I am beyond excited right now I just bought one of these on eBay. That is going to make a serious workstation. The board is coming with dual-core processors on it. So right now it is a pretty weak 8-core setup. But I can upgrade to 6-core CPUs and have a total of 24 cores weaving pixels on my screen. I know GIMP allows you to specify how many cores to use also. So I'm hoping it really can make the most of all of that.

As soon as I have any progress to report I'll start a build thread for those who may be interested. I think I may try some custom water cooling. That would be amusing.

Four AMD processors... Time to buy some shares of your electricity provider.

Better off getting a solid state drive and max out your RAM. 4 6-core processors is freaking ridiculous. lol

Like ofnuts said; hate to be paying your power bill (as I understand it, each processor would max out at I believe 30W so 120W of power; of course, I could be wrong). Regardless, it is getting to be Winter so at least your room will be warm enough. lol

Smokin'!!! Wow, that's way beyond cool!!!

Ofnuts- Yeah, I'm a bit worried about that. Supermicro recommends a minimum of 1,000 watts to run the board.

Lylejk- The TDP of the processors I want to use is 135W if I remember correctly. So 540W just from the processors. Eek. But that will only be when it's wide open. And, honestly, how often would that be?

Wallace- You know I'll be posting like a proud new daddy. It may still take a while to get going. I got a screaming deal on the board but the rest of the parts will probably be brand new. Can't drop that kind of change all at once.

Oregonian- I'm hoping it turns out as epic as I think it will. Time will tell.

The one concern I have at the moment is whether the onboard video is adequate. Sumpermicro says the PCI-E x16 slot cannot be populated with a VGA card. I don't understand why that would be. Seems the slot shouldn't care what is in it.

It seems the problem with video cards on this board is mechanical. Apparently there's a spacing issue of some sort. So that may be resolved with an extender or something. The board has a proprietary mounting configuration so I was already needing to build a case for it. It should be fairly simple to work in a way to add a graphics card. Worst case scenario, I use one of those external cards designed for laptops.

My first priority is to get the power supply. I have the necessary peripherals to fire it up and see if it posts. But I don't have a power supply. Do you think a cheap PSU would be adequate just to get it to post? I don't want to risk smoking the board. But I don't have the $200 for the PSU right now. I know I could get something cheaper. But I already ruined one high-end build with a cheap PSU. I'd prefer to do it right this time.

I agree. But just to be clear, I'm only talking about briefly firing the system up to make sure it's functional before I start spending more money on it. I can get a much cheaper PSU now that I can save for a pending project and use it just to make sure this board is good. Or would that still be too risky? I already have my eye on the correct PSU for this build but I'd hate to spend $200 on that PSU only to find out the board is scrap.

On a related note, what should I look for in a graphics card for this application? All the recommendations I find online are geared towards gaming. I'm not sure the same criteria apply to digital art.

If the PSU is not good it will make the board unstable, and you won't know which part is the problem. In other words, you can easily tell that both PSU and Board are good, but it's hard to tell which is bad.

Now, since you are asking about the graphics card: an image editing application is much more likely to be designed to use the graphics card than to use all these cores, and even if graphics cards are power guzzlers, they still guzzle less power per floating point operation than a regular CPU when you can use their parallel computation power, which is often the case in computer graphics.

Too unstable to even verify that the BIOS is alive? Is there any way to test a motherboard without powering it up? The seller says it's been tested. And it isn't just some shmuck selling things out of his garage. So I'm probably fine. I'm just paranoid about some things.

True. But everybody has a graphics card. Not everybody has a quad-socket workstation And GIMP does allow you to set a number of cores under the preferences. So I'm assuming it has the algorithms to make use of those cores. I also intend to do other computationally-intensive things like compiling programs. And I tend to do several of these things at once. That's where more cores really shine. Mainly, though, it just makes me giggle. And that's what life is all about.

Gimp allows you to set the number of cores, but nothing says it uses them. I have that set to 4 (2+2 cores on my Core i5 processor) and if I launch a big Gaussian blur on a very big image, only one core is ever active during the several minutes of processing (both "Filters" and "GEGL Tools" implementations).

People are not stupid, and usually purchase the more efficient thing. So unless you have vastly different requirements (but fast graphics is a common requirement between you and gamers) you are better off getting more or less the popular gear (especially since the high number of purchasers makes for more options and more competitive prices).

Compiling programs is not CPU intensive these days. It is mostly I/O bound, due to include file avalanche. Better spend your money on SSDs (faster, quieter, more frugal).

I definitely want SSDs. But I need to research more. I keep hearing people say that writing to them shortens their lifespan. Which seems bizarre to me. What I can't find out is whether that's an effect that would be apparent in a home application or whether it's only of concern for applications that move a lot of data.

That's strange that GIMP doesn't use the extra cores. Why bother allowing you to set a preference that makes no difference? Oh well. I'll still be able to multitask while filters run in the background. And when I progress into Blender it may make more of a difference. Like I said, I'm primarily building a quad-socket machine because that's what makes me giggle.

Thanks for the tip about the graphics card. I may get a cheapo one just to see if I can make it work on that board and then upgrade once I know it can work. I can always put the cheap one in my HTPC build since that doesn't need much.

Going to a shop is a good idea. But I may just wait til I can swing the PSU I want. Don't know any reputable shops in my area.

Hadn't thought about returning the PSU. May be too late to return the mobo by then- depends on how long it takes to get the PSU.

Yay!



This thing is HUGE!