HwH Project V8

So it all started with a late night browse through eBay (what project doesn't?!) an auction was ending very soon, I had no time to research I just knew I wanted it, bid placed and it was mine..... a dual Xeon server board (I love dual CPU systems!) The INTEL S5000VSA


I had a cheap atx "GAMING" case lying about brand new, unused from a customers build who choose to upgrade to something else after it was purchased he had told me to just keep it...


I purchased a couple of 3.0GHz Intel Xeon X5450 Quad cores (S771) and 8GB of DDR2 ECC ram (max supported) - perfect!

I then lined up the motherboard with the case..... yeeeeahhhhh that's not a standard ATX board, and it definitely wont fit in this...


so the case was gutted to a skeleton, all drive bays etc removed




now it fits...


because this is a server board its designed to be fitted to specially designed cases where the cpu coolers mount through the board directly to the chassis. we had a pair of nice brand new lightweight akasa aluminium coolers so just mounted them directly to the board using some motherboard standoffs and a some notches in the chassis!


shes in...


if you notice the far front screws in front of the cpu coolers have no where in the case to mount to, so we built a little bracket, fitted some stand offs, painted it black and riveted it into the case...


we were using a Corsair VS450 PSU, which doesn't support the 8 pin CPU power required by the server motherboard (its just 2x 4 pin connectors side by side) so a bit of custom wiring to make a connector to fit...




now things were getting serious we realised this board was flawed, being a server board it has onboard video and no PCI-E slot for a video card it also only has 4 ram slots for a total of 8gb ram...


so meet the S5000XVN - the boards big workstation brother, PCI-E for a video card and 8x ram slots for 16GB of ram which we promptly added! along with a Geforce GTX 560ti 1GB we had lying around...


good old wire tuck..


now since we had no optical drives we managed to cram 3x 120mm blue LED fans in the front of the case for some serious airflow and also swapped to genuine intel heatsinks that came with the new board...


front view looks awesome! (note the dual XEON case stickers as a show of power!)...




we then finished it off with a small upgrade to a GTX 580ti 1.5GB and a couple of Sandisk 120gb SSD's in Raid 0


some benchmarks (ON THE GTX 560TI - still to get round to re doing them on the new card)...

WHAT THE...

I tried to get my hands on one of this but they were all WAY too expensive...

maybe next time.

Great idea and looks very nice!
RESPECT!

its worth keeping your eyes peeled as this one wasn't expensive at all!

ppl are just insane, there are prices between 99€ up to 900€ on ebay

the VSA was something silly like £30 but the XVN we paid around £100 but it came with 2x 2.66GHz Xeon quad cores and genuine intel heatsinks which we swapped over with our 3.0GHz chips and sold the 2.66 as a bundle with the VSA board and akasa HSF's so it worked out a cheap upgrade.

lucky shot you made!