Well my third sr-2 is now on the way lol. I swear I have a weird addiction to this board. I built my first system for like $3000 and felt guilty since it was on credit so sold it. Then purchased a used sr-2 and did the same things except for I spend around $2000 on the system. Then I sold that one. Now I'm doing it all again  but this time my goal is to keep the build under $1000 which is probably more what I can actually afford . Here's my start. Who thinks I can do it lol. I found E5620's for $175 a piece used or e5645s a piece for $375 used. Now if I can only get my hands on one of those discounted EVGA sr-2 PSU's. 
 
1 Rosewill BLACKHAWK-ULTRA Gaming Super Tower Computer Case, support up to HPTX, come with Eight Fans,Top HDD dockingItem #: N82E16811147157Standard Return Policy $219.99$139.99 1 Refurbished: EVGA 270-WS-W555-RX LGA 1366 Intel 5520 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HPTX Intel MotherboardItem #: N82E16813188091Limited Replacement Only Return Policy $599.99$324.99 Subtotal $464.98 Tax $0.00 UPS Guaranteed 3 Day $0.00 Promo Code -$76.75 Order Total $388.23  

Sounds like you've had fun! I just finally got my TX10-D case and 1 year later starting to finally assemble my 2 SR2 MB's into this beast. Good luck with your goal hope you find your deals.

Ya, that formatting didn't show up well on the post above. I picked up a Roswell Blackhawk ultra and the sr-2 for $388. I was looking into x79 and figured it would be several hundred more for a comparable system. I really like the look of dual CPU systems. It's like sli for your CPU lol. I always wanted a 6 core cpu and up to this point could never afford one, but with prices dropping I should be able to get entry level 6 cores for the sr-2 for around $300 and hopefully oc them to 4.0ghz which should be faster than any current gen quad I would think, then multiply that by 2 down the road.

Well I'm on my way. I just ordered two L5639 Xeons. These were ES samples and are a weird processor but seems like there are quite a few of them around and others have confirmed them working on sr-2's on some other forums. I got them for $250 each so I now have 24 hyperthreaded cores for $500, and they should overclock to 3.4ghz. Ya baby. My total is at $888.13 so far. This should be a killer bang for buck system now. My goal is to have a complete 12 core 24 thread system for under $1000!

Good luck with es as they are incomplete and illegally sold. Produced as test samples before complete models come out.

Hope they work for you. And sounds like a sweet plan. If I hadn't wanted to go water cooling I could have built my system for around $1k. But with water cooling I probably have around $2k into mine. Looking forward to seeing pics when your done.

These chips came out of production Hp servers which is weird. They were specially made for HP I'm pretty sure from what research I could find, so I don't think they are quite the same as most other chips. Ya water cooling kills the build price lol. I've been down that road several times, and now I'm just strictly an air cooler, or closed loop cooler. You loose too much money on water-cooling parts, and its too stressful.

I used H70s on my SR-2 for a while when I had it.  They were doing pretty good on my E5620 OC'ed to 3.4-3.8 under folding.  For cheap WCing the AIO units are not that bad.
 
I would love to build another SR-2 Again but im barely scrapping enough to assemble scrap 775s.

Well, I got my newegg refurbished sr-2 today which looks like it is in excellent condition thank goodness. The rosewill case is also and excellent value. I am very impressed with it. I don't have a computer so taking pictures will be hard. I'm typing on my ipad which I just received my refurbished zagg keyboard case ($25) and it is making typing an absolute dream compared to what I've had to do all week with the stupid on screen keyboard. I went to lowes and cut a piece of glass to replace the mesh with on the side panel of the blackhawk ultra. I decided to do glass because it does not scratch like acrylic does, and it is actually cheaper as well. I don't see too many people do glass window mods so it will be cool to try something different than what I normally do. My sr-2 came without the 1366 backplates so I'm going to call evga and hope that they can hook me up with some. It really sucks because now I have to wait to install the motherboard, since the case only has a cutout for one cpu and I will need to access the back of the motherboard when I get the new backplates. I also have 48gb of ripjaw 1600mhz ram on the way. I intend to make a 30+ gb ram disk to install games and things onto. I think that would be a fun thing to play around with since I will never actually use 48gb of ram. I am also going to install server 2012 for fun, or possibly server 2008 since I can get it for free and then I will mod the OS so I can run games and programs on it like a standard windows 7 copy.

Here are some pictures of the current progress:

I made the see through side panel out of glass because it is more clear than plexi and doesn't scratch as easy, but I found out the hard way how fragile it is. I was double side taping it in, and I pushed in the center of glass when applying pressure and it cracked the glass right down the middle. I may try again with a thicker peice of glass. I still prefer it to plexy since even paper towels can scratch plexi and you can't use amonia based cleaners like windex on them.

I see someone used my guide for using the 12th hidden standoff for strength of mounting the board ... lol ... nice looking build you got going on ... again ;)

Ya, first time I had a case that can take every screw the sr-2 mb has. I think I used your guide for my last sr-2 as well. I love the added safety of having that hidden 12th standoff. I chose the evga superclock cooler because it's weight to performance ratio was the best I found. I think they are 510g each, which should very nice for the mb when mounted vertical.

Running tests now. Had a lot of hoops to jump through like I always do with this board, but I'm slowing getting things figured out. Had a no video device error on the debugger with my ATI card. I'm afraid I possibly fried it when swapping coolers, not sure yet. I ran to bestbuy and picked up at 610 to run tests with. Board kept getting FF code after that. Turned out to be the cpu jumpers were in incorrect positions. I fixed that and then windows would crash and computer would FF code after loading windows. Tried reinstalling windows and although my SSD was recognized by the motherboard, the windows installation could not see it. I set everything to IDE compatible mode and switched to sata II connectors and my windows installation worked. After getting into windows. Only 2 cores would show up. I overclocked and reseated the ram and now everything is working. I'm running a 195 baseclock for easy tuning. Now to prime 95 the system and burn in the paste. I'm getting 20c hotter on one cpu than the other. Trying to figure that out now.

Things are running nice and fast, but I'm having these very strange load temps. There is ussually about a 10c difference between cpu 0&1 on the Sr-2 but this is extreme. Could be one is a cherry CPU. Or somehow I borked one of the cpu cooler installs. I don't know. Both are receiving same voltage and on same overclock settings.

Glad its finally going. Can't wait to see finished pics.

This will be project. I still have all the the sleeving to do, and I think I'm going to do some vinyl work as well. I'm undecided on fans at the moment. I dropped the voltages across the board and brought the temps way down. Also the fans with the EVGA superclocks are the loudest things I've heard, next to a delta. I had to drop them way down in the bios and they are still noise. They move a lot of air though. I'm guessing its partly why this cooler did so well in the benchmarks I saw for it. My voltages are at 1.14 with my overclock. Pretty sweet I would say. Load temps are around 40c now.

Nice temps. Wish my 5620's were that cool.

The bios gives me much higher temps, about 10-20c higher than hardware monitor. Not sure which to believe. With the low voltages I'm running on the 60watt cpu's and the large coolers, its completely possible my temps are that low, but the sr-2 always gives such weird temp readings. Below is my cinebench score.

I wonder how low I can drop the voltages on these bad boys. I'm running prime95 right now at 1.11 volts 3.3ghz
 
I dropped the EVGA superclock fan speeds down to 20% on anything below 50c and 70% anything over 75c. The cpu's are now running at 40-55c under load across the different cores.
 
I'm getting the same speeds as a stock X5680's, but at much lower temps and power consumption. Pretty cool.

I thought maybe my 6970 was dead but it turned out to be the mk-13. For whatever reason the card would not post with that heatsink on. I did an antec 620 zip tie mod and the card runs great. I don't have much active cooling for the ram, the vrm's however seem to stay nice and icy cool. Here are some screen shots with unigine heaven running in the background.


 

Here are some updated pictures of the computer. I haven't done cable management yet. I'm going to purchase a 1200 PSU and single sleeve it, then I will install it later and tidy things up. 
 











[IMG
]http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd64/Bigbrag/pc024.jpg[/IMG]
 

great looking build, at a fantastic low price
Henrik

looks like the bolts w/ washers worked finegood job man.

Looks great, now you just need some matching single sleeved extensions. Case looks good BTW.

Ya, I have 300ft paracord, black, white, & red inbound with enough premade wires and connectors to do 2 full sets of extensions. I have an lepa (rebranded enermax) 900 watt gold PSU. I may buy a different psu to single sleeve though because the last enermax psu I sleeved turned out to be a disaster due to wires splitting from one into multiples so I couldn't sleeve all the way to the PSU. I was working out a deal for a Cosmos II case, but it didn't work out. I'm pretty satisfied with my current case but it would be nicer to have a higher end case with aluminum parts. Bolts and washers did turn out well. Evga eventually mailed me some 1366 brackets which makes me happy as well. When I redo things I may replace the backplates so I can run the stock mouting hardware for the EVGA superclock coolers.

Here are some update pictures of my rig. I did some custom sleeving with para cord that turned out nice and moved some things around for better airflow, replaced the cpu fans with gentle typhoon server fans, added a controller etc.