Hi all,
 
I am new here and new to the SR-2. Recently i have just gotten myself the motherboard for a very very very good price and am now in the process of planning for the build and would like any advice for the build. here are the components which i plan on using:
 
- Intel Xeon X5650 - 2 units
- GSkill Ripjaw Z 48GB 2133Mhz
- Crucial M4 256Gb SSD - 2 units (Raid 0)
- 2TB HDD 7200rpm - 2 units
- HD 7970 - 4 units (quadfire)
- Silverstone Strider Gold Evolution 1200W - 2 units
- Caselabs STH10
 
Here are some of the things that i need clarification:
 
Can the board support 48GB of 2133mhz Memory? i have a set of 4 at home from my previous build and if i can use them, i only need to get another 2 more of the same sets and i will get 48GB, which would be great.
 
Can the board support 4 HD 7970? i know it supports crossfire, i just need to confirm, thats all. i have 2 HD 7970 also from a previous build at home. I just need to purchase 2 more units and i can go full quadfire. If it doesnt support it then i will have to sell it off and get GTX 680 or GTX 670 (depending on the availability).
 
Do i need 2 PSU for my setup or is 1 PSU enough?
 
Hope that anyone will be able to give some advice on my build. Thanks in advance! 
 

If you are going for that amount of memory, i assume that you are going to make a professional use,so i would advice you to sell your kit and to buy ecc memory...having memory at 1600 or 2000 makes absolutely no difference in almost any real scenario use that you can think of... But having ECC makes a big difference when taking into account stability in a professional context.
If you choosed Ecc memory, go dual rank buffered since, when using quad rank, it slows down the speed of the memory.
No problem for quadcrossfire.If you are going to overclock,  two psu are better since the gpus alone, slightly overclocked, can pull 1200 watt from the plug...
If you are going to oc, the cpus account for at least other 400 watts at 4ghz @1.4 volts for both cpus at full load. Add then the power for drives, fans and liquid cooling in case you are under water and you see that you rapidly pass the 60% load that it would be ideal to keep your psu at .
Choose Antec PSU or seasonic ones,they are the ones with least ripple and noise of all.
Do you have already ssd? cause these days 512gb M4 can be found dirt cheap.I just bought one for 280£.consider also that the sata 6 gbps controller on the sr-2 is ridicuolously slow  and that already one drive saturates its maximum bandwidth,raid is pointless on this controller.
so the best would be to have a single bigger drive.this option would also not cripple the ability for the os to pass trim commands to the drives.
Cheers

hello uartin,
 
thanks for the advice! really appreciate it! but i think i will have to mention 1 thing which i think is quite important.. i am from Malaysia and some of the things i would like to get for this build might not be available and even if it is, it might cost quite high as they will tell me 'need to do special orders'...
 
so i think the best solution for me with the memory is to go with non-ecc as i think it is quite hard to get ecc memory here in Malaysia. and if i were to go with non-ecc memory, do you think that i should just get new 1600 memory or just get the extra 2 sets as i mentioned earlier?
 
as for PSU i might just go for seasonic, as i dont think Antec is quite popular here, so there wont be much choice.. should i go with 2 seasonic 1000W Platinum or should i go with 2 X 1250? Price for the platinum is slightly cheaper compared to the X 1250. Will the Platinum be good enough? 
 
i did notice that SSD pricing have dropped recently. but i was planning to go RAID using the controller on the motherboard. but since  you mentioned the issues with the controller, i guess i will go with just 1 higher capacity SSD. will look for those 512GB ones.

logiclessness


hello uartin,

thanks for the advice! really appreciate it! but i think i will have to mention 1 thing which i think is quite important.. i am from Malaysia and some of the things i would like to get for this build might not be available and even if it is, it might cost quite high as they will tell me 'need to do special orders'...

so i think the best solution for me with the memory is to go with non-ecc as i think it is quite hard to get ecc memory here in Malaysia. and if i were to go with non-ecc memory, do you think that i should just get new 1600 memory or just get the extra 2 sets as i mentioned earlier?

as for PSU i might just go for seasonic, as i dont think Antec is quite popular here, so there wont be much choice.. should i go with 2 seasonic 1000W Platinum or should i go with 2 X 1250? Price for the platinum is slightly cheaper compared to the X 1250. Will the Platinum be good enough? 

i did notice that SSD pricing have dropped recently. but i was planning to go RAID using the controller on the motherboard. but since  you mentioned the issues with the controller, i guess i will go with just 1 higher capacity SSD. will look for those 512GB ones.

 
I would go for whatever option is cheaper. If you intend to do insane overclocking, going with the 2133 Gskill is a good choice. But considering how little difference it makes as far as performance from going from 1600 to 2133, you'd probably be better off going with the cheaper memory. The reasons are two: 1.) there is no guarantee you will even be able to reach the capabilities of what the memory is capable of. 2.)  you can always lower the memory divider and keep them within spec while overclocking. 
As for your power supply, I'd go for the higher wattage ones. I personally use a 1350 watt Enermax MaxREVO and a Silverstone ST1500 1500 watt unit. 
 
If you do want to create a raid, I suggest using a dedicated card from Areca or LSI, but LSI has some known issues with this board. As you have stated though, you intend to use 4 7970's (the difference from going from 3 to 4 cards in terms of performance really isn't worth the price premium), but you could also do 3 video cards and a raid card in the last slot. This is what I do. I've been very happy with my Areca cards, and I have used a lot of them. If you do get a raid card, I suggest putting those SSD drives in raid 0, but make another raid with some regular hard drives. How you go about all of this is entirely up to you, but I thought I'd throw those things out there for ya. 

uartin


If you are going for that amount of memory, i assume that you are going to make a professional use,so i would advice you to sell your kit and to buy ecc memory...having memory at 1600 or 2000 makes absolutely no difference in almost any real scenario use that you can think of... But having ECC makes a big difference when taking into account stability in a professional context.
If you choosed Ecc memory, go dual rank buffered since, when using quad rank, it slows down the speed of the memory.
No problem for quadcrossfire.If you are going to overclock,  two psu are better since the gpus alone, slightly overclocked, can pull 1200 watt from the plug...
If you are going to oc, the cpus account for at least other 400 watts at 4ghz @1.4 volts for both cpus at full load. Add then the power for drives, fans and liquid cooling in case you are under water and you see that you rapidly pass the 60% load that it would be ideal to keep your psu at .
Choose Antec PSU or seasonic ones,they are the ones with least ripple and noise of all.
Do you have already ssd? cause these days 512gb M4 can be found dirt cheap.I just bought one for 280£.consider also that the sata 6 gbps controller on the sr-2 is ridicuolously slow  and that already one drive saturates its maximum bandwidth,raid is pointless on this controller.
so the best would be to have a single bigger drive.this option would also not cripple the ability for the os to pass trim commands to the drives.
Cheers

 
Fortunately now, and I felt I should mention this, they finally make ECC Registered DDR3 1600 memory. So you could technically still have the server memory, but also be able to overclock at the same time. I have found that the Crucial memory seems to not mind being overclocked as I've got 96GB of 1333 overclocked to 1600. Crucial does now offer 1600 memory in the ECC registered capacity. I'd be willing to guess the reason the sticks I use overclocked so easily to 1600 is that the memory chips used on the sticks themselves are probably the same ones they use for 1333, 1066, and 800. I don't know this for certain, but I was amazed at how easily they handled the 1600 speeds with not so much as a voltage increase. 

As SCSIman mentioned, there are also other good alternatives to Seasonic and Antec, but as i said the Platinum 1000 and the HCP 1200 are theunits with the cleanest energy delivery. Both have very little level of noise and ripple. Their voltage regulation is also the best . Enermax and Silverstone are great units but they don't come close to the uniformity and cleanness of energy delivered by the aforementioned units.
If you decide to follow the non-ecc route try to take the same memory you already have. Mixing memories is never a good idea.
I think that even if in Malaysia you could not be able to  find ECC memory, you could shop online and find  something like this
 
http://www.ebay.it/itm/4-GB-DIMM-240-pin-DDR3-1600-PC3-12800-registered-ECC-/150844516151?pt=US_Memory_RAM_&hash=item231f08a737
 
If you watercooled even just one of the four 7970 you would gain access to one of the pci slots to use a raid card.
The energy you are going to absorb from the plug is around 1500-1800 watt with all the components (gpus and cpus) loaded 100%(assuming 300-350 watts per gpu and 400 watts for both cpus with everything seriously overclocked), but this is not a realistic load. It is difficult thta you are going to load cpus and gpus at the same time. Anyway you don't need more than 2 1200 watt psus(with such psu you would stress psus at 65-75% at most). If i were you i would still go with Antec,which is proved to be able to bear even higher load than advertised. Until seasonic started to do its x series psu they(Antec 1200 series) were simply unrivaled. X series are exceptional though. Try to search online.

thanks scsi2man and uartin for the feedback and advice for my build. really appreciate it! anyways here is what i have decided to get:
 
- Seasonic 1000w Platinum Series - 2 units
- 48GB of Samsung MV-3V4G3D/US DDR3 1600 MHz
- Crucial M4 512GB SSD
- Little Devil V8 with reversed mobo
 
saw some reviews on the memory from Samsung and they seem to be really good and it is considered quite cheap too. hope it will be able to run well on SR-2.
 
i will be going with the V8 casing since Caselabs STH10 plus all the other parts needed plus shipping costs too much for me, even though i would love to own it.
 
and here is the water cooling list i will be planning on using:
 
- Koolance CPU-370 - 2 units
- Koolance VID-AR797 for HD 7970 - 4 units
- MIPS SR-2 waterblock
- MIPS memory waterblock - 2 units
- Swiftech MCP35X2 pump
- Swiftech Extreme Performance Quad 120mm radiator - 3 units
- Bitspower Water Tank Z-Multi 250
- Corsair SP120 fans - 12 units
- Bitspower fittings
- Aqua Computer Aquaero 5 XT
- Aqua Computer Poweradjust 2
- Aqua Computer Flow sensor
- Aqua Computer inline temp sensor
 
I would like to know, will the MCP35X2 be enough to push the water through what i am planning to use? Or should i get another single MCP35X? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

You should go with 2 pumps.

+1 for two pumps (you also have peace of mind of redundancy)
Did you give a look to Enermax Fulmo GT.
It is a great case and cheap too!
Koolance stuff is not my favourite, i bought no spill vl4n fittings and after few months 70 % leaks....
Also their previous waterblocks were notorius for leaking....

Enermax Fulmo GT? I saw reviews on it and it seems good, but it will not be able to take 2 PSU and still fit bigger rads, which is why i will go with the LDPC V8. Dual PSU with the extender and i will be able to fit 3 480 rads. 
 
Koolance is notorious to leaking? then i will have to look for others... wouldnt want the loop to leak and destroy the whole build..........
 
I have been browsing and am thinking, should i go for the Swiftech Apogee Drive II for each CPU? if i do get them, then there will be a total of 4 pumps including the MCP35X2... overkill??
 
i have read somewhere saying that these pumps tend to produce alot of heat which will transfer into the loop itself. is that true? 
 
I think i will most probably go full Swiftech for the watercooling..

Ek supreme hf are very good and not too expensive.
I understand what you mean.
with  the Fulmo GT  you shuold do some hacking to fit two psu and still fit two big 480 rads but it is more compact than adding the extender to the little devil.
But this goes for any case that doesn't have an extender,not only for the fulmo gt.
Anyway for the same price there is also the CUBITEK hptx and also another that now i don't remember(rosewill is the brand) but they all lack a dust filtration system and disassembling the system entirely every two months to take away pillows of dust is not fun...
 

Rosewill Blackhawk ultra is the name of the case. I ordered one a few days ago for only $110. That's what i'm using for my sr-2 build. It holds two psu's and is an overall great case from what i've seen. Ld's cases are much sexier, but I'm focussing on cost, with this build.