Good riddance!

Of all the exotic ( mysterious? bizarre? ) cables that were included with my new Enermax power supply, one thing that was missing was any kind of adapter or connector for a floppy drive. Furthermore,my Asus Striker Extreme mobo doest not not have floppy power adapters either!

But lo and behold, you can both boot from, and flash the bios from a USB key drive. I know this works, 'cause to store the bios file I just grabbed a random USB drive out of a drawer. At the BIOS setup, the built-in bios flashing utility transparently read the filesystem, and even let me select which of the xxx.bin files I wanted to flash. Yea!

However, after the flash and reset, instead of just posting, I got a few screens of text, which finally stopped at a "1.>" prompt. I was confused, because at this point, the "system" was just cpu, ram, video card and the USB key. Then I remembered that a year ago I had put a Linux kernel on the key drive as an experiment. It had not worked then, but this system happily booted. So I had accidentally built a fully functional diskless workstation :)

Motherboard innovation?

Here's an idea that should be worth a billion dollar patent: Put a power switch on the motherboard.

It's unbelievable that this is not a standard feature on consumer motherboards.
Kudos for Asus for including one, but it pisses me off that in years of PC building, this is the first mobo I have seen with this feature. It also has reset and clear CMOS switches. Nice.
Of course the switches are all in a stupid place, where they are to certain to be covered up by any card in the last PCI-E slot.

Come on guys, try building a real PC in a real case with your mobo prototypes. Better yet, run a focus group where PC enthusiasts build PCs with your prototypes. I guarante that with what you learn, your final products will stomp the competition in user reviews.

Enermax needs some tech writers

It drives me crazy that for years, Enermax has not found a technical writer who is proficient in English. Actually they don't have a technical writer who is proficient at all. The manual for the PSU is unintelligible. You'd think they could pay some tourist or exchange student fifty bucks to write 4 or five comprehensible paragraphs.

How hard is it to hook up a power supply? Hard.
First, there are sets of custom exotic cables, that are only for specific motherboards, chipsets, GPU cards, and combinations of the above. For example, there are 6 "PCI-E" cables. My theory is that one is for any single PCI-E GPU, one is only for some ATI GPUs, and a set is for twin NVidia SLI cards. Which is which? Undocumented, and all the cables can be plugged into the wrong card or socket on the PSU. Oh, and, there is no documentation of the "Master" vs. "Slave" PCI-E sockets on the PSU.

The first 4 attempts at POST failed, with the PSU making scary beeps. I just kept switching cables and ports until it POST worked.

So SLI builders, try using the pair of 6x6 red-ended cables, with the Master into PCI-E 0 and Slave into PCI-E 3.

Parts List

So far, my system is
Asus Striker Extreme Motherboard
Intel QX6850 CPU
Two EVGA 8800 GTS 320 GPUs
Raptor 150gb Hard drive
Enermax Infinity 720 watt PSU
Coolermaster Hyper TX 2 CPU Cooler