Socket 603 Xeon MP [Now with benchmarks]

[NTMBK]

UPDATE: I bought this upgrade and installed it, and it works nicely. If you want to see some benchmarks to see how old skool hardware handles modern loads, see my later posts!


Original post

As you can see from my signature, I have a very old dual-socket Xeon workstation (picked up free when they were throwing them out at work, score). I'm thinking of upgrading the processors, since you can get old Xeons mighty cheap on eBay- apparently this motherboard is good up to 3GHz, and a 50% performance boost would help make it a bit more useful.

I have a question however- will the Gallatin Xeon MPs work in a motherboard designed for Prestonia Xeons? They're both Socket 603 with a 400MHz FSB, but I'm not sure whether the board would fail to recognise them- and their 4MB L3 cache. Anyone got any advice?

[Arkaign]

It's going to depend on your exact mobo and bios revision.

[Charles Kozierok]

In general I'd say yes, but as Arkaign mentioned, the devil will be in the details.

[NTMBK]

Originally Posted by Arkaign

It's going to depend on your exact mobo and bios revision.

It's a Dell Precision 530, if that's any help to anyone out there. Dell have released updated BIOS for it, including one which apparently includes "Added support for newer Processors". Sadly they don't seem to specify anywhere what these newer processors are. (Helpful, Dell! )#

EDIT: Hmm, the release date for the BIOS revision with updated CPU support is December 2004 (or possibly May, I'm never sure with US sites). The Gallatin I'm looking at came out in March 2004 according to Wikipedia, so I'm kinda hopeful?

EDIT 2: I could just try going for the Prestonia 3GHz, but that seems to actually be a lot rarer and more expensive on eBay. Plus it hasn't got a nice fat L3.

[Arkaign]

This thread seems to have confirmation for you :

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/29...xeon-processor

"Hi all,

I currently run my dell precision 530 with two gallatin sl79v's (3.0ghz with 4mb cache each) and 4GB of pc800 rambus rimms on riser cards, this combined with an hd3850 agp card makes it run all new games like crysis2, bioschock 2, battlefield bad company , etc.. etc..

People are amazed on how fast it is and all panic if I show them the motherboard from 2001
Am now going to buy an pci-x sas card to hook it up to an ssd boot disk with dual 15k sas disks for fast data, I have even ordered an pci-x to pci-e 4x epansion card (pex8114) so that I can connect the latest pci express videocard to it.... can't wait to get the results in.

Friendly greets

Kevin

p.s: not every ws 530 motherboard can handle the sl79v's for that you need at least bios a11"

Given that you're already running 130nm CPUs (Prestonia), I think the 130nm Gallatin should work, as long as your bios is updated.

[NTMBK]

Originally Posted by Arkaign

This thread seems to have confirmation for you :

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/29...xeon-processor

"Hi all,

I currently run my dell precision 530 with two gallatin sl79v's (3.0ghz with 4mb cache each) and 4GB of pc800 rambus rimms on riser cards, this combined with an hd3850 agp card makes it run all new games like crysis2, bioschock 2, battlefield bad company , etc.. etc..

People are amazed on how fast it is and all panic if I show them the motherboard from 2001
Am now going to buy an pci-x sas card to hook it up to an ssd boot disk with dual 15k sas disks for fast data, I have even ordered an pci-x to pci-e 4x epansion card (pex8114) so that I can connect the latest pci express videocard to it.... can't wait to get the results in.

Friendly greets

Kevin

p.s: not every ws 530 motherboard can handle the sl79v's for that you need at least bios a11"

Given that you're already running 130nm CPUs (Prestonia), I think the 130nm Gallatin should work, as long as your bios is updated.

Aha, awesome! That's it, I've hit buy Thanks for the help.

[Arkaign]

Originally Posted by NTMBK

Aha, awesome! That's it, I've hit buy Thanks for the help.

Cool! I hope it works out well for you, I'm a fan of cheap upgrades that keep things going better.

[NTMBK]

Apparently these processors were $3600 each at launch... and now they're £20 for a pair. Scary how fast things change.

[NTMBK]

As my sig now indicates, I managed to upgrade the processors! The trickiest part was that the TIM had set solid- when I lifted the heatsinks, it yanked the old processors out without despite the socket being "shut". I managed to get the processors off the heatsinks and remount them, and there seems to be no harm done.

[OlafSicky]

So how does it run?

[NTMBK]

Originally Posted by OlafSicky

So how does it run?

I've not thrown any intensive games at it yet to test it, but it feels a little bit smoother, certainly. Less of the random stalls it used to get.

[crashtech]

Any Netburst CPU seems painfully slow to me these days. I would expect that rig to perform similarly to a low end Core2 Duo.

[NTMBK]

Originally Posted by crashtech

Any Netburst CPU seems painfully slow to me these days. I would expect that rig to perform similarly to a low end Core2 Duo.

Oh, there's no denying it's slow. But getting this old thing running, and then upgrading, has been more like a bit of fun on the side for me It's nice to learn a bit of history. Not to mention, it's certainly usable for internet browsing, music, and older/indie games, which is plenty for me. When I eventually get bored I'm sure I'll sell it.

Anyone got any benchmarks they'd like me to run? They have to run under Windows XP, I've not tried putting 7 on this yet.

[SPBHM]

some "free" and easy to run things like cinebench 11.5, winrar (4.20 or higher)
and I'm curious to see how the system performs on AIDA64 cache and memory benchmark...

also have you tried any 3Dmark? what about 1080p youtube playback (forcing hardware acceleration off)?

[NTMBK]

Right, here's some AIDA64 benchmarks!

Memory latency: 176.6 ns (528.22 cycles)
Memory copy: 2115 MB/s
Memory write: 2036 MB/s
Memory read: 2579 MB/s

So yeah, pretty terrible! 4 threads over a 400MHz FSB is seriously choked. Maybe I should rerun without HT on...

EDIT: Results without HT:

Latency: 175.7 ns
Copy: 2080 MB/s
Write: 2036 MB/s
Read: 2582 MB/s

[Ferzerp]

That's a decade old junk.....

I'd not wish it on my worst enemy.

[NTMBK]

Originally Posted by Ferzerp

That's a decade old junk.....

I'd not wish it on my worst enemy.

Meh, with nice keyboard and a modern monitor it's perfectly usable for internet browsing. Plus indie games are fine, FTL runs well. No substitute for demanding games of course

[Absolution75]

I'm going to guess that the lowest end $45 pentium processor would beat it in most benchmarks.

Someone can do the calculations, but I would imagine a low end pentium lynfield would more than make up for its cost in power savings.


It is a cool machine, but mmmmm

[crashtech]

Yeah, a G530 has close to 3 times the CPU performance as this dual 3Ghz Gallatin rig according to the only source where I could find results for both, Passmark.

[NTMBK]

Don't worry, I know that it's in no way a sensible thing to be doing, and that even a modern Celery would beat it in almost every way. This is just me indulging my hobby.

What can I say? I enjoy screwing around with computers, seeing how fast they can go, tweaking and prodding them. I get as much enjoyment out of doing it to an older computer as to a newer one, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper. And seriously, who among us hasn't done daft, pointless things with our computers, just for the hell of it?

[SPBHM]

pretty high latency, but I think this was always a characteristic of RDRAM, and with FSB at a 100MHz QDR for this platform is also not going to help, the other results are quite good considering how old it is, I think.

what about the cache test from aida?
I'm also curious about winrar and cb.


this PC is probably significantly slower than a G530 (I'm not sure about the single core sandy bridges, like the g440), but yes, it's something more interesting and "cooler", for me at least.

[NTMBK]

Annoyingly, the test won't test my L3. The programme recognises that the cache is present, but won't run tests on it. Weird. Probably some bug in the software, I doubt that this is a very common configuration to test! Well, here's the results anyway:



Next up, 3DMark!

[NTMBK]

Right, here's some 3DMark results!

Without Hyperthreading: 5891

With Hyperthreading: 5585

Interestingly, the "CPU test" actually performed far worse with hyperthreading enabled!

[Ferzerp]

Originally Posted by NTMBK

Interestingly, the "CPU test" actually performed far worse with hyperthreading enabled!

You can't compare the HT of today with the HT of netburst. It true netburst fasion, it needed to be a failure in every way possible. (Netburst was *really* awful. We didn't see anything else so abysmal for its time until late 2011)

Right now, you have to have some *extremely* optimized code to keep a core active enough where HT is no benefit (and in a few extremely rare edge cases a penalty. Even with Linpack it is only a 5-10% penalty, and I think that's the absolute worse possible scenario for it). Back then, it was pretty bad. Anything that was pretty high processor utilization could make HT fall flat on its face and get results like yours due to contention for the same resources.

[SPBHM]

Originally Posted by NTMBK

Right, here's some 3DMark results!

Without Hyperthreading: 5891

With Hyperthreading: 5585

Interestingly, the "CPU test" actually performed far worse with hyperthreading enabled!

l2 looks HIGH on this test, a lot higher than what I remember my K7 would achieve.

as for the 3dmark... that's unexpected.. I never really tested HT on 3dmark06, but on Vantage it brings good gains, well at least for nehalem and higher.

this 4600 is a DDR2 or DDR3 card?


anyway, HT seems to work well with some netburst CPUs
http://en.inpai.com.cn/doc/enshowcon...23&pageid=6627