My main IC's were 74 family TTL, HNIL, CMOS and Op-Amps. All of them were in sockets or I put in sockets for them. I also have a TTL family tester. Just pull the chip, plug it into the tester socket and it would read out what gates were bad if any. Grab a replacement chip and socket it and move on to another. The transistors were all 3 pin devices in TO cans and or TO-220 packages.

Easy to troubleshoot with a DVM or O'scope. I also had a custom board rig which pulled all the card edge connectors out to a terminal strip for mockup and troubleshooting. My biggest problem was after 20 times in rework, solder pads and traces would get lifted from the board and need replacing. After a dozen years, the OEM started making the cards as cheap as possible to prevent third party rework and even touching an solder iron to a pad for the first time would almost always lift the pad. My job got harder after that. At least there was always bench work awaiting me when I didn't have any field service calls to make.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Yes, that was the challenging part, trying to source the supposedly "proprietary" components. The OEM would typically sand off any original manufacturer idents. I got very familiar with Mouser Electronics, Newark and Digi-Key catalogs. I also had an extensive library of board schematics from when the manufacturer published them for service personnel. That was stopped after a dozen years. They wanted the manufacturer service personnel to snap a bad board in half across a desk edge when removed from a machine and taken offsite to be disposed. Also got pretty good at dumping FW programs from some of the chips and learned to blow the code into new parts. The boards were not cheap. Minimum $2K to $30K in cost from the OEM. And that was only if they would sell to you as third party competitor. Had to have the customer order the parts if we needed it overnight to get a machine back online for treatment the next day. If I ordered the part, the manufacturer wouldn't even start processing the order for shipment for ten business days. They did play business hardball.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Most manufacturers do not like others working on their gear:-)

OTOH we used to sell back to some of the manufacturers maintenance sections because at times cards were in short supply and they were low down on the pecking order for cards, S/H cards could be used by their maintainers on hired systems.

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Kevin

Yes, that was the challenging part, trying to source the supposedly "proprietary" components.

Thats where I was working on a principle of anything that was got working was a bonus and I could scavenge from anything that was considered rubbish.

When buying a to be decomissioned system we would anti-tamper label certain cards - parts to make sure that cards were not swapped out for earlier revision or part faulty cards.

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Kevin

Yes that is the situation any third-party service organization has to work in. Still, never had any troubles signing new customers to a service contract after they came off the usual 1 or 2 year warranty service coverage. The OEM basically sold a new system as a "loss leader" at prices below production cost and then made up the lost profit on many years of exorbitant service contracts with the customer. We as a third party service organization could offer better uptime and response times on a contract than the manufacturer at half the contract price of the OEM.

One of my jobs was to deinstall old systems we purchased from a customer after they bought a newer system. I was usually hauling the old machine out on a weekend as the new OEM machine was getting delivered and installed on Monday. Then I refurbed the machine back to new after stripping the chassis down to bare metal and rebuilding it back to factory specs. Then we sold the refurbed system to a new customer along with a new service contract.

I got very good at rebuilding or refurbing parts that had been retrieved by "dumpster diving" as they say.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Just a "attaboy" shoutout to you Kevin. I see your TR host at #9 in the Top 20 Hosts list and climbing fast. I suspect you will be challenging my 4 gpu host at #2 shortly. You might even get to #1 and pass Petri since he doesn't really have 16 1080Ti in his host. But that Titan V card is the dark horse factor in his host.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I saw him coming past my #3 for some time :)

I would say in about two weeks based on how long my most recent "new" host has recovered from its upgrade. He still could get a further boost with a better AP config other than the stock one he is using presently. But who knows when any new Arecibo work will show up for the splitters? And he did mention he is short on time to play with the new host.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

By daily production his 4x1080Ti host is actualy the #2, just behing Petri host.

To beat this babies only when the new generation of Volta GPU' s reaches mainstreet.

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I see that on the stats sites. His daily production is already at the #2 position.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Oops, been spotted:-)

I did have a quick play with the settings and found that I could run at 95% processors with no loss on GPU timings, that works out at 26 CPU WU's and 4 GPU WU's.

AP's don't hang around for long, don't seem to be getting many on CPU.

I don't think Petri has much to worry about, he has been processing more than me every time I have looked.

Actually lost a little processing time yesterday, picked up 30 CPU Einstein WU's at 6 hrs each plus about 100 GPU WU's. Burp:-)

Can't let the system get cold:-)

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Kevin

I saw the Einstein work on the stats site. I too do Einstein along with GPUGrid.net but only only on the GPU. I was doing some CPU work at GPUGrid.net on my 16.04 Ubuntu systems but the tasks won't run on 18.04 yet.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Most of the Einstein is done on this machine, 1 card for each and CPU running Seti, I also run Climate Prediction but ATM they are having major server problems. they are CPU only.

The one thing that is annoying, the Threadripper has got a higher RAC over on Einstein than it has here, I run a few WU's to see if or how well it processed them in Linux and set it up to switch over if it runs out of work during maintenance or server failure here. looking at their stats it could easily get into 2nd place on their RAC stats with GPU's only.

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Kevin

As promised here are the new pics of Numbskull after the mobo/cpu transplant. Not much to see really because it looks the same.

Replaced all four XSPC 90° fittings with other brand. The XSPC ones are really crap. Hard to believe with the general high quality of their other parts. Also replaced the G1/4 thermal sensor in the pump. Will have to see if I can unbury the broken lead in the potting in the old sensor to recover its functionality. Project for another day and low priority. The new one cost less than $8.

The Hero mobo and 2700X are a pleasure to work with. Just plug them in, select what every overclock you desire in the BIOS and off you go. Easy-peasy.

Crosshair VII Hero-2700X
New 90° fittings
C7H-Trident Z memory
Second 1070 restored

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I like the layout of that case, so much free space left over.

Its where I went wrong, separate pumps and reservoir, and drive bays fitted and mostly filled.

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Kevin

Thermaltake cases are very modular. You can either leave all the bits in or take them out. I have never needed tons of storage space so I just remove the drive bays. Took out the three 5 1/4 bays in the front and the three 3 1/2 drive bays under the motherboard. Kept the three 2 1/2 drive mounts on the side because they help stiffen up the case and don't take away any space.

I removed one of the 3 1/2 drive bays in the X9 case and had removed the other but put it back in since it provided an ideal spot to mount an extra fan blowing on the PCH heatsink on the Intel motherboard that was the root cause of that motherboards many RMA trips by the previous owner. Removed the front 5 1/4 bays in that machine too to fit another 200mm fan along with the stock one.

And they are really not more expensive than popular brands like Corsair but not even as expensive as Case Labs.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

@ Keith.

Got a few AP's running through Threadripper now, do they look better?

I am now running Psensor for temps.

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Kevin

Yes, I looked at them earlier in the week. You have set them up to use more of the 1080Ti resources now. But in truth, I didn't see much difference in run times between the stock AP configuration and the optimized. I actually expected more to show up. Granted, that was only an examination of a dozen or so AP tasks.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

@ Keith.

Got a few AP's running through Threadripper now, do they look better?

I am now running Psensor for temps.

What does Psensor show for your temps? Do you see everything that the command line sensors output shows? Did you ever get around to installing the it87 motherboard SIO chip driver? Did you update the k10temp Ryzen/Threadripper chip temp driver to the latest that shows Tdie and Tctl?

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Was hoping for a bit better myself, but it is an improvement over what it was.

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Kevin