Once the machine was constructed it was time to test the system out and hopefully test for speed. However, as life is, things turned out to be a lot more complicated than I hoped.
When the power on was tried first, everything fired up perfectly, although a monitor had to be plugged into each system in turn to check if they were working. When I went thought them with monitor and keyboard I found that two out of the five were not recognising the processor. After extensive BIOS poking I thought the best course of action to take would be to update the BIOS in order to sort out the unknown CPU issues. I thought this very bizarre, since all the systems functioned prior to installation.
I downloaded an updated BIOS from the manufacturer website and proceeded to flash the offending motherboard. After I restarted the board from the flash, I discovered that I had downloaded the wrong BIOS, I had the one for a similar board!
I decided to try and hot-swap the BIOS chip. This meant removing the dead BIOS chip, inserting in a fresh one from a good motherboard, booting it up and changing the BIOS just before it flashed it. Although a very risky process, this paid off, as we managed to successfully update the board. I then decided to flash all 5 of the motherboards to the same updated BIOS to maintain similarities.
Whilst this fixed my CPU errors, I discovered I had a couple of gammy hard drives (it never rains...) I bought in a couple of cheap replacements to do the job. Unfortunately, all this fiddling meant I had to disassemble and reassemble the motherboard stack several times - a time-consuming and highly irritating process!
After having everything sorted it was time to check the network, as the server is operated by a remote console. Everything functioned correctly - and I was up and running!
In order to prove itself as a decent piece of kit I decided to set up a show down against my current computer rendering a small animation of my iPod lasting 30 seconds - 600 frames. My computer (a 3 GHz Pentium4 with 2 GB RAM) took 1 hour to complete the task - however the Rendiathon took a mere 15 minutes for the very same job. Cutting rendering times by 75%? I think that's a mod job well done!
When the power on was tried first, everything fired up perfectly, although a monitor had to be plugged into each system in turn to check if they were working. When I went thought them with monitor and keyboard I found that two out of the five were not recognising the processor. After extensive BIOS poking I thought the best course of action to take would be to update the BIOS in order to sort out the unknown CPU issues. I thought this very bizarre, since all the systems functioned prior to installation.
I downloaded an updated BIOS from the manufacturer website and proceeded to flash the offending motherboard. After I restarted the board from the flash, I discovered that I had downloaded the wrong BIOS, I had the one for a similar board!
I decided to try and hot-swap the BIOS chip. This meant removing the dead BIOS chip, inserting in a fresh one from a good motherboard, booting it up and changing the BIOS just before it flashed it. Although a very risky process, this paid off, as we managed to successfully update the board. I then decided to flash all 5 of the motherboards to the same updated BIOS to maintain similarities.
Whilst this fixed my CPU errors, I discovered I had a couple of gammy hard drives (it never rains...) I bought in a couple of cheap replacements to do the job. Unfortunately, all this fiddling meant I had to disassemble and reassemble the motherboard stack several times - a time-consuming and highly irritating process!
After having everything sorted it was time to check the network, as the server is operated by a remote console. Everything functioned correctly - and I was up and running!
In order to prove itself as a decent piece of kit I decided to set up a show down against my current computer rendering a small animation of my iPod lasting 30 seconds - 600 frames. My computer (a 3 GHz Pentium4 with 2 GB RAM) took 1 hour to complete the task - however the Rendiathon took a mere 15 minutes for the very same job. Cutting rendering times by 75%? I think that's a mod job well done!
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review
October 14 2021 | 15:04
Want to comment? Please log in.