Mind your own business!

Two English men are on a train.
"What's in that box up there?"
"It's a MacGuffin."
"What's a MacGuffin?"
"It's for catching lions in the Scottish highlands."
"But there are no lions in the Scottish highlands!"
"Then it's not a MacGuffin."

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file

So I encountered an interesting problem this week: too many ranks. Apparently Opterons can only handle 4 ranks of memory at 400MHz. We loaded a certain machine with 4 dual-rank DIMMs per CPU (=8 ranks/CPU) and it was woefully unstable. Opterons can handle 8 ranks if they run at 333MHz, so I downclocked the memory in the BIOS.

Just something to watch out for the next time you try to build a 1U with two dual-core Opteron 270s and 8 2GB DIMMs. :)

This machine pulls 2.9A under load!