I just inherited a "new" computer...

[Leee]

I went to visit my brother yesterday and as I pulled up in front of his house and popped the trunk of my car open to get something out, my grown niece walked up and said, "I see you opened your trunk - you must have seen me coming out."  So I said, "Of course - get in."
With proper greetings taken care of, she went to -her- car, opened the trunk and brought out her husband's old retired gaming computer.  She jammed it into the trunk of my car and said he had finally got an -actual- end table to replace it.  This is how my life goes some times.
So what I now have is a great big CoolerMaster tower case containing

• a 750 watt power supply
• an Asus Sabertooth 990FX (r 1.01) MOBO
• an AMD FX 6100 CPU (six cores)
• 24 GB of DDR3 RAM
• a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda plate spinner (7200 RPM)
• a "DVD RAM" optical drive
• Not one but -two- GeForce GTX 550 TI cards, each with two DVI outputs
• Eight fans! (counting the PSU, CPU and two GPU fans), all filthy to the point they probably didn't work very well.

I spent about an hour with a toothbrush and vacuum cleaner before I even powered it up - the CPU heat sink and fan were particularly disgusting but I didn't want to take the heat sink off because I didn't have any fresh paste on hand.
Some of the nice bits are that it has a great severalitude of  USB ports, at least four of which are USB 3.0, and a bunch of other neat ports (firewire, multimedia in/out, GBE, etc)

When I did fire it up I immediately noticed the first major problem - it had MS Windows on it.  At least that one's easy to fix with the application of a Tiny Core USB stick.   
The second problem, of course, was those graphics cards.  I'm not a gamer, so the ultimate in GPU performance isn't an issue for me and I'll never use more then two monitors (probably only one) so I could ditch one of the graphics cards - but will the nvidia / nouveau extensions in the repo work with these cards? (I haven't put the thing on the network yet to download that sort of thing, just booted from an old USB stick I already had on hand).  I have a little bit of a phobia here because of a previous experience with an (even older) Nvidia-based card that I was never able to get working right with Tiny Core.

The final problem I'm seeing is the RAM.  There are three 8GB sticks of ram (24 GB by my math) but both Win10 and Tiny Core 15 report only 12 GB.If 16 or 8 GB showed up, I would suspect that one or two of the RAM sticks was not being recognized, but seeing 12 GB doesn't seem reasonable.
Does anyone here have any experience with this combination of MOBO and graphics card and Linux.?

[patrikg]

When I get a pc computer in my hands, I always first go to the net and search for newer BIOS's.
Before I wipe the Game OS (Windows), because lots of bios update programs only runs on this OS.
Have also used rufus and burn a Windows on the GO usb thumb drive with the bios update program.
Some times a have to disable the security thingy because windows defender is pain in the trunk.

Then when it comes to these problems after the bios update,,,, comes later...

[Leee]

Thanks for the reminder about BIOS updating.

Depending on how everything else goes, wiping the HD will be one of the last things I do - and I may never get around to it at all.  Tiny Core runs acceptably from USB and heaven knows this thing has enough USB ports (-ten- 2.0 and four 3.0!) so unless I get to where I want to use a 13 year old HD for bulk storage, I'll probably just Leave Win 10 on it.

TBH, I need a loud, power hungry tower like I need another hole in my head.  I just hate to see a fully functional machine getting tossed.  Although, if I can "lean it up" a little (a lot) it might be quieter and less power hungry.  Hmmm...  Next time I fire it up, I'll put it on a power meter and see how bad it actually is.

[gadget42]

near the bottom of this webpage is a bottleneck calculator that has your gpu available in the drop-down menu.

https://pc-builds.com/cpu/049/amd-fx-6100

however, in the "compatible gpu" listings much earlier on the webpage it doesn't list the GeForce GTX 550 TI

the calculator shows the gtx550ti being a bottleneck but doesn't give any option for a pair of them(sli-bridge?)

this might also help:

https://www.gpumag.com/nvidia-sli-and-compatible-cards/

with regards to the ram, the labels/stickers on some sticks show the total for a matched set
(and sometimes the actual part number will call them out as a 2/3/4 piece set)

so you've probably got three sticks of 4gb

coincidently, or not... now working on 3 machines for a friend(a T6600 cpu laptop, a A6-7310 cpu aio, and another all-in-one with an i3-7100u) fortunately they are quite clean and just need some ssd upgrades and perhaps some additional ram.

above all else, have fun!

[Rich]

Hi Leee

... There are three 8GB sticks of ram (24 GB by my math) but both Win10 and Tiny Core 15 report only 12 GB. ...

I was recently gifted a retired machine that had a Corsair 16 GB RAM module
installed. Both 64 bit Windows and Linux reported 4 GB. Looking up the specs
for the motherboard revealed it supported 16 GB, but only when installed as
two 8 GB modules. When I replaced the Corsair with two 8 GB modules, the
machine correctly reported 16 GB. So you might want to check what RAM the
motherboard supports.

... Although, if I can "lean it up" a little (a lot) it might be quieter and less power hungry. ...

The CPU governor might help there. Check  /lib/modules/$KERNEL/kernel/drivers/cpufreq
to see if there's a driver for your CPU.

[Leee]

Hi Leee

... There are three 8GB sticks of ram (24 GB by my math) but both Win10 and Tiny Core 15 report only 12 GB. ...

I was recently gifted a retired machine that had a Corsair 16 GB RAM module
installed. Both 64 bit Windows and Linux reported 4 GB. Looking up the specs
for the motherboard revealed it supported 16 GB, but only when installed as
two 8 GB modules. When I replaced the Corsair with two 8 GB modules, the
machine correctly reported 16 GB. So you might want to check what RAM the
motherboard supports.

... Although, if I can "lean it up" a little (a lot) it might be quieter and less power hungry. ...

The CPU governor might help there. Check  /lib/modules/$KERNEL/kernel/drivers/cpufreq
to see if there's a driver for your CPU.

Hmmm.... coincidentally, these are also Corsair memory modules.  I haven't yet got the full specs for the mobo, though that's next on my to-do list after I check the overall power draw.
I did verify the BIOS is up to date.

[Rich]

Hi Leee
That reminds me, it's possible the BIOS may have a
setting for balancing power against performance.

... Both 64 bit Windows and Linux reported 4 GB. ...

The BIOS also reported 4 GB.

[Leee]

Hi Leee
That reminds me, it's possible the BIOS may have a
setting for balancing power against performance.

... Both 64 bit Windows and Linux reported 4 GB. ...

The BIOS also reported 4 GB.

Yes, the BIOs has a setting for balancing power vs performance and I've set ti to the lowest power option.  I also pulled one of the Nvidia cards and two of the case fans - it's much quieter now but still drawing about 95 watts at idle (4 times what another tower I have, of similar vintage, draws).  One of the remaining fans sounds a little iffy, but of course it's not a duplicate of one of the ones I've pulled.

The BIOS on this box reports those 8 GB RAM sticks as 4 GB each, so I suspect I just have to find the right setting in the bios and beat it into submission.

So far no joy on the graphics cards, but I'm only just getting started on that.

[Leee]

near the bottom of this webpage is a bottleneck calculator that has your gpu available in the drop-down menu.

https://pc-builds.com/cpu/049/amd-fx-6100

however, in the "compatible gpu" listings much earlier on the webpage it doesn't list the GeForce GTX 550 TI

the calculator shows the gtx550ti being a bottleneck but doesn't give any option for a pair of them(sli-bridge?)

this might also help:

https://www.gpumag.com/nvidia-sli-and-compatible-cards/

with regards to the ram, the labels/stickers on some sticks show the total for a matched set
(and sometimes the actual part number will call them out as a 2/3/4 piece set)

so you've probably got three sticks of 4gb

coincidently, or not... now working on 3 machines for a friend(a T6600 cpu laptop, a A6-7310 cpu aio, and another all-in-one with an i3-7100u) fortunately they are quite clean and just need some ssd upgrades and perhaps some additional ram.

above all else, have fun!

Regarding the GPU cards: as this is a "spare" computer, the graphics "bottleneck" isn't really an issue for me - I'm not looking for phenomenal performance so much as I just want to be able to use my 1920X1080 monitor at its full resolution.  Right now, it's showing my desktop at some generic lower resolution.  Sure, It would be nice to be able to watch full screen videos occasionally but, really, if this mobo had pretty much -any- on-board graphics (which it doesn't!) it would probably be fine.  I know the mobo was designed for gamers, who are fully expected to install some sort of high end graphics cards but FFS couldn't we at least have a vga port on the board!?

Anyway, I've pulled one of the cards - and yes, they did have a little bridge thing between them.  As expected, bringing it down to just one card had no effect on the display output.  It's really just down to driver/firmware to get the graphics working right.

Regarding the RAM:  It looks you are exactly right.  Each module (Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9) is marked "8GB (2x4GB)" which I took to mean that "each 8GB module had two 4GB RAM chips on it".  That still seems to me to be the only correct way to interpret that label and there's a pretty little heat sink obscuring the actual truth.  Only by googling the part number and getting to look at the actual retail packaging did I come to suspect that it is as you described.  I guess, since it came to me for free, I don't get to bitch about it too much but there's no way that it's ok for each module to be marked that way.

[patrikg]

On some PC there are a lot of memory slots, so you can seat them so the banking will be correct.
Depending of how the simm/dimm are built. How many chips and the chips storage capacity.

[Leee]

On some PC there are a lot of memory slots, so you can seat them so the banking will be correct.
Depending of how the simm/dimm are built. How many chips and the chips storage capacity.

There are some options in the bios about a couple of different "interleave" items (I don't remember the exact verbiage right now - I think it was "bank interleave" and "channel interleave") and I tried the various combinations of that, along with a couple of combinations of which DIMM slot to leave empty.  There's even a physical button on the mobo that basically does "mess with the memory settings and get it to work as best it can" and the result is always the same.
I'm convinced now that these really are only 4 GB memory sticks.  The fact that they apparently were sold only in pairs but only three of them are present raises questions but, again, beggars can't be choosers.