LinusTechTips dual xeon questions...

[theaterix]

Here is todays video on Vessel from Linus.. https://www.vessel.com/videos/UidG4RWR4

What was the point in this video? While pretty cool to see a dual CPU, ive been looking on the Bay and it seems there is a lot of these CPU's floating around for cheap...
If one could find a good enough board, what do yous think??
Would be pretty cool to watercool them on a decent board if one can be found

Thoughts??

 

[rIcK]

Perhaps share some info without me signing up to Vessel?

 

[theaterix]

Perhaps share some info without me signing up to Vessel?

Sorry didn't even consider this.
Basically he takes a Intel 771 Xeon from the Bay presumably, which are cheap, like £20-40 and gets 2 quad cores, makes an 8 core system, dumps a 980 in and sees what happens.
Basically Companies dump these chips out of old servers and are sold off stupidly cheap.
In the video, he explains while there is slight bottleneck, for $150 you can have a motherboard, cpus and 16gb RAM.

It intrigued me, now, i probably wouldn't spend money on it, but I am just sharing the experiment around.
Realistically, if you were to build a lower end system, this could work, and is very very cheap to start...
It will be out on YouTube next monday for the normal viewers to watch, but i got a year free on Vessel.
Just seeing if anyone had seen anything like this before as the idea is quite a cool one, and the possibilities are large.

 

[joeyjojo]

Just seeing if anyone had seen anything like this before as the idea is quite a cool one, and the possibilities are large.

The 1800+ reply Xeon thread in this subforum?

If core count if useful then old Xeons have always been a good option. For gamers they usually don't make sense though - low clock speeds, no overclocking, strange form factors, no multi-GPU, picky memory, sometimes non-standard PSU connectors, sometimes need server OS, etc.

 

[Klunt Bumskrint]

What support is there for dual cpu configs, unless it's a server or cruncher? Definitely no point for gaming.

 

[Orangey]

I have heard of people running GTA V (CPU heavy game) with dual Xeons to great success.

 

[Cyanide]

The 1800+ reply Xeon thread in this subforum?

If core count if useful then old Xeons have always been a good option. For gamers they usually don't make sense though - low clock speeds, no overclocking, strange form factors, no multi-GPU, picky memory, sometimes non-standard PSU connectors, sometimes need server OS, etc.

The lga775 xeons are even worse as they're much older tech, I imagine it's not going to play well at all with modern ganes

 

[rtho782]

Plenty of these about, but I wouldn't want an 8 core LGA771 system - low clock speeds, poor IPC by modern standards, massive memory bottleneck due to no IMC and 8 cores fighting for FSB bandwidth.

If it's 8 cores I wanted I'd go for a single Haswell-E, or even a 2nd hand SandyBridge-E Xeon, also single cpu.

Dual socket is fun for uniqueness (it was more fun before dual core CPUs were a thing, I had a dual socket Athlon XP a looooong time ago!) but generally in modern times pointless, unless you are using modern CPUs.

No cheap 2nd hand system is going to have more than 18 cores, and that's how many you can have in a single chip today.

Also, with any vaguely recent dual socket platform, you then have to deal with NUMA.

 

[theaterix]

Plenty of these about, but I wouldn't want an 8 core LGA771 system - low clock speeds, poor IPC by modern standards, massive memory bottleneck due to no IMC and 8 cores fighting for FSB bandwidth.

If it's 8 cores I wanted I'd go for a single Haswell-E, or even a 2nd hand SandyBridge-E Xeon, also single cpu.

Dual socket is fun for uniqueness (it was more fun before dual core CPUs were a thing, I had a dual socket Athlon XP a looooong time ago!) but generally in modern times pointless, unless you are using modern CPUs.

No cheap 2nd hand system is going to have more than 18 cores, and that's how many you can have in a single chip today.

Also, with any vaguely recent dual socket platform, you then have to deal with NUMA.

Yeah I figured it would be slow, overall.
Wasn't really a realistic proposition, just wanted to see if anyone knew anymore than the video already suggested really as it seemed quite a cool concept!

 

[Justintime]

771 systems make great Freenas servers, i usually only use 1 quad cpu. Issue is the fbdimms need to be actively cooled if you don't wan't a deafening forced airflow rack.