a dinky little aluminium cooler, and the R5 not having the greatest airflow (which looking at it now I'd mounted the fans on the outside as opposed to the inside, though even with proper mounting I don't think it'd have been enough airflow regardless).
The last sort of fault was the fans; Noctua are great, no doubt about it - however the board itself has very rudimentary fan control optimizing cool over quiet, and would ramp up given the high temps of the chipset. My idea was get a fan controller, hook everything up to that and have it on the lowest setting. It was relatively quiet this way and the chipset was in the 70s, however if I had the fan knobs at the lowest they go then cold booted the machine, the fans simply wouldn’t spin up and I’d have to ramp them up then down again. Obviously not an ideal solution, and after one bout of forgetfulness I saw the chipset at 100c. Clearly a solution was needed.
Criteria was simple; new case, mesh front with mostly unobstructed airflow. Instantly got put onto Phanteks by a bunch of people, and was looking at the P400A however a bit more digging lead me to the Enthoo Pro - mesh front, plenty room for cable management and an included fan controller that would take a PWM signal and control all the fans even if they are 3 pin. Replaced the 120GB SSD with a 500GB Crucial MX500 too.
All images in full res here: https://imgur.com/a/FHlN9uc
So that’s it, the rig in it’s current form. The Phanteks case REALLY sorted the airflow issues and dropped the chipset temps from mid 80s if not higher under load to a much better low 60s. The Noctua’s pair up well together even with them being slightly cramped, one naturally runs hotter than the other but load temps from memory are around mid to high 50s on one CPU, and high 40s low 50s on the other.
Final thoughts.
I guess the final point is how well does it perform? In my opinion, pretty damn well given it's age.
CB R20:
Slightly hard to give a helpful review on gaming performance as I don’t play AAA titles, mostly just stuff like GTA V, Minecraft with modpacks, Rainbow 6 Siege etc but FPS in games has never been an issue that’s popped up when playing the games I do.
Overall, there’s also the question of was it worth it? In my opinion, yes. I got to learn a lot about the hardware even if it is old. Sure, it lacks in single core performance, has a way higher power draw than modern components and numerous other drawbacks I’m sure people will point out. However it serves me well and I’m happy with it, and I suppose that’s the main point of it all right?
Full cost as it currently is: £462.36 - honestly unsure as to what the actual cost of it all is, obviously more money went into it and was lost ie dead 970, but then I'd also flip excess parts/systems and put the money back into the build so who knows. Definitely could've saved and just got a new Ryzen system, and that's what I plan to do in the next year or so, but for now 1366 lives on.
If you made it this far through my inane ramblings and justifications, thanks for reading. Happy to answer any questions related to the rig, performance or any other related stuff.
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