Our last server build featured one of these boards; we took the time to take quite a lot of photos and do a full-write up of it, which should be ready soon! In the meanwhile:
Author: sotech
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Noctua NM-I2011 mounting kits
One of the better tower coolers which fits inside a 4U server chassis is the Noctua NH-U12P SE2, but by default they only ship with Socket 775/1155/1156/1366 and AM2/2+/3 mounting gear – leaving anyone who wants to use the baby Noctua cooler with their Socket 2011-based server out in the cold. Fortunately, Noctua have a Socket 2011 mounting kit available as an extra: the NM-I2011.
If you can provide Noctua with a receipt of the cooler purchase (and please note that this applies to a number of Noctua coolers, not just the 92mm variants) and a S2011 CPU or motherboard receipt they will ship one to you for free. Most of our customers report that they receive them within 2 weeks of submitting the request; for those who can’t wait we stock the mounting kits for $5. Inside you get everything you need except thermal paste:
The instructions are easy to follow and the kit completely replaces any existing mounting hardware attached to the cooler, providing a very firm and secure mount.
Kudos to Noctua for providing these for free for those who aren’t in a hurry – their customer service is excellent and their products come highly recommended from the team at Switched On Tech Design. You can find more info on their coolers at:
and the NM-I2011 Mounting Kit Order Form at:
http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=nm_i2011_upgrade_order&setlng=en
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Corsair SP120 fans
We have a handful of the new Corsair fans in for testing – initial results look promising.
The SP line are optimised for static pressure, which means they’re ideal for use on cooling radiators or other places where there is restricted airflow, like storage chassis’ or behind narrow grilles. This is in contrast to the other new fans from Corsair’s – the AF line – which are better suited for more open-air use. One nifty feature is that each fan comes with red, white and blue coloured rings to match your system colour scheme – a nice nod towards those of us who build colour-coordinated systems.
A full write-up coming soon!
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Western Digital Red Drive Performance Numbers: Sequential Read/Write
As a follow-up to our review (found here), we’ve finally finished testing the new Red drives and compared them to the equivalent Green drives.
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Can you mix processor models in Intel’s Socket 2011 dual-CPU motherboards?
Intel recommend using two identical CPUs in their socket-2011 dual-socket motherboards; it is theoretically possible to use non-identical CPUs, though, and Intel’s rules for that are that they must be:
- Of the same processor family
- Have the same number of cores
- Have the same cache size at each level of cache
- Able to find a common QPI link frequency
Given the above, Intel states that you can mix CPUs with different core frequencies – the faster CPU will clock down to match the slower one, however. The same applies to the QPI links.
We haven’t yet had the opportunity to test differing CPUs in other brands’ dual-socket motherboards yet – we will update if or when we do. This isn’t something which we would usually recommend without finding someone who has successfully tested your intended combination just in case, but it is handy to know that it is theoretically supported.
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Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe not recognising IBM M1015
We had a customer who installed a M1015 into their workstation and it wouldn’t recognise the card at all during the boot process; the board was still on the shipping BIOS 0906, and the issue was resolved by updating to the most current BIOS (1401 at the time of writing). After updating the BIOS the card was recognised during the boot process as normal.
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Incorrect keyboard layout/map on a Raspberry Pi – no | or \
One thing that’s come up occasionally with our testing of the Pi so far has been that some distributions pick up on odd keyboard maps by default, particularly with Apple keyboards – to fix this on one of the Debian distros and get back your missing pipe (|) or backslash (\) characters run:
# dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
and select the correct keyboard map/layout for your keyboard.
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Western Digital 2TB Red Drive review (WD20EFRX)
Up until now Western Digital have separated their hard drive lines into three; Blue for consumer drives, Green for low-power drives and Black for performance. This has now been expanded with a fourth colour added to the stable; the WD Red NAS hard drive range. Western Digital tout these as being designed specifically for the usage patterns typically seen in a network-attached-storage (NAS) device – generally 24/7 operation, potentially poor ventilation and the likelihood of being in a RAID array of some description for mass media storage.
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Western Digital announce Red NAS drives
WD have announced a new line of drives specifically designed for 24/7 home and small business network-attached-storage use – dubbed the Red Series. Initial release information suggests improved power consumption across the board as well as improved performance and modifications to make them more suitable for constant use. The vibration compensation is quite interesting – 3D Active Balance, to use their term – and there is also mention of intelligent error recovery to prevent the drive dropping from a RAID controller.
You can read more about the drives here. Our testing unit is in-house and we should have some numbers soon!
