I ragged a bit on the Gigabyte 3D Mercury case in my first post, calling it a near thing. Actually, the case isn't a near thing at all, it's the Skulltrail D5400 motherboard that's caused the most difficulty. Not that it isn't a wonderful product, it's just something new to the consumer market with special needs. A pampered rock star if you will.

First off, it's eATX, meaning large, with only relatively few cases on the market that will accommodate it. Next there's the fact that it's socket LGA771 meaning none of Intel's mainstream LGA775 processors fit it. There's no throwing two cheapos in this thing and upgrading later. Then there are those two darn EPS12V 8-pin sockets. If you've been reading, you'll already know that it was very difficult to find a power supply that offered two leads and I've yet to spot an adapter to split a single EPS12V connector into two. You might not want to do such a thing anyway, as a single 12-volt rail might not be up to the task (though I was perfectly willing to try it!).

The D5400XS I'm using at the moment is an alpha preproduction unit from Intel though I've been assured it's virtually identical to what will hit the retail channels. Even now that I've got everything in place, I'm still trying to figure out why it's so slow to boot. It takes forever to recognize the OCZ SSDs and I'm hoping there's not a compatibility issue. Oh, well... that's why they pay me the big bucks.

Caveat: The following is meant to be illustrative of the problems one can encounter when configuring and troubleshooting with new hardware and technologies. It is most emphatically NOT a rant against any particular company. I've encounter such issues with virtually every vendor in the industry at some point. Technology is programmed by humans who make mistakes. Perhaps not as many as I make, but...
I figured the slow drive recognition was a BIOS/SATA controller issue with the SSDs that might have been spotted and solved by now so I downloaded the 2/18/2008 BIOS update from the Intel site. Unfortunately, after burning the ISO file to CD, I booted and was greeted by a prompt saying "Missing parameter in config file". Go figure. What said parameter was and why it was missing, I'll probably never know. Suffice it to say that I was not pleased.

Tried the interminable boot again, and this time I got the proper boot prompt. If only I'd pressed the key within the required 15 seconds. One more interminable boot (The drive recognition sequence is what was taking forever--hanging at the two SSD drives. Things were very quick after this section) and then the updater hung yet again at the Linux -InitDisk. There were also messages about INT13 failures. I let it sit there for quite a while and worked on this blog entry, remembering that this is where the BIOS hangs. It was trying to find a partition on the SSDs ten minutes later when I finally decided to just pull the SSDs (which are eventually recognized) and try the reboot without them attached. Pretty darn quick this time and the BIOS flash transpired without incident. When this system actually kicks into gear, it's not playing games. Well, not yet anyway.

Alas, the BIOS flash didn't solve the problem so I'm going to have to quit till Monday when the OCZ and Intel folks are available for comment. Until then.

Cheers, Jon