Building a CHEAP dual socket 2011-3 Xeon cpu workstation for fun. 2017 edition....... - Page 1

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Building a CHEAP dual socket 2011-3 Xeon cpu workstation for fun. 2017 edition.......

Posted: 1/26/2017 8:10:54 PM EDT

EDIT : The whole point of my last dual Xeon build and this build is to build a pc that will massively exceed the performance of the top of the line Intel enthusiast cpu while spending less on the whole build than the price of just the top of the line Cpu by itself.

The savings come from the Cpu's picked and using some used parts.

The Intel Core i7 6950x at $1649.99 at new egg. So that's my target price for the build.

This is not a gaming build, but I will try WOT and maybe GTA5 on it just to see what it will do.

Cinebench 15 score of a i7 6950x:

Stock settings is : single core 151, multi cores 1904. ( I just realized that my current dual E-5 2670 build beats this multi core score by a little over a 100 points.)

Overclocked to 4.5 Ghz: all core 2327

Yea I know there are a bunch of different benchmarks that will show different things depending on a lot of factors but Cinebench 15 is an easy way to compare performance.

It will use plenty of used parts, from the last build, stuff I already have and purchased online.

But I will probably include the prices if I had to buy them used just to give an idea what someone would have too spend.

Posted: 1/26/2017 8:13:18 PM EDT

[#1]

You're building commodity PC hardware. Why a new thread?

Posted: 1/26/2017 8:18:59 PM EDT

[#2]

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Quoted:
You're building commodity PC hardware. Why a new thread?

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New build = new thread.

Plus this one will be a little more interesting, and more user friendly, than last years build.

Posted: 1/26/2017 9:53:11 PM EDT

[#3]

Motherboard ordered !!!!!!!!!!

This one, unlike the first dual Xeon build, is a workstation motherboard with on-board sound, lots of full length PCI-e x16 slots and USB 3.0 on-board AND certified to work with SLI or Crossfire AND windows 10.

It also has overclocking capabilities.

Overclocking a Xeon? Nope!!! but it gives me features that might allow me to run all cores at full turbo boost speed because of a "bug" ( I call it a feature

) in Haswell cpu's.

~~I'm hoping to be able to run two retail Xeon E5-2683 v3 14 core cpu's ALL cores at 3.0 GHz......two 14 hyper-threading cpu's .............56 threads at 3.0 GHz~~

~~I'll go into that later after I have all my parts and try to do it, its not guaranteed but a few have been able to do it.~~

~~And if that does not work out I just might end up using a pair of E5 V4 ES cpu's, this will be a plaything NOT a server and not mission critical for anything.~~

EDIT: Ended up getting two E5-2667 V3 ES cpu's

What I will be able to reuse:
Case
Power supply
Cpu coolers> might have to upgrade if the mod works.
SSD's
Hard drives
Two RX 480 video cards.
(Everything except the motherboard, Cpu's and ram.)

I should be able to sell the cpu's and ram from last years build for what I have in them if not more, and sell the motherboard for a bit of a loss.

That should help offset the cost of this build.

Like I said in the first build, I like to build pc's for fun and I am tired of the same old kind of gaming build's I have been doing for decades.

Posted: 1/26/2017 10:38:35 PM EDT

[#4]

Relevant to this thread:

E5 2683 v3 running at 105 bclk with ALL threads running at turbo boost.

This single Cpu has more performance than BOTH my E5 2670's.

Why a E5 2683 V3 ? because its the latest used cpu that is available in large quantities with the clock speed I am interested in and that is a Haswell.

EDIT: Another success some one had doing it.!

Posted: 1/27/2017 1:50:39 PM EDT

[#5]

is that OS W10 or S16?

Posted: 1/27/2017 8:35:20 PM EDT

[#6]

Quoted:
is that OS W10 or S16?

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The last pic above?

My guess is Windows 10.

Posted: 1/27/2017 9:53:05 PM EDT

[#7]

The redonkulous number of cores/threads thing is so played out.

I'll be more impressed if you stuff that thing with 4 of these and do a RAID 10.

Posted: 1/28/2017 12:53:55 AM EDT

[#8]

Quote History

Quoted:
The redonkulous number of cores/threads thing is so played out.

I'll be more impressed if you stuff that thing with 4 of these and do a RAID 10.

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Link fail...........

Posted: 1/28/2017 1:12:43 AM EDT

[#9]

I click the link in 7 different browsers in 3 different VMs in two different countries, works fine for me.

Posted: 1/28/2017 4:08:39 PM EDT

[#10]

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Quoted:
I click the link in 7 different browsers in 3 different VMs in two different countries, works fine for me.

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When I click on the link with Firefox I see this:

And since you forced me to use Internet Explorer I get this:

Well if I did that I would have to change the title of the thread to "Building a dual socket 2011-3 Xeon cpu workstation while emptying my checking account. 2017 edition......."

But I am tempted by the 400 GB version.....

Posted: 1/31/2017 11:20:28 PM EDT

[#11]

Ram is ordered, 64 Gig's of DDR4. " G.SKILL TridentZ Series 64GB (8 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Intel X99 Platform Memory (Desktop Memory) Model F4-3200C16Q2-64GTZB "

Regular price $489.99...............sale price $349.00

Was on sale and is optimized for X99 chipset, no the motherboard does not have an X99 chipset but its "sister" chipset C612 so it seemed a better idea than generic DDR4 ram.

And the motherboard will only run the ram up to 2400 and yes its overkill but the price was right.

Also I decided not to run ECC ram since this will not be a server at all.

From the motherboard manual:

" ECC Support
This allows you to enable or disable the DDR ECC support feature."

I have not spent this much on a single purchase of ram since I paid almost the same for some DDR400 ram a long time ago.

Spent so far:
Motherboard $370.49
DDR4 Ram 64 gigs $349.00

Total: $719.49

Still need to finalize which CPU's to get.

I investigated the all core turbo Haswell "bug" and I would have to mod the bios, been a LONG time since I did that (Back in the 80's and the 8086 days

) , and the bio's on this board is the AMI Aptio V version that does not easily lend itself to modding.

But I might just order a spare OEM bios chip just in case.

So i'm still thinking about CPU choices either a ES E-5 V4 or the E5-2683 V3.

The 2683 V3 even without doing the all core mod is a BEAST of a cpu and having two of them would just about double the performance of my current dual 2670 build.

Posted: 1/31/2017 11:36:19 PM EDT

[#12]

Double tap.

Posted: 2/1/2017 12:54:56 AM EDT

[#13]

In. Loved your last build.

Posted: 2/2/2017 10:57:23 PM EDT

[#14]

I am rethinking, or is it maybe overthinking CPU's.

On another board someone said that there will be a assload of E5 V3's servers and cpu's available this summer when the E5 V5's are released and datacenters will be upgraded.

So the recommendation I saw was to get the cheapest V3's or V4 ES's for with the speed that you can live with until then.

So i'm thinking of just getting a couple of E5-2667 V3 8 core cpu's that have all core boost of 3.5 GHz for now.

The performance of the E5-2667 V3 are about ~40-45 percent faster than my E5-2670's so it will still be a healthy upgrade and will save me a little cash.

32 threads a 3.5 GHz.

My 2670's all core boost is 3.0 GHz, so 500MHz on a two generation newer cpu should hold me over.

Plus i'm still leery of bricking my motherboard by messing around the bios to get a couple of E5-2683 V3 running a faster all core boost.

Posted: 2/3/2017 10:47:12 PM EDT

[#15]

Ram is in !!

64 gigs of DDR4 goodness!!

Heat sinks are NICE!!

Very heavy and WAY better quality than the cheap feeling heat sinks on the Ripsaw series ram I have in the FX 8320 build.

Posted: 2/3/2017 11:26:08 PM EDT

[#16]

CPU's are ordered.

Ordered off of ebay from a highly rated seller from Asia and will take about a week to get here per shipping info on ebay.

Finally decided on cpu's!! $289.00 each.

Ordered two E5-2667 V3 ES 8 core cpus.

Yes ES cpu's but not too early of a stepping and these are supposed to be perfectly stable.

I went with two 8 core CPU's again, these because of the high all core boost these have.

This stepping is supposed to turbo boost up to 3.6 GHz and have a all core boost of 3.5 GHz and a base clock of 2.9 GHz.

Also this stepping has a whopping 35 MB of L3 cache instead of 20 MB L3 cache of the production version.

My E5-2670 cpu's in last years build boost up to 3.3 GHz and a all core boost of 3.0 GHz and a base clock of 2.6 GHz.

So the cpu's I ordered boost up 500 MHz more on all cores boost and add the ~%15-20 improvement of being two generations newer for about %45 improvement in performance.

And that should really be noticeable with my day to day stuff I do.

These are rated for 135 watts each so I may have to upgrade the cpu coolers.

Posted: 2/4/2017 11:23:19 AM EDT

[#17]

Cpu's are already shipped!!

Supposed to be at the job Monday!!

Posted: 2/5/2017 10:47:11 AM EDT

[#18]

Quote History

Quoted:
The redonkulous number of cores/threads thing is so played out.

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No its not.

Posted: 2/5/2017 12:36:21 PM EDT

[#19]

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Quoted:

No its not.

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Quoted:

Quoted:
The redonkulous number of cores/threads thing is so played out.

No its not.

I'm just waiting for them to get cheap enough.

Posted: 2/5/2017 12:43:57 PM EDT

[#20]

I sure can't complain about shipping, ordered them Friday evening from China and they are in Cincinnati on Sunday and I'll have them Monday.

Posted: 2/6/2017 9:17:03 PM EDT

[#21]

My Cpu's and motherboard came in today, backed up all my stuff to my NAS and back up NAS.

Downloaded the latest drivers and software and bios.

The red on the DDR 4 ram makes it a bit "colorful" but at least they match the two red SATA ports

Supposedly GSkill sells the painted plastic snap in pieces so maybe I can get white, blue or even black.

Posted: 2/6/2017 9:44:09 PM EDT

[#22]

These are starting to come out for sub-$900.

Posted: 2/6/2017 9:59:13 PM EDT

[#23]

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Quoted:
These are starting to come out for sub-$900.

http://www.esaitech.com/images/detailed/99/Intel_S4600LT2_V2_Xeon_E5-4600V2_Chipset-C600-A_Socket-R_LGA-2011_1.46Tb_DDR3-1600MHz_Server_Motherboard.jpg

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Yea but these are under $200.00 new in the box.

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?type=3&campId=5337559805&toolId=10001&customId=iyuvok0hfi00zk8a00004&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2FWiwynn-SV7210-2-Node-Open-Compute-Server-Base-Unit-2x-LGA2011-Brand-New-%2F391293435900%3Fhash%3Ditem5b1ae7fffc:g:J20AAOSwFqJWsRi6

Posted: 2/6/2017 10:09:49 PM EDT

[#24]

Yeah, but that's two separate nodes, not a single node.

Quote History

Quoted:

Yea but these are under $200.00 new in the box.
http://i.imgur.com/Owxwkpu.jpg

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?type=3&&campId=5337559805&customId=iyuw26uacd00zk8a00e15;campId=5337559805&toolId=10001&customId=iyuvok0hfi00zk8a00004&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2FWiwynn-SV7210-2-Node-Open-Compute-Server-Base-Unit-2x-LGA2011-Brand-New-%2F391293435900%3Fhash%3Ditem5b1ae7fffc:g:J20AAOSwFqJWsRi6

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Posted: 2/6/2017 11:15:16 PM EDT

[#25]

Quote History

Quoted:

No its not.

View Quote View All Quotes

View All Quotes

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Quoted:

Quoted:
The redonkulous number of cores/threads thing is so played out.

No its not.

It is to those of use that have nice stuff at work.

My work lab is 5 Cisco UCS blades running dual 10 core and 256GB of RAM.

I do wish I had the money to build a dual socket machine at home, but disk I/O is always the issue, not CPU.

Posted: 2/7/2017 1:43:00 AM EDT

[#26]

Quote History

Quoted:

It is to those of use that have nice stuff at work.

My work lab is 5 Cisco UCS blades running dual 10 core and 256GB of RAM.

I do wish I had the money to build a dual socket machine at home, but disk I/O is always the issue, not CPU.

View Quote

Yup, as soon as you try and lab up some meaningful workloads, IOPS becomes the obvious need. I've kinda sorta solved this in the past with massive ram read/write caching in front of spindles, you just hope you don't lose power suddenly.

Posted: 2/8/2017 1:50:55 AM EDT

[#27]

It runs!!

Only running one video card for now and running Windows 7 Ultimate until I upgrade to Windows 10.

Crappy Windows phone pic.

Posted: 2/8/2017 1:53:26 AM EDT

[#28]

The dual E5-2667 V3 ES cpus. They are very VERY odd LOL.

All core boost is only 3.0 GHz and I was hoping for a bit more.

Nothing matches a retail/OE E5-2667 V3. First of all they have 35mb of L3 cache instead of 20mb on the retail one.

Second HWiNFO64 shows them to be a 14 core with only 8 that are used.

Also CPU-Z benchmark shows the dual Xeon's spanking the Intel i7 6950X by about ~%45.

Yea I know its just one benchmark.

Posted: 2/8/2017 2:04:03 AM EDT

[#29]

Cinebench 15 score, I was hoping for a little more out of them.

But it still spanks the top i7 at stock speed, but gets spanked by one that is overclocked to 4.5 ghz.

I still need to fiddle with the bios a bit.

Posted: 2/8/2017 2:25:50 AM EDT

[#30]

A little better, about 300 points higher than my dual E5-2670 build.

Posted: 2/8/2017 6:39:41 AM EDT

[#31]

Quote History

Quoted:

Yup, as soon as you try and lab up some meaningful workloads, IOPS becomes the obvious need. I've kinda sorta solved this in the past with massive ram read/write caching in front of spindles, you just hope you don't lose power suddenly.

View Quote

Can't you fix this with nvme pcie drives today?

Posted: 2/8/2017 1:49:39 PM EDT

[#32]

Quote History

Quoted:

Can't you fix this with nvme pcie drives today?

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It can help but you are still limited in capacity due to cost. It would take a lot of storage to make use of a dual socket system for what I would use it for.

Posted: 2/9/2017 12:30:39 AM EDT

[#33]

Installed Windows 7 last night, did the free upgrade to Windows 10 today while I was at work to get it activated with Windows 10.

Tonight I did a fresh install of windows 10.

Runs pretty damn sweet so far.

Posted: 2/10/2017 2:02:07 AM EDT

[#34]

Installed WOT and the new build runs about ~ %15 percent more FPS.

Crossfire still runs like crap on it, playing a single RX480 at 1440p runs great up to ~125 FPS, turn on crossfire and get 25 FPS with the same settings..............well thats up from crossfire on the older build it ran at 15 FPS.

But Windows 10 runs VERY nicely on this setup.

Running a couple of cryptominig apps to give it a workout.

EDIT: I just looked at the task manager ..... 70 MB of L3 cache...I still have p.c's that have far less than that total ram.

Posted: 2/11/2017 12:16:19 AM EDT

[#35]

The onboard audio sounds pretty good but not as good as the Xonar DSX PCI-e card out of the old build so I installed it.

Also installed the USB 3.0 PCI-e card out of the old build for 4 more usb 3.0 port's if I can get one of these too.

Posted: 2/12/2017 12:13:03 AM EDT

[#36]

I was running a couple of programs to stress my pc and video cards again and for some reason it kept crashing, did not do it a couple a days ago.

So it looks like I forgot to plug a power connector in here:

Owners man says if you have more than three PCI-e cards to plug a power connector in.

Posted: 2/12/2017 12:40:30 AM EDT

[#37]

Also the CPU number one is pretty close to the hard drive/optical drive cage, its about an inch or so closer compared to the first dual Xeon motherboard and its running a little warmer than the rearmost CPU.

So I dug around and found a optical drive bay cover that was removed from a Antec 900 case, it is perforated with a lot of holes.

Fits snug and works, matches the case really nicely and i'll need to scrounge up a second one.

Posted: 2/13/2017 12:07:14 AM EDT

[#38]

Installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS..............

WHAT A PAIN IN THE ASS!!!!!!!!!!

Off and on since last night and finally got it working a while ago.

Grub2 and UEFI is still not configured correctly and I have to pick either Windows 10 or Ubuntu but its usable now.

First time to install Linux on a UEFI sytem without legacy and oh what a learning process.

EDIT: Fixed the Grub 2 issue I was having.

Posted: 2/13/2017 10:06:33 PM EDT

[#39]

One thing I noticed about the V3 cpu's vs the V1's is that they do not put out as much heat when they are cranking.

Posted: 2/16/2017 11:24:27 PM EDT

[#40]

Playing around with mining crypto-currency to give the new build a workout.

Mining Monero.

Posted: 2/17/2017 12:52:25 AM EDT

[#41]

Now with more command line geekiness.

Posted: 2/18/2017 3:28:19 PM EDT

[#42]

These E5-2667 ES cpu's with the 35mb L3 cache of a 14 core processor with only 8 cores using them are killer for cpu cryptomining.

The miner programs that I use recommend 2 mb per thread of L3 cache.

So 35mb/2 = 17.5, so I can use all 16 threads of each cpu to mine and never access the ram which would slow down the threads that have to use ram tremendously.

On my old dual Xeon with E5-2670 V1 cpu's it would not increase the H/s at all if I used more than 9 or 10 threads per cpu.

So the new build running the same number of cores at the same speed but two gens newer and almost double the L3 cache has about %60 better performance and running noticeably cooler.

Posted: 3/7/2017 9:14:40 PM EDT

[#43]

Upgraded Ubuntu 16.04 to kernel version 4.10.1-041001-generic and it runs great.

Been running Ubuntu mostly and hardly ever boot into windows 10 anymore, been crypto mining monero.

I posted on three websites about how good the cpu's were mining altcoins, I was planning on buying a couple more because they have been slow sellers but they all sold out on ebay in the last week except from the sellers that really have overpriced them.

I guess I should have kept quiet about them.