kolotyluk

There was video on YouTube for a while reputed to be a SkullTrail II, but it was kind of blurry and probably fake, and it was removed last year some time. The other sources I've seen are legitreviews and fudzilla and arstechnica. Anyway, I'm not holding my breath for a SkullTrail II

Yup, the S5520SC is just a workstation board. For Asus do you mean the Z8NA-D6? It's a little disappointing they tried to squeeze a dual processor on a standard ATX board.


I was looking at Tweakers.fr. I was hoping this or something like it might work with the S5520SC.


I was thinking of cooling the 5580's with a CoolIT Boreas thinking that might leave the CPU in turbo mode longer, but as I understand, only one core can run in turbo mode at a time.

Anyway, thanks for the responses.

Cheers, Eric

Zardon

I am actually cooling the CPU's with a forthcoming Coolit product which I will hopefully get around to reviewing shortly. Without ruining too much in this thread, keep your eyes posted on the site for more information in the not too distant future.

m0dus

Hey there, quick question regarding the review--did you need to remove the stock backplates that came with the mobo when installing the xigmatek coolers? I ask because I've got some experience with the Dark knights you used and I would prefer to use them in my own dual xeon build.

mitekillem

I bought a Corsair HX1000 PSU, based on the results of this review, for my s5520SC motherboard with dual Xeon processors. I can't get it to work. I have the extra 8-pin CPU connection, it has the CPU label on the cable, and is color-coded, so it's nearly impossible to screw it up. How did you get it to work in you test? Currently, I can get only one CPU to work at a time. Is there something I could be missing? Please help.

Zardon

First I think we need to make sure it is the PSU and not the other CPU which is the issue. You have everything plugged in correctly right? both CPU power leads. Does the bios only report one CPU? have you tried swapping the CPU's around in the sockets?

kris23

wow you can run a dual CPU mobo with only one CPU? i gotta do that....

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Zardon

Not a great idea unless you plan to buy another CPU at a later date. High quality Dual CPU motherboards are expensive and not great value for money if you plan on running a single CPU solution.

Lone Rangir

I have a question about the power supply. I notice the board has two 8-pin plugs for additional CPU power. From what I can tell by looking at pictures on a vendor site, both these supplies only have one. Did you use a splitter? Or what can a person do?

kolotyluk

I recently built a system with an Intel S5520SC using two Xeon 5580 CPUs, 12 GB of RAM, and a Radeon 4870. I have been a lot of problems with this rig and I was hoping someone might have some suggestions on what might be going wrong or what else I can check into.

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit RTM and I'm having serious performance problems. I first noticed it when running Second Life - every two seconds the whole UI would freeze for about 1 second. This happened not only in the 3D stuff, but the 2D stuff like typing in a chat window - I could not type smoothly because there were pauses every two seconds.

I have since noticed that other applications seem to be experiencing these pauses or freezes. For example when typing in the text field of a web browser, I cannot type smoothly either because of all the pauses every two seconds. When viewing the animated graphics on the Driver Heaven web site they seem to pause every two seconds as well.

Another problem is quite frequently I start getting pauses in my audio stream. Often when there is a pause there is a glaring sound like the sound data was corrupted. This does not happen all the time, but when it does it does not go away without rebooting the system.

While I was running various applications I had the Task Manager open to check CPU utilization and saw something very strange. Even when I had no applications running there was constant activity on every thread on each processor. Basically the graph for each thread shows the thread really busy and it gets less busy slowly over time until they all go quiet for a while, then all threads jump to busy again at the same time and the cycle repeats every minute or so.





When I look at the Processes tab in the Task Manager and sort on CPU utilization no processes show that they are doing anything and the System Idle Process continuously shows 99%. This does not agree at all with CPU utilization graphs.

I cannot help but think this phenomena is related to the performance problems I have having with my other applications.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Eric

Tyrsonswood

Zardon is running into this as well I believe, hope he sees this post.

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Zardon

Hi Eric - yes I noticed this with Windows 7 as well - I reported it to Microsoft and Intel and they are investigating.

For the time being you are going to need to revert to Vista 64 bit to resolve this issue.

kolotyluk

Ahhh - so I'm not going crazy after all - this is a real problem. I'll try using Vista as you suggest.

Thanks Zardon

Cheers, Eric

Zardon

Nothing wrong with your system its some polling issue with windows 7 and the nehalem SC motherboard. thats the initial report anyway.

Vista 64 bit works great with the system id advise you stick with this until they release Windows 7 and get the most exclusive high end systems working perfectly at a later date. Unfortunately they are lower down the priority scale.

kolotyluk

I reported this problem to Intel to and they basically said that Windows 7 is not supported yet on the S5520SC and referred me to a list of supported operating systems.

Just as an aside - after a week of operation my S5520SC spontaneously failed while initializing a RAID volume. After powering the system down and powering it back up the MB would not even POST. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Intel tech support, who had me remove the memory, then the graphics card, then pull the CMOS battery. Nothing changed - the board would still not even start to POST. I had to send the MB back to Intel. Now I'll probably have to wait a couple of weeks for a replacement.

Cheers, Eric

brutusmaximus

Christ, thats a bit of bad luck man. Hope they sort it out. Not like intel boards, normally the most reliable you can get.

Weird on the windows 7 issue, i saw Zardon posting about it on the forums a month or so ago and the CPU spiking issue is really weird.

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lhdlp

hello, I have had to deal with the CPU usage spikes on my s5520sc when I moved to win7.

In order to fix the issue, you must have both of your Ethernet ports connected to something real at all times, and both configurated to use real network settings in windows.

I hope this fixes your issues too.


This is obviously a bug on somebody's part, but connecting both ethernet ports fixed my problem completely.

kolotyluk

Hot dam - I hope this fixes my problem too. Thanks!

Well I can connect both ethernet ports to my router, but I'm not sure what you mean by use real network settings in Windows? Is there something special you have to do other than let each port find it's DHCP settings from the router?

Hopefully this will just be a driver fix at some point in the future.

Cheers, Eric

Zardon

I can confirm this works and I have to thank you for taking the time to pass this on. I have emailed Intel about this issue and hopefully it can be resolved in a forthcoming patch.

kolotyluk

Hopefully I will be getting my replacement board today - at least that's what UPS says. Unfortunately Intel can't give me any information on what was wrong with my original board. It would be nice to know if the board was simply defective, or something I may have done during handling/installation. Weird that it seem to run fine for a week, and then <sound of packman dying>

So it sounds like the CPU spiking issue happens unless both network ports are connected and live. I'll try that and see if it fixes the problem. Not sure if we have to wait for a fix from Intel or Microsoft.

Monday is Labor Day, and I'm taking tomorrow off from work, so I get the next 4 days off to tinker with my system

Cheers, Eric

kolotyluk

OK, I received my replacement S5520SC yesterday and installed it this morning, but I've been having nothing but problems with it all day.

I suspect a thermal problem because the system just keeps spontaneously shutting itself off. Also, the Status LED at the back of the chassis blinks Amber for a while, then when the system powers down it's solid Amber. However, there are many causes of this status state beyond just "temperature threshold exceeded."

I've been on the phone with Intel support. We're trying to run the selview utility from the EFI shell - it starts, says it's loading a driver, then just hangs. The Intel support guy is unwilling to help much more because I do not have a standard thermal solution - he just keeps referring me to their standard compatability guide.

What is even more frustrating is the Intel Deployment CD will no longer boot properly.

I'm not sure where to go from here because I can't any more details on what might be wrong. I supposed I could re-attached my water-blocks on the CPUs.

I had my previous S5520SC running for over a week before it died - but I'm not sure why it died.

Any advice on what to try next would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Eric

P.S. Should I start another thread for this discussion, or just keep going here?

kolotyluk

OK - I got the selview EFI utility to dump the System Event Log to a file. Looking at the log the only thing serious I can see is:

I can't see what the problem is as 10 degrees C is NOT hot.

Also, I told the BIOS that I had all the fans connected, but I don't really have that many fans. Could the board be shutting down because it can't see all the fans?

Anyway, nowhere in the log file can I see any serious thermal event. Again, any ideas would be most welcome.

Cheers, Eric

SystemEventLog.txt

kolotyluk

OK, some more progress, but still more problems.

I was able to download the EFI utilitiy to upgrade the BIOS (and friends). I had to do this because the system will not longer boot the Intel Deployment CD from the optical drive. At any rate I was able to tell the system which fans are connected and which ones are not. After rebooting the system the System Status LED stays on solid green for quite a while, then eventually switches to flashing green, then flashing amber, and finally powers down.

Looking at the System Event Log afterwards there are no more complaints about missing fans, but the root cause still seems to be that the IOH (5520) is overheating. There is a technical note that earlier versions of the BIOS/BMC did not detect this, but they claim it's been fixed in the latest version I am running. I still can't see why 10.0 degrees C is too hot, unless there is a bug in the logging and it really means 100.0 degrees C. At any rate I would expect the IOH to start off at at least 20 degrees C which is room temperature.

Has anyone heard if there are any bugs in the IOH temperature reporting?

Cheers, Eric

kolotyluk

Now a little success finally...

I was able to get Windows Vista 64 installed and running on my system.

I had to turn off the RAID and clear the CMOS, but it worked.

I think there may be a problem with my IOH overheating as I have been running my system with the sides off the chassis. Right now I have a honking big room fan blowing air in the side of the chassis and the system status light is staying solid green. Hopefully if I put the sides on the chassis the airflow will be correct and the IOH (5520 northbridge) will not overheat.

One nice thing about the Sculltrail board was you could put water blocks on the northbridge as well as the CPUs. But with the S5520SC the northbridge sits under the tail end of the graphics cards so there is no way to attach a water block to it.

I have a SilverStone JJ07 chassis which has two fans pulling air into the chassis, and an exhaust vent above the card cage. So now I'm worried that even when I put the sides on the chassis the IOH may not get enought cooling.

Has anyone else had problems with the 5520 overheating?

Cheers, Eric

kolotyluk

Well I finished connecting up the front panel connections and put the sides back on my chassis. Unfortunately the IOH is still overheating, but it takes longer to overheat with the chassis closed up. Right now I have the side panel off again and I have a room fan blowing air in. That's working, but it's hardly a long term solution.

Cheers, Eric

Zardon

I adhered a fan to my northbridge to keep it cool.

kolotyluk

Zardon, did you attach the fan directly to the stock heatsink on the 5520? Doesn't your graphics card get in the way?

The tail end of my Radeon 4870 hangs over the 5520. Some day I would like to use a Radeon 5870 X2 which will hang even further over the 5520.

I'm thinking of cutting a hole in the side of the chassis and putting in a fan to blow directly on the 5520.

Cheers, Eric

ThehAWKs

Hi Everyone i was planning to Build a Dual Xeon System Around the Intel S5520SC motherboard since it has two full 16x PCI-E Slots. i dont wanna hold out any longer for a Skulltrail II i just wanted to know if SLI was Working with the New Nvidia 190.62 Drivers.

kolotyluk

ThehAWKs: I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that the S5520SC supports SLI, but I can't be sure. I know for a fact that it does support CrossFire, which is why I'm hoping to get a pair of Radeon 5870 X2 boards.

Cheers, Eric

Zardon

Unfortunately Nvidia have still yet to unlock SLI support in their drivers for this particular board, but they can do it - and they did for the skulltrail board as we did a 3 way SLI review a while ago. I am pushing them for a date or reply but im positive it is some kind of political decision on some level.

Zardon

Yes I know what you mean it is not ideal - I however placed a 120mm fan in that area recently at a slight angle with some creative bracket design. It really helps stability and to reduce the temps. either that or you could opt for one of the huge 220mm side panel fans available on many stores and push it in as close as possible while mounting it with some DIY work into your specific case.