One of the things you get used to when you assemble and configure PCs is mystery. Turn the router and the modem off for ten minutes and a network problem that was vexing you all day suddenly disappears.Even stranger fixes are commonplace. My all time favorite was the tech report that instructed you to drop your Atari ST from a height of I believe 6 inches to reseat possibly loose memory chips.
In the end, I can't really tell you why the SSDs starting working with the D5400XS. I did play with the Drive Configuration in the BIOS, changing from Native to Legacy, AHCI to RAID to IDE. But I'd done that before to no good effect. Perhaps it was setting the IDE Pre-Delay to 5 seconds that turned the trick. Now running in Native/RAID mode with the SSDs striped in RAID 0, everything is working perfectly and Vista is now installed.
But even installing Vista wasn't easy. It kept yelping about no viable volume available, even after I'd partitioned and formatted. Once again, two reboots later the problem mysteriously resolved itself.
In the latest picture of the motherboard that you'll see below, you might notice that I've turned one CPU fan around. This is to blow air across the four Kingston 800MHz FB Dimms which otherwise run pretty hot. I'm going to have to really mind my thermal P's and Q's on this build. I may even add more fans for the 15K drives to make sure they play nice. I used to run Cheetah's back in the day, but I'd forgotten just how hot they can get. And... It takes a very long time to format a 1.1TB drive which is what you basically get with the four Seagates combined in striped RAID 0.
So how is it? I've never seen Windows operate like this. Normally, I can barely tell an entry-level machine from a gamer but this one is NOTICEABLY faster, even with the placeholder nVidia 8600GT and a standard VGA driver dealing pixels. With the nVidia driver installed, even better. Overall, the effect is WOW! Whoever wins this will have no complaints about the performance. At least after it's booted--it's still a bit slow in that regard having to check two CPUs and initialize the RAID card.
Yours less stressfully, Jon
