So it begins! (3960x + custom liquid cooling)

[101m4n]

7 minutes ago, For Science! said:

This sounds to me like you are booting with another card in the primary PCIe slot.

Actually it was in the primary slot, but I had a second GPU (the rx550) in the other x16 slot with the display attached.

7 minutes ago, For Science! said:

Try disable CSM (compatibility support module). And after doing that, put hte 1080 back into the primary slot to see if anything changes.

I think I remember seeing something like that. I also tried a few different settings (like forcing pcie gen 3) etc without luck. I'll give this a go.

[101m4n]

Nope, same outcome.

 

Edit* I found an evga card within tube distance in london on ebay for £230. I'm picking it up this evening.

[101m4n]

The evga card works.

 

I have seen many reports of 10 series cards not posting in various motherboards and a disproportionate number of those issues seem to be with MSI cards. I pretty sure they just guffed up the bios on these cards somehow. Oh well, I suppose I'll just include a note and a return postage label with the card when I sell it.

 

Here's the system now:

Not without some more issues though (why not?).

One of the things I wanted was fan control via coolant temperature. Fortunately the board supports this with a couple of headers for 10k thermistors. For reasons that defy all logic and sense though, certain fans can only be controlled by certain sensors. The sensor that suited my needs however, was sandwiched between the edge of a usb2 header and the bottom-most PCIe slot.

I ended up having to solder some new leads on that would fit in the gap:

Can't say I was thrilled about soldering this close to by far the most valuable computer I have ever owned, but hey ho. It had to be done. I'm sure the cardboard will protect it from the 250 centigrade molten metal .

Time to get an OS installed :

[xgiovio]

nice. any news on temperatures and watts?

[101m4n]

5 hours ago, xgiovio said:

nice. any news on temperatures and watts?

I neglected to update this as I've been quite busy with work.
With the fans tuned to fairly quiet levels, I get about 35-40 idle in windows and 60 ish under full load, package power at full load is around 250 watts and it turbos to 4.25 on all core loads, which isn't bad at all!

I'd tune it quieter, but as the GPU is open-air and not blower, I won't be doing that. At some point in the future I will probably replace the 1080 with something more recent and add it to the loop. Then I should be able to tune the fans to complete silence .
The high idle temps seem to be because it doesn't clock down to idle frequencies when idle. This isn't an issue in linux, could be windows background nonsense keeping the frequency high, or it could be windows itself trying to control the frequency directly and making a hash of it. I don't know. I only use windows for vr and the occasional game that won't run acceptably in steamplay anyway so I don't really care.
On the other hand, compiles go crazy fast now! They also use a lot of memory though. With the GNU linker I frequently get within a hairs breadth of paging on some of the projects I am working on at the moment.

One interesting issue had is that steam appears to have some sort of shader caching mechanism, whereby when I start a vulkan game it will attempt to pre-compile the shaders in parallel, which will in turn use all the memory and swap and cause linux to start killing off processes in a desperate bid to keep the system afloat. So that was fun.

Fortunately this feature can be turned off in steam settings.
Otherwise it's been great! I hope to get many many years of use out of this system. Fingers crossed AMD puts the zen3 threadripper stuff on the same socket!