Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

No man, keep posting. It's interesting to see what issues you have with these systems.

They just have the same questions I had... technically, the hardware is just obsolete, from a performance point of view it's not worth it. But I can understand you want something different so I'm not pushing you to give up.

[brethin]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Workstation boards are even worse for what you are trying to make it do. Its like trying to make a WYSE terminal play a DX11 graphic game you need to refocus on what you want your system to do and buy from that not buy from what you want to build and make it do what it cant do.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Workstation boards are even worse for what you are trying to make it do. Its like trying to make a WYSE terminal play a DX11 graphic game you need to refocus on what you want your system to do and buy from that not buy from what you want to build and make it do what it cant do.

DX is all on the GPU... Once I go to PCI-E, for the most part I can run any Nvidia GPU I dare... Even with AGP, the ATI 4670 did/does very well (I only built V3 because I was gifted some parts with more potential). Heck, the only thing that doesn't work now is the TV tuner, which a K8WE would fix. Heck, the K8WE would allow me to do everything I'd want HW wise, even with double height cards (as the only two PCI's I'd need is the RAID controller and the TV tuner). Add on 7 X64 (my favorite windows OS ever) and 16GB of DDR (more than I'll ever need) and I'm rocking for a long, long time.

It's like telling a classic car guy to toss his '78 camaro and instead buy a more efficent and safer (and cheaper to maintain perhaps) Kia... There's more to life than economics (only one of many factors).

[brethin]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

DX is all on the GPU... Once I go to PCI-E, for the most part I can run any Nvidia GPU I dare... Even with AGP, the ATI 4670 did/does very well (I only built V3 because I was gifted some parts with more potential). Heck, the only thing that doesn't work now is the TV tuner, which a K8WE would fix. Heck, the K8WE would allow me to do everything I'd want HW wise, even with double height cards (as the only two PCI's I'd need is the RAID controller and the TV tuner). Add on 7 X64 (my favorite windows OS ever) and 16GB of DDR (more than I'll ever need) and I'm rocking for a long, long time.

It's like telling a classic car guy to toss his '78 camaro and instead buy a more efficent and safer (and cheaper to maintain perhaps) Kia... There's more to life than economics (only one of many factors).]

No its more like telling him stop buying `78 Mack Truck parts and trying to make them run llike a 2010 camaro.

Your not trying to build a workstation your trying to build a desktop (based on all your posts of what you want it to do) and you will never be happy using workstation/server hardware EVER.

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

The issue is how these pci express ports are implemented.
On consumer hardware, the lanes to the video card pci express come from the cpu and the less important lanes are from the chipset...
on these workstation boards each pci express goes to a chip which then talks to the cpu: https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...2b07aca8a6.pdf

Modern video card drivers don't take this in consideration and they're "tuned" to assume direct connection to processors, so you can get into instability issues.

Otherwise, there's bottlenecks everywhere. Back then, this type of board was top of the line and so on but nowadays... it's just not that great anymore.

For example, you can put two processors on the board but basically almost any processor you can buy now online is faster than those Opteron 2xx processors.

Look in the datasheet above... The bus between processors is a measly 1600 MT/s one ... my current board works at 5200 MT/s. Same with the chipset-cpu bus, all are constrained to 1600 MT/s... that's slow...
You also have the issue of some hardware on a part of the board and other hardware on another part, for example you have a gigabit card linked to CPU 2 and sata linked to CPU 1 ... transferring stuff to the network involves moving data through several hypertransport links ... it's certainly not user friendly but was a necessity back then.

Also, you can put lots of ram and have dual channel, but at the end of the day it's still ddr1, 400 Mhz. Do the math on the bandwidth, 400 mhz ddr1 with huge latencies and with the problem of having the ram data moved between the two processors for synchronizing stuff versus 1600-1866 mhz ddr3 directly connected to one six-eight core processor that's 4-8 times more powerful than those two opterons combined.

For example, Opteron 256 has 963 points in cpubenchmark and each of them has a 92.6w tdp ... my fx-8320 has 8181 performance points and does this within a 125w tdp. The whole system on idle uses 90w (with 16 GB ddr3 and 4 hdds), 230w while doing video encoding. Yours probably uses 50w only in the ram modules...

Sigh.. now I've done exactly what I didn't want to do. Like I said, the server boards look awesome, they're very nice, a system like that certainly gives you a feeling of reliability and all that, and if you feel that way do it, i don't have any problems with it.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

No its more like telling him stop buying `78 Mack Truck parts and trying to make them run llike a 2010 camaro.

Your not trying to build a workstation your trying to build a desktop (based on all your posts of what you want it to do) and you will never be happy using workstation/server hardware EVER.

You don't get it.

In my mind, truck parts woudl be like server parts... and this isn't a server! It's a workstation (PC version of a Mac Pro), which if anything would be like a caddy... lots of power, lots of luxery. Likewise, a gaming rig would be the camero... lots of speed, but not much else. And a consumer rig? Kia grocery getter.

I'm not buying old server HW and expecting it to run just like a new system. Perhaps running a newer OS and USB 2.0 (which is far from new), but otherwise, it's a different story.

What I'm trying to do is get a cross between the CPU power and disk access speed of a workstation with the the GPU power of a gaming GPU. Not a replacement for either. Or in the car analogy, dropping a higher performance motor in a caddy. Not the best racecar or luxery wagon, but for somebody who needed a bit of both, a unique and fitting ride. If course, in either case, it's not what the designer intended and of course the may be some hiccups and/or custom workarounds needed... but that's expected and if anything is half the fun.

---

If I do get a K8WE, I will need to get different GPU's to use twin monitors, as my Quadro FX's I have sitting are Gefoce 6800 based, and in order to do twin displays on SLI, I need Geforce 8 or newer (and I'd get geforce, not quadro).

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

what are you going to do with a workstation desktop? 3d modeling or just facebooking?

edit: if that is a K8SR you're screwed, not even an AGP slot

[Pentium4]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

I have a Quadro FX 3700 that has been sitting in my room for months if you are interested

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

The issue is how these pci express ports are implemented.
On consumer hardware, the lanes to the video card pci express come from the cpu and the less important lanes are from the chipset...
on these workstation boards each pci express goes to a chip which then talks to the cpu: https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...2b07aca8a6.pdf

Modern video card drivers don't take this in consideration and they're "tuned" to assume direct connection to processors, so you can get into instability issues.

Otherwise, there's bottlenecks everywhere. Back then, this type of board was top of the line and so on but nowadays... it's just not that great anymore.

For example, you can put two processors on the board but basically almost any processor you can buy now online is faster than those Opteron 2xx processors.

Look in the datasheet above... The bus between processors is a measly 1600 MT/s one ... my current board works at 5200 MT/s. Same with the chipset-cpu bus, all are constrained to 1600 MT/s... that's slow...
You also have the issue of some hardware on a part of the board and other hardware on another part, for example you have a gigabit card linked to CPU 2 and sata linked to CPU 1 ... transferring stuff to the network involves moving data through several hypertransport links ... it's certainly not user friendly but was a necessity back then.

Also, you can put lots of ram and have dual channel, but at the end of the day it's still ddr1, 400 Mhz. Do the math on the bandwidth, 400 mhz ddr1 with huge latencies and with the problem of having the ram data moved between the two processors for synchronizing stuff versus 1600-1866 mhz ddr3 directly connected to one six-eight core processor that's 4-8 times more powerful than those two opterons combined.

For example, Opteron 256 has 963 points in cpubenchmark and each of them has a 92.6w tdp ... my fx-8320 has 8181 performance points and does this within a 125w tdp. The whole system on idle uses 90w (with 16 GB ddr3 and 4 hdds), 230w while doing video encoding. Yours probably uses 50w only in the ram modules...

Sigh.. now I've done exactly what I didn't want to do. Like I said, the server boards look awesome, they're very nice, a system like that certainly gives you a feeling of reliability and all that, and if you feel that way do it, i don't have any problems with it.

Yeah, and I'd have to spend $800+ to do that the right way (it cost a classmate that much to do it the cheapass way, IMHO the rig was shit). And guess what? Give it 3 years and it's probably dead (modern stuff isn't made to last).

I know the speed that everything talks to eachother is a bottleneck... However, I don't run super-high end games on it either (just FOSS stuff like supertuxkart, neverputt, and maybe the occassional bit of minecraft).

As for instability, I'd like to see hard proof of that. If that's the case, then I dunno what to do other than shitcan it, and start sucking snake like the rest of the muggles of the world (sarcasm). But really, wouldn't it just run a bit slower?

I also know it's a power hog... Whatever. The amount we're talking isn't that signifigant. If we were talking a quad GPU 1500W PSU'd gamer beast, then you'd have a point.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

I have a Quadro FX 3700 that has been sitting in my room for months if you are interested

No, if I get another card it will be GeForce, not quadro (I'm not doing CAD). And two of them, as I'd be doing SLI.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

what are you going to do with a workstation desktop? 3d modeling or just facebooking?

edit: if that is a K8SR you're screwed, not even an AGP slot

Heavy web browisng with many tabs open... maybe some report writign and GIMP/Inkscape photo editing at the same time... with twin screens. Perhaps stuff with the tuner card. Maybe even some light gaming. You know, power using. The kind of stuff that has made my Latitiude D630 go to a crawl... and it has a 2.4GHZ C2D! Yeah, not Ivy bridge... but still, new enough.

edit- yeah, I know the K8SR is a useless (to me) server board. I told the seller in the case of the board itself being a K8SR to consider it a pre-ship return under the 30 Day warranty/return period.

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Yeah, and I'd have to spend $800+ to do that the right way (it cost a classmate that much to do it the cheapass way, IMHO the rig was shit). And guess what? Give it 3 years and it's probably dead (modern stuff isn't made to last).

He probably bought that from best buy or some other shitty store.

140$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113286
88$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157280
58$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233335

286$.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

He probably bought that from best buy or some other shitty store.

140$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113286
88$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157280
58$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233335

286$.

Nope, custom built from newegg parts picked by my ASUS lovign classmates. Cheapass case and PSU, the rest wasn't even close to maxing it out (Sorry, but not maxing things out kinda peeves me more than I should).

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

The issue is how these pci express ports are implemented.
On consumer hardware, the lanes to the video card pci express come from the cpu and the less important lanes are from the chipset...
on these workstation boards each pci express goes to a chip which then talks to the cpu: https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...2b07aca8a6.pdf

Modern video card drivers don't take this in consideration and they're "tuned" to assume direct connection to processors, so you can get into instability issues.

What about non-hypertransport stuff? Like the nForce 4 SLI intel edition (for 775 P4) or the intel variants of the nforce 590 sli and 570 sli? All of those (and any pre core i_ series nforce) AFAIK had the the PCIe run through the northbridge, a separate chip and NOT a direct connection to the CPU.

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Seems you don't get it. It worked fine BACK THEN.
It was the only way technically possible back then. Nowadays all processors have pci express lanes built in and drivers are made with that assumption and optimized for that.

nForce 4 had only a 1 Ghz Hypertransport link to the cpu on AMD systems, up to 2000MT/s.
The intel version still uses hypertransport (1.6 GB/s) between northbridge and southbridge but uses the (up to) 1066 Mhz fsb to communicate to the processor.
Also, on this platform the memory is connected to the northbridge just like the pci express connectors, there's a super fast link between memory and pci express.
On AMD server platform the memory controller was integrated in CPU, so data had to go to northbridge, go through ht bus to cpu, then go back through the memory controller in the cpu.



There's another big difference: in a regular desktop system like that nforce 4 chipsets there's a direct path : pci express - northbridge - cpu . (In today's modern desktops it's direct pci express - cpu)
In a workstation/server like this one you try to buy, you have a choke point: the bandwidth between processors, in your case only 1600 MT/s.

If you have a video card on the first pci express but a game runs on the second physical processor, the data goes back and forth through the northbridge connected to first processor, then goes through the ht link to the second processor (a ht link that's already busy maintaining consistency between processors), accesses the memory banks and goes back...
It wasn't an issue back then when video cards were using pci express 1.0 and had 128-256 DDR1 memory on them, there just wasn't much data transferred back and forth.
Nowadays, even onboard video cards are more powerful than those pci express video cards that were available back then, a modern video card's driver is simply unlikely to work right with all the latencies, slow bandwidth, quirks of memory access between processes and processors etc etc.

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

rd, how much $$$ have you spent on this? Just curious

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

rd, how much $$$ have you spent on this? Just curious

Maybe $250. Over half of which is the case.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Seems you don't get it. It worked fine BACK THEN.
It was the only way technically possible back then. Nowadays all processors have pci express lanes built in and drivers are made with that assumption and optimized for that.

nForce 4 had only a 1 Ghz Hypertransport link to the cpu on AMD systems, up to 2000MT/s.
The intel version still uses hypertransport (1.6 GB/s) between northbridge and southbridge but uses the (up to) 1066 Mhz fsb to communicate to the processor.
Also, on this platform the memory is connected to the northbridge just like the pci express connectors, there's a super fast link between memory and pci express.
On AMD server platform the memory controller was integrated in CPU, so data had to go to northbridge, go through ht bus to cpu, then go back through the memory controller in the cpu.



There's another big difference: in a regular desktop system like that nforce 4 chipsets there's a direct path : pci express - northbridge - cpu . (In today's modern desktops it's direct pci express - cpu)
In a workstation/server like this one you try to buy, you have a choke point: the bandwidth between processors, in your case only 1600 MT/s.

If you have a video card on the first pci express but a game runs on the second physical processor, the data goes back and forth through the northbridge connected to first processor, then goes through the ht link to the second processor (a ht link that's already busy maintaining consistency between processors), accesses the memory banks and goes back...
It wasn't an issue back then when video cards were using pci express 1.0 and had 128-256 DDR1 memory on them, there just wasn't much data transferred back and forth.
Nowadays, even onboard video cards are more powerful than those pci express video cards that were available back then, a modern video card's driver is simply unlikely to work right with all the latencies, slow bandwidth, quirks of memory access between processes and processors etc etc.

I kinda doubt that... IIRC topcat ran a SLI'd K8WE with 7600GT's... and he reported no issues.

I'm sorry (or not) that I don't want a celeron based new system. Celeron = piss poor flimsy junk.

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

7600gt are not exactly top of the video cards, you know. They're 7-8 years old cards. I'm talking more recent video cards, made in the last 2-3 years or so.
Nobody said you should get a Celeron, even though they're cheap and powerful (very good value).

Since the performance of two opterons satisfies you (and seems you're not intel fanboy), you could start even with a cheap $55 processor

AMD Athlon II X2 270 Regor 3.4GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor ADX270OCGMBOX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103953

This one is still about 2-2.5 times more powerful than your two opterons combined.

On motherboards, you can get solid motherboards for this processor for as low $50 (and it's not Asus) but you'd be somewhat limited in upgrading (it doesn't support all the FX series processors) and you may not like that it has Apaq and possibly ucc kzg capacitors on it:

GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-S2 AM3+ AMD 760G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128564

If you want more quality and features (full Nichicon polymer capacitors, sata 6gbps, ide connector, 2pci slots, 4 memory slots) and support for all fx series processors for potential upgrade, you have this at $70:

ASRock 980DE3/U3S3 AM3+ AMD RX881/760G SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157366

You can just fill it with 4 x 1-2 GB ddr3 sticks if you can't stand not having the board full of ram but imho that's just silly.

Or you can just buy a 4gb ddr3 stick for now, even a 30$ stick will be way better than those 16 gb ddr1 you have now - the system will just feel faster even with only 4gb: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148538

DDR1 with ECC is still bought on eBay for 3-5$ a module, maybe more if you find a stupid buyer or advertise as matched pairs etc etc so you could recover a part of your investment in this new hardware.

Both mbs have onboard video that's enough for windows and 2d stuff but you can always stick a pci express card in them without any fuss and conflicts and so on.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

7600gt are not exactly top of the video cards, you know. They're 7-8 years old cards. I'm talking more recent video cards, made in the last 2-3 years or so.

That explains a lot.

I wasn't going to put that new of a card in anyway... Maybe Geforce 9 or so.