Well I had a chance to play with an engineering sample Core i7 with a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME motherboard and 12GB of Aeneon DDR3-1333 C8 memory for an upcoming NCIX Tech Tips, and I’m actually very impressed with the platform.

I’ve mellowed out in the last couple years going from balls to the walls overclocking (think E6600 @ 4.0GHz 24/7 with a custom -25C chiller under my tower) to being more concerned with overall platform stability and maturity (while also loving speed).

On another note, I have a confession to make. My name is Linus and I have a memory addiction. I don’t need lots of memory. Frequently with 8GB in my system I was looking at up to 7GB of “cached” memory under Vista only being used to store frequently used programs. That didn’t stop me from salivating when I saw that high end X58 motherboards were going to feature 6 RAM slots. Naturally the first thing I did was load each slot up with 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a shot of the test bench I used including the less-than-stellar stock heatsink from Intel (got an APOGEE GTZ hold down en route from Swiftech), a 6800GT that has served me well over the years, and my ghetto sleeved OCZ GameXSTream 600W (also present in the top picture with my chiller). I will be doing a complete overclocking walk through for Nehalem on NCIX Tech Tips, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with a dog CPU, all 6 RAM slots loaded up (far more stress on the memory controller), and terrible stock cooling:

- 200x base clock multiplier without much fuss
- 1480MHz C8 @ 1.66V on this random set of 3 dual channel kits of memory primed for 12 passes overnight.
- QPI speed of over 1700Mhz without much trouble
- 3.7GHz on the CPU before running into what I think was a combination of a thermal limitation (80+C under load) and having a less than steller overclocking chip

For a terrific beginner’s guide on overclocking see this thread on www.xtremesystems.org

Well my WHS has finally been put to the test. I sat down to my computer to see this error message pop up

Intrigued, I opened up my WHS Connector Software to discover that the status for one of my Seagate 7200.10 500GB drives was “missing”.

I think that this whole experience could have been made more intuitive for the non-tech-heads that Microsoft is apparently targeting with this product, but without too much trouble I was able to get through the removal wizard.

The process took about 1.5 hours. In that time it was rebalancing the data that was replicated on the 500GB drive I removed and splitting it between the 320GB OS drive and the other 500GB drive that remained in the home server.

There wasn’t enough space for the server to duplicate all of the data on only two drives, so this error came up prompting me to add another hard drive. That was relatively simple, and shortly after I added the new drive, this error message went away.

All in all I’m very pleased. I lost some episodes of Numb3rs and a few old Disney movies that I had saved, but not replicated. Congrats to the Windows Home Server team for making this 500GB hard drive failure as simple as an RMA with no loss of important data!

The first thing I want to say about this post is that in 90% of cases this is NOT something that I recommend. Normally power supplies that do not have a PCIe 6-pin connector lack one for a GOOD REASON. They are not capable of supplying adequate power to a modern graphics card an they should be replaced. Here’s a short list of the criteria you should consider before doing this mod:

- Brand name power supply with a good reputation (I’m using a Silverstone Strider 400W for example)

- Adequate ratings on the 12V rail(s). (The one I’m using is rated for 14A and 15A on its two 12V rails)

- Warranty. You will be voiding it. Don’t do this to a power supply that is still under warranty

- Safety. If performed wrong, this mod could be very dangerous to your power supply, any computer you plug it into, and your health. You could be shocked, start a fire, etc. Check everything thrice.

- Cables - If you don’t have enough Molex or SATA cables as it is, you won’t be able to do this mod. Actually adding cables to the power supply is outside of the scope of this article. In the case of the 400W power supply I used, it has 3 cables each with 3 molex connectors. I decided to sacrifice one of them to be my new PCIe cable.

The first thing I did was clip the two molex plugs off my molex to PCIe adapter. Then I clipped the molex plug off the power supply leaving as much length as possible.

Then all the wire ends were stripped so that they could be joined together.

Once the wires are stripped, we have to figure out which wires to twist together. The easiest (and safest) way to do this is to use an existing adapter for the mod (which we did. We used a molex to PCIe adapter, and all we’re doing is making it permanent) so that you can match up the wire colours by simply plugging it together. In this photo you can see that black goes to brown/black, and yellow goes to uglier yellow. The red does not go anywhere so we’ll show you what to do with that later.

Here you should spread everything out and check your work (obviously with nothing plugged in…). Do a quick sanity check and make sure that you’re basically recreating the conditions of the original adapter.

It’s always best to solder wires together instead of just twisting them for a cable mod like this. We applied flux and solder to make sure that these won’t come apart. I speak from experience when I say that twisted/taped cables will eventually stop working correctly.

You want to make sure that any cables that are not supposed to connect are covered adequately. I’ve wrapped it in several layers of quality electrician’s tape, ensuring that the end is covered as well as all sides.

Here you can see the three cables that we’re still going to use are wrapped and ready to go

Now in order to make our mod more professional looking we’re going to use some cable sleeving, shrink wrap and zip ties to make this look as close to an original part of the power supply as possible.

So now you can hook up your PCIe graphics card without any unsightly adapters, and you’ve managed to turn a power supply that was only useful for low end systems (no graphics) to one that can take on a solid mid-range system again.

I’d just like to re-emphasize that it’s very important to test to make sure the power supply is good enough in the first place, so checking the amperages on the rails is a good way to do that, but another thing you can do is just use the adapter, power up the system, run some intensive stress tests, and see if the PSU works to power your graphics card. Yet another great resource is the tech support of your graphics manufacturer. You can read them the specs of the power supply and ask them if it’s enough.

Also I accept no liability if by following these instructions you bork your power supply, motherboard, any other hardware, yourself, your house, your other property, etc. This mod is performed at your own risk and is just there to offer guidance.