Planning to build a couple computers
13 Feb 2010 20:27:33 UTC
Topic 194772
(moderation:
I've been debating the need to build a new computer and due to the opportunity to buy a couple good used motherboards at a VERY good price it looks like I'll be building a pair of dual xeon computers. The following link is the motherboard's info on the intel site. Intel SE7525RP2 Motherboard
Is anyone using an Intel SE7525RP2 motherboard? If so, what are your opinions?
I'm also trying to decide what processors to use.
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/cs-020775.htm
I'm considering the SL8P6 or SL8P5 processors but wonder if there's a better choice.
I realize that for many people here this is obsolete but with my limited resources I can't afford the latest technology. The dual xeon boxes will be big improvements compared to the athlon xp computer I'm currently using. When I'm not using them the computers will be processing data for BOINC projects. I'd appreciate any constructive input anyone here could provide.
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Planning to build a couple computers
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For the last 6 years I have run a dual Prestonia Xeon server, using the older MoBo Intel SE7505VB2. To date (touching wood) this machine has run flawlessly under XP Pro 32 bit. You can see some details here.
Shih-Tzu are clever, cuddly, playful and rule!! Jack Russell are feisty!
I don´t wanna be a
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I don´t wanna be a smart-alec, but wouldn´t a decent sockel 775 board with a Q6600 be more effective? Crunching and performance/watt wise?
With any good board (arround 40€ @ ebay) and a Q6600 (arround 100€) you can get 3.6 GHz quite easily. And this should match your dual dual xeon platform. If you have to pay your power bill, you will notice the difference. 3.6GHz Q6600 eat 250W @ einstein crunching.
hotze
I have to agree with hotze33;
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I have to agree with hotze33; high power single core proccessors will murder you on power consumption. The SL8P5/6 chips are 110W parts. 4 of them will run 440W, vs 130W for a basic core2 quad chip. At 10c/kwh for electricity that will cost you an extra $300ish yearly in operating costs just for the CPUs.
You'd be much better off on the long term building a Q6600/i5-750/i5-860 based system even if the startup costs are a bit higher.
RE: I don´t wanna be a
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The cheapest Q6600 I see on ebay is $175. Add to that the price of a good motherboard and memory and we're beyond my price range. The reason I decided to go the route I did is the price and capabilities. For the price of one Q6600 I can buy the two Intel SE7525RP2 motherboards, four SL8P6 xeons (3GHz), and four 1GB sticks of PC2-3200R 400MHz DDR2. The pci express slots offer a simple upgrade over the on-board video and the pci-x slots will allow me to put to use a 3ware raid controller that's sitting here idle.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
I can only second what others
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I can only second what others have said here: Depending on the cost of electricity for you, you will rather sooner than later reach an break even point where you spend more on the Xeons (purchase + operations) than for a single entry level quad-core Core 2.
The performance of Pentium 4 based CPUs per Watt is appallingly low for Einstein@Home tasks. It can be very frustrating for P4 owners to compare their runtimes with those of wingmen with Core 2 CPUs.
CU
HBE
RE: The cheapest Q6600 I
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Is power free for you? That is a serious question, not an attempted insult.
If $175 for a Q6600 is out of bounds, might you consider $116 US for a Wolfdale E7500 45 nm Core 2 Duo (not Quad) (today's price with free shipping at a popular site commonly referred to as the egg)
Aside from the price being lower than Q6600, the power savings over your quad-Xeon system will be even more compelling with the Wolfdale. You must know your incremental price/killowatt-hour, and can decide how many hours of use a year you expect, for how many years. To be sure, a proper calculation would lower the impact of the out-year spending by an appropriate discount rate, but, no joking, unless power is free for you, I can't imagine this is a sound financial decision. If it is free, then forgive the impertinence, please.
When PCs burned 55 watts, cost $4,000, and were seldom left turned on outside of working hours, power cost was pretty far down the list of reasonable concerns. Times have changed. Before I retired from Intel, I happened to hear that Google was one of the outfits must urgently requesting lower power CPUs of us. They had already noted power as a major cost factor in their giant server farms.
A concrete example using
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A concrete example using European (more specific: German) rates:
1 kWh of electricity roughly costs me about 20 Euro cent or 0.27 $.
Let's say I have a PC running at 120 Watts, 24/7 .
So let's see:
That's 24h * 0.120kW = 2.88 kWh per day. Doesn't sound like much? Per year, this is 1052 kWh or one Mega Watt hour , and will cost me therefore 284 US bugs.
So, if you have to decide whether to buy (say) two cheap computers each running at 120 W or just one more expensive with twice the performance and also 120W, (and you run them 24/7), you can spend more than 250 more bucks on the single machine and still break even in less than a year.
OK, I guess electricity is much cheaper in the US, so you'll have to put in your numbers and budgets and see for yourself what fits your needs.
EDIT: As for performance: Look at this Workunit (ABP2):http://einsteinathome.org/workunit/68346831
Here a Pentium 4 era Xeon at 2.66 GHz (hyperthreaded I guess) is only 20% faster than it's wingman which happens to be one of my vintage Dual Pentium III @ 1.4 GHz (!!!) (both under Linux), and probably consuming more than 20% more power. An entry level Core 2 will need just around one third of the runtime for the same workunit.
CU
HBE
I'd point out ( I'm also
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I'd point out ( I'm also being serious ) that the vast bulk of X Watts is going to wind up as 'waste' heat. Albeit some is expended changing ( semi-permanently ) states of some device like a hard drive, but alot of the energy use is changing an electronic state one way - only to set it back later on.
So if you need to heat indoors there can be a significant 'added value' for a farm of boxes. If you don't - or you need to explicitly cool - then you're in strife. ( I live half way up a mountain range in a temperate climate )
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Honestly, I wish I could
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Honestly, I wish I could afford the core based configuration but I can't. My reason for asking the question was simply to determine if the mentioned processors were in fact the last single core before the changeover to the core based xeons. The SL8P* all have 800MHz fsb 2MB l2 cache and are the second to last irwindale processors. I have no doubt that they will perform better than a 512k l2 xeon
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
What we're saying is that
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What we're saying is that unless you have extremely cheap electricity, the total cost of the xeon boxes even if you get them completely free, will exceed that of buying a single Q6600 box in short order. It'll take about 1 year at 'average' US prices of around 10c/kwh. At the prices Bikeman pays in Germany the switchover point will be reached in 4 or 5.