[BUILDING] The HaswellRise mod

[JuanLobo]

I was curious because of your 2 mini-pcie cards... If it was the Asrock, I was searching to find if an m.2 slot can accept mSATA as well as m.2.

On the B85N, will you be standing the full length mini-pcie wifi card up in the half length slot and just fiddle with the bracket?

 

[dj_aris]

I was curious because of your 2 mini-pcie cards... If it was the Asrock, I was searching to find if an m.2 slot can accept mSATA as well as m.2.

On the B85N, will you be standing the full length mini-pcie wifi card up in the half length slot and just fiddle with the bracket?

I think mSATA and M.2 are not pin compatible. Not sure about that though. But the fact remains that thee are almost no "true" M.2 drives available right now.

I'm not sure I understand your question! B85N has a full size mPCIe (which will be occupied by the mSATA) and a half size slot (for the wifi module), but, this second slot is vertical so I suppose I can actually use a full sized wifi module as well. So I guess the answer is yes!

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

I think mSATA and M.2 are not pin compatible. Not sure about that though. But the fact remains that thee are almost no "true" M.2 drives available right now.

I'm not sure I understand your question! B85N has a full size mPCIe (which will be occupied by the mSATA) and a half size slot (for the wifi module), but, this second slot is vertical so I suppose I can actually use a full sized wifi module as well. So I guess the answer is yes!

Correct. M.2 and mSata are not compatible.

There is an M.2 drive available, search for the Samsung XP941. Dont expect to boot from it in a PC though.

 

[dj_aris]

Correct. M.2 and mSata are not compatible.

There is an M.2 drive available, search for the Samsung XP941. Dont expect to boot from it in a PC though.

Agreed, see my post #53 on page 6. But now here's a fun fact: XP941 might be bootable after all. Mac Pro 2013 uses XP941 (predictably for Apple with a proprietary than a M.2 connector), and Samsung also says that all Mac Pros from 2008 and later are in fact bootable from PCIe adapters with XP941s on board. Now I'm not saying that this is also true for a standard retail board, but I'm just suggesting there might be a possibility to boot from that one.

Meanwhile, a standard 2-lane M.2 is actually slow for XP941; a full blown PCIe unlocks it's true potential. For more info have a look here: http://www.barefeats.com/hard183.html

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Agreed, see my post #53 on page 6. But now here's a fun fact: XP941 might be bootable after all. Mac Pro 2013 uses XP941 (predictably for Apple with a proprietary than a M.2 connector), and Samsung also says that all Mac Pros from 2008 and later are in fact bootable from PCIe adapters with XP941s on board. Now I'm not saying that this is also true for a standard retail board, but I'm just suggesting there might be a possibility to boot from that one.

Meanwhile, a standard 2-lane M.2 is actually slow for XP941; a full blown PCIe unlocks it's true potential. For more info have a look here: http://www.barefeats.com/hard183.html

The XP941 has been thoroughly investigated. The reason it works in the macs and certain sony vaio machines as well is because they built the necessary code in the EFI portion of the machine apparently. This is not the standard code built into your average EFI motherboard system.

Several adaptors including the BPlus ones and the very cheap Lycom DT-120 have been tested with it. But still they dont boot.

There is one possible option right now, that is the new Asrock Z97 Extreme6 which has the x4 PCIe interface to allow it to run at full speed. There are even images on Asrocks website that boast the speeds they acheieved using it on that board. No mention of it being bootable, but I would guess they have made the appropriate code changes to allow that.

I currently have an email in with a supplier of the XP941 who have sent one to Asus for testing in their Z97 lineup. They will be getting back to me when Asus reply to them.

It was interesting when I emailed the company and they contacted Asus, that Asus bought the 512Gb model from them almost straight away and had it sent to the U.S for testing. I was inquiring about it being bootable in the Z97I board, but even that connector is only x2.

Asrock have a nice little board too, which is the Z97E-ITX, but that doesnt take 80mm blades, only 42 and 60 mm ones.

Apparently part of the issue is that for it to be bootable, it should normally have certain code baked into the chips on the SSD itself and Samsung never did this. Presumably Apple, Sony etc have somehow managed to add that code to their EFI systems and made it work.

 

[dj_aris]

The XP941 has been thoroughly investigated. [...]

Asrock have a nice little board too, which is the Z97E-ITX, but that doesnt take 80mm blades, only 42 and 60 mm ones. [...]

It's nice that you have looked into this one so much and I'll be anticipating the results if you eventually use it in a build of yours. Meanwhile, what is dissapointing for me is that we are teased with SSD super speeds but we're not there yet. I mean, why Asrock mITX doesn't accept 80mm M.2? Are those 20mm of difference that important under the motherboard? And also, "Asrock Z97 Extreme 6" has an "ultra" M.2 slot, capable of 32GBps speed, which is -if I'm not mistaken- fed by 4 PCIe lanes right off the CPU (rather than through the motherboard chipset).

But in a mITX board, where there is only a 16xPCIe slot anyway, why not use the remaining lanes for such "ultra" M.2 slot? Don't they go wasted anyway? (not sure about what I just typed! feel free to correct!)

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

It's nice that you have looked into this one so much and I'll be anticipating the results if you eventually use it in a build of yours. Meanwhile, what is dissapointing for me is that we are teased with SSD super speeds but we're not there yet. I mean, why Asrock mITX doesn't accept 80mm M.2? Are those 20mm of difference that important under the motherboard? And also, "Asrock Z97 Extreme 6" has an "ultra" M.2 slot, capable of 32GBps speed, which is -if I'm not mistaken- fed by 4 PCIe lanes right off the CPU (rather than through the motherboard chipset).

But in a mITX board, where there is only a 16xPCIe slot anyway, why not use the remaining lanes for such "ultra" M.2 slot? Don't they go wasted anyway? (not sure about what I just typed! feel free to correct!)

You're absolutely right my friend.

The Asrock mini-itx board is simply down to the size of the board I think because if you look at the back side of the board, had they made it any longer, it would have interfered with the CPU arrangement. The size of an M.2 SSD is nothing more technical than how many chips can be placed on the board itself. The bigger the board, the larger the number of chips, so the higher the capacity and ultimately speed too.

They are correct in creating smaller as well as larger M.2 SSD boards since it then gives the option to use the same tech in laptops and such. IIRC M.2 started life as a product designed for laptops anyway, and it simply grew into the desktop arena.

The Extreme6 is a slightly different beast and Asrock are to be applauded for what they have done. That slot is indeed fed by 4 PCIe lanes; the key here though is that they are PCEe 3.0 lanes rather than PCIe 2.0. So they have put 16 lanes to the GPU slot and used a further 4 for the M.2 Ultra slot. The other difference is that they are wired directly to the CPU instead of going through the chipset, so less latency and overheads = much better raw performance.

This is where the difference between PCIe M.2 and Sata M.2 can come into play. Native PCIe 3.0 is absolutely the fastest arrangement possible right now and Asrock have hit the nail on the head. Its a shame other manufacturers have not gone down this road, and its also a shame Asrock have not done this on more of their Z97 boards. I think its a fair bet though, that when the newer chipsets arrive from Intel, this kind of arrangment will be far more common, and even that some manufacturers will produce a newer model board with a similar arrangement on the Z97.

To further see the possibilities of using these methods for SSD type mass storage, have a search for the Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe. That uses the PCIe 2.0 lanes, but uses 8 of them!! They have put the physical storage (On the top tier unit) up to 1920Gb and its headline read speed is in excess of 2 GB/s. If you look here, you will see it is actually made up of four smaller chips under the bonnet, together with an LSI controller, so its a kind of raid setup really. It presents to the OS as a single drive though, which is a good thing. All wrapped up in a neat single slot solution. This is one of the best implementations out there by a country mile. As always, its not only the performance that is staggering; just take a look at the price of that bad boi ! I would consider one if they actually bothered to make them available in Europe.

 

[dj_aris]

Right on time! http://www.anandtech.com/show/8006/samsung-ssd-xp941-review-the-pcie-era-is-here/

 

[dj_aris]

Parts final Update - Build log begins!

Today I received the GA-B85N:


And immediately I filled it with all my hardware:


So first things first, as you can notice, the picoPSU has a connector for the 4pin CPU power, SATA power and a molex connector. But this blocked the second ram slot:


My solution was to skip the connector entirely and solder two wires on the back of the PSU just for the 4pin CPU power. My soldering is a bit dodgy but it most certainly does the job and the ram now fits perfectly:


Then, to save some time, I just cloned my other hackintosh's drive to the new one, but I couldn't boot because of the HD4600 graphics. Fortunately, Chimera 3.0.1 fixed that, I also installed 10.9.3 and everything works perfectly right now:


Some performance figures:
Geekbench 2 Tryout (32bit): 10337 pts
Furmark: 1016 pts (16fps)

Meanwhile, idle power is about 25w and load power never exceeds 60w. Finally, idle CPU temp is about 38 celsius and during the Furmark stress test I saw up to 61 degrees. The system is also very quiet.

Of course these are only some temporary figures as I'm only using the IGP for now and more importantly the system is on the bench rather than in the case. More on both subjects later.

I've also noticed that some things don't make sense, like the System Info which reports a "2.7GHz" CPU speed, instead of the 2.0 it runs, or 1600MHz ram speed while it's actually 1866MHz. But I consider these trivial as the system runs smoothly otherwise.

I also went on with the PSU, regulated the voltage as close as 12v as possible and wired it in the frame:


And now the bad news: fitting a GPU will be -the least to say- tricky. The added height from the CPU backplate, plus the acrylic sheet I'll be using to bolt the motherboard, make it impossible to fit a dGPU vertically, in the motherboard PCIe slot; I'm not giving up yet, I have some more ideas before I call it a day and settle with the iGPU but meanwhile I have to brainstorm!

 

[golemB]

Looks AMAZING, dj_aris!

Can you tell us more about the GA-B85N motherboard compatibility and the WiFi compatibility (based on the mini-PCI-E slot)?