{"id":4495,"date":"2019-12-10T13:33:38","date_gmt":"2019-12-10T03:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/?p=4495"},"modified":"2019-12-10T13:33:38","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T03:33:38","slug":"blackbird-singing-in-the-dead-of-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/10\/blackbird-singing-in-the-dead-of-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Blackbird (singing in the dead of night..)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Way back when Raptor Computer Systems was doing pre-orders for the microATX Blackboard POWER9 system, I put in a pre-order. Since then, I’ve had a few life changes (such as moving to the US and starting to work for Amazon rather than IBM), but I’ve finally<\/strong> gone and done (most of) the setup for my own POWER9 system on (or under) my desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An 8 core POWER9 CPU, in bubble wrap and plastic packaging.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Everything came in a big brown box, all rather well packed. I had the board, CPU, heatsink assembly and the special tool to attach the heatsink to the board. Although unique to POWER9, the heatsink\/fan assembly was one of the easier ones I’ve ever attached to a board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The board itself looks pretty much as you’d expect – there’s a big spot for the CPU, a couple of PCI slots, a couple of DIMM slots and some SATA connectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bits that are a bit unusual for a micro-ATX board are the big space reserved for FlexVer, the ASPEED BMC chip and the socketed flash. FlexVer is something I’m not ever going to use, and instead wish<\/strong> that there was an on-board m2 SSD slot instead, even if it was just<\/strong> PCIe. Having to sacrifice a PCIe slot just for a SSD is kind of a bummer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Blackbird POWER9 board<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The POWER9 chip in socket<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n