Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: zxcvbob on November 18, 2012, 11:28:37 PM
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I was looking at refurbished computers the other night at geeks.com and they had some 1U rack-mount servers with multiple Xeon processors for less than $200 (no OS) including an enclosure. How would that work for a home PC? The only thing I saw wrong with the specs was the ATI ES1000 video card -- and only 2 USB ports. Let's see if I can find it again...
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=512F-280B-XQC186X2-2R&cat=SVR
If I wanted to install Windows, would it have to be one of the server editions, like Win 2003 or 2008?
"What do I want to do with it?", you ask? Mainly just see if I can do it. And it would be nice to have something powerful enough for games like TF2 and Civ-5 (that's the main reason the ES1000 video card sucks)
This is mostly a thought exercise cuz I have Cheap Bastard Disease. But if I can run this on one of the Win 2000 or XP Pro licenses I already have, the price is in "toy" range.
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I asked a similar question a while back, and was told that servers use more power than most PCs would draw. That, and it may not have a sound card.
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It would make a nice SETI@home box...
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If I wanted to install Windows, would it have to be one of the server editions, like Win 2003 or 2008?
No. Theoretically, you could put on Windows 7 or XP. Finding drivers might be entertainment, but you could likely get away with using Win2003 drivers for XP and Win2008 drivers for Win7. I've done both, and reverse on occasion. I once used a Dell XPS M2010 as a server simulator (laptop with a RAID card), and slapped Win2003 on it. The XPS design team was impressed.
Worst case, install VMware ESXi or Xen on it. Then run any OS on top of that.
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It will likely not make a good multimedia or game machine. Servers...serve. they are mostly built to have good disk I/O systems and redundant hardware for maximum uptime. They usually lack in graphics throughput and sound capability. Most of the time they are accessed via RDP or SSH by an admin, requiring no graphics horsepower.
Likewise, gaming rigs...game. They typically make for lousy servers due to I/O bottlenecks and poor redundancy.
In short, this 1U server will lack any sound capability, have a non desktop grade I/O system that will make desktop win64 os support trying, and require a video card upgrade to play anything beyond Starcraft. And the 1U form factor will probably not be large enough for a nice PCIe radeon or nvidea large format card... And definitely will not support anything like crossfireX.
If you are really interested in a game rig, pm me. I have a 3core amd athlon system with 8gb ram and dual radeon 3900 gpus that i am not currently using. Dvd burner, sd card reader, i will throw in a decent hard drive with it, somewhere between 500 and 750gb. I might even include my winXP x64 media and license.
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It will likely be loud. The cooling fans on most servers are optimized for performance and not noise.
The servers we use for our Splunk boxes (Dell Poweredge R710) are as loud as one of those high pressure hand dryers on startup, but settle down to a gentle roar once they've booted. Even after they settle down, they're louder than I'd want to sit near for extended periods.
The comments about multimedia and such are spot on.
Chris
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The servers we use for our Splunk boxes (Dell Poweredge R710) are as loud as one of those high pressure hand dryers on startup, but settle down to a gentle roar once they've booted. Even after they settle down, they're louder than I'd want to sit near for extended periods.
This.
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If you do decide to go the 8-core route, make sure you prop up one side of it on a brick or something. At least, people always tell me 'don't forget to tip your server'.
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mtnbkr is right about the noise, too. I meant to type that as well but was typing on an android smartphone and was just annoyed with the keyboard by that point.
It will roar and be audible on the other side of the house when it boots, and dominate any noise you get out of your USB-based audio/speaker solution (since you don't have room to add a PCIe sound card) when running at normal volume. It will also likely cause a significant thermal difference in the room where you put it versus the rest of your house.
Servers just don't belong in houses, IMO.
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It will likely be loud. The cooling fans on most servers are optimized for performance and not noise.
The servers we use for our Splunk boxes (Dell Poweredge R710) are as loud as one of those high pressure hand dryers on startup, but settle down to a gentle roar once they've booted. Even after they settle down, they're louder than I'd want to sit near for extended periods.
The comments about multimedia and such are spot on.
Chris
Darn. Once again, reality ruins a perfectly good project. Everything else could probably be worked-around, but not the loud fans. And that's a big deal.
If you are really interested in a game rig, pm me. I have a 3core amd athlon system with 8gb ram and dual radeon 3900 gpus that i am not currently using. Dvd burner, sd card reader, i will throw in a decent hard drive with it, somewhere between 500 and 750gb. I might even include my winXP x64 media and license.
Nah, gaming was just the excuse to justify it.
If you do decide to go the 8-core route, make sure you prop up one side of it on a brick or something. At least, people always tell me 'don't forget to tip your server'.
=)
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Also most games won't use more than four cores, the rest will just sit there all lonely.
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win7 likes to crash on 8 cores, and often. mostly firefox, but it's not alone. =|
that's with an amd fx-8150 though. was hoping 16GBs of ram would keep FF happy. [tinfoil] intel might be different.
i'm actually considering the upgrade, to win8. :facepalm:
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win7 likes to crash on 8 cores, and often. mostly firefox, but it's not alone. =|
that's with an amd fx-8150 though. was hoping 16GBs of ram would keep FF happy. [tinfoil] intel might be different.
i'm actually considering the upgrade, to win8. :facepalm:
I'm of the opinion that Win7 doesn't co-exist happily with AMD processors.
Bought my wife a new Toshiba notebook with Win7 and an AMD brain. Locked up just trying to install MS Office. Sent it back to Toshiba, they replaced it in kind -- same thing. Finally sent it back again, did battle with the customer "service" department, and convinced them to replace it with a similar model (with a slightly lower MSRP) that has an Intel brain.
End of problem.
Right now, I'd rather have a netbook with an Atom processor than an AMD anything.
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I'm of the opinion that Win7 doesn't co-exist happily with AMD processors.
My Win 7 system is running quite happily on an AMD system.
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi1100.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fg405%2Fallencb%2F1-1.jpg&hash=1f34f3d5c854a0ab11467f82ec87524d548f6688)
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi1100.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fg405%2Fallencb%2F2-1.jpg&hash=5722a714c0a0d87049c77f165202472c7d206ca7)
Chris
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I'm of the opinion that Win7 doesn't co-exist happily with AMD processors.
Bought my wife a new Toshiba notebook with Win7 and an AMD brain. Locked up just trying to install MS Office. Sent it back to Toshiba, they replaced it in kind -- same thing. Finally sent it back again, did battle with the customer "service" department, and convinced them to replace it with a similar model (with a slightly lower MSRP) that has an Intel brain.
End of problem.
Right now, I'd rather have a netbook with an Atom processor than an AMD anything.
Purge Toshiba-loaded OEM OS. OEM OS loads are full of bloatware, bundled junk and so on. Load the OS clean, get the drivers you need, and abstain from all the Toshiba-sponsored apps. Install the apps you need.
It's not AMD. It's just a bad OEM load.
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The consensus is clear but another plug for the fan being way too loud. We had a blade server in our office to image off of and it was quite obnoxious to sit next to.
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The consensus is clear but another plug for the fan being way too loud. We had a blade server in our office to image off of and it was quite obnoxious to sit next to.
How many blades were in your server? The noise is cumulative...
For $165 I'm still tempted to get one just to play with, but at this point I will wait around and they will sell-out. I don't have a lot of patience for "loud fan".
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Note what was said above about "server" vs. "workstation".
There is a difference, and a big one.
I've been buying off-lease IBM dual-socket workstations since about 2001, but only the workstations (IntelliStation M-Pro and Z-Pro) - NOT servers.
Those workstations are set up to actually run desktop apps and utilize video cards, albeit in a heavy-handed fashion.
Rackmount servers aren't so friendly to doing anything other than acting as remote servers. They'll run a VM for you, and obviously play fileserver.
They won't be your first choice for running Borderlands 2 or Adobe Creative Suite 6.
There's also a noise and wattmeter penalty for those 8 cores and big power supply.
I continue to dabble in the heavy iron - my latest IBM toy is an IntelliStation Z-Pro 9228 workstation.
It has 2 each Xeon X5365 quad-core 3.0Ghz processors, and 16Gb of FB-DIMM memory. It's also hopelessly obsolete in 2012, IBM stopped selling them in 2009.
IBM, HP, and Dell professional-grade workstations are built like the proverbial brick outhouses, but for entirely different purposes than typical gaming desktops.
For reliability, they have long self-testing Power-On Self Test routines, use Fully Buffered DIMM memory, and run big noisy fans with huge heatsinks, SAS/SATA RAID controllers, and chassis intrusion monitoring hardware, amongst other things.
The money I saved on buying my off-lease IBM (as found on eBay or other websites) went into a Koolance water-cooling system to kill the fan noise, a Radeon HD6870 for gaming and Creative Suite 6, a 256Gb SSD primary drive for sheer speed of file access, and stuffing those 8 sticks of expensive and obsolete FB-DIMM memory into the slots. I run Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and the computer reports a Windows Experience Identifier score of 7.8. That's the good part.
The bad part is that one could get a current quad-core or hex-core i7 system that would also do the same performance-wise, with less wattage draw, footprint, weight, and noise.
That having been said, if you just want to play with industrial-grade hardware, it is cheap when sold as surplus. I used to buy at www.pcsurplusonline.com for a long time, but they've somewhat dried up in the workstation and server department. Sometimes www.geeks.com gets corporate machines in, as do a few other sites out there.
I ran SETI Optimized for a few weeks earlier this summer. I averaged just over 10K credits/day, but the heat in the office and the spinning wattmeter shut me down in short order.
My next machine will be the Lenovo ThinkStation D30, with 16 Xeon Sandy Bridge cores vs. the 8 relic Clovertown cores I'm currently using. And yes, I'll test it out on SETI. =D
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How many blades were in your server? The noise is cumulative...
I'm not sure I understand the question. The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server. We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative. :)
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I'm not sure I understand the question. The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server. We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative. :)
The one in the office; I couldn't tell if you were talking about a whole rack full of blades or just a single one (like the 1U chassis I linked to)
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I'm not sure I understand the question. The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server. We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative. :)
That's not a blade server.
A blade server is a large chassis... 4U to 12U or so in size, in which "blade computers" are inserted in a typically vertical arrangement. They share network bandwidth and power provisioning from the blade server, but each blade has its own RAM/CPU and sometimes even 2.5" drive subsystem (though they are more recently provisioned via SAN allocation over FC or iSCSI instead for higher IO).
A 1U server is just a plain old boring server.
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I'm not sure I understand the question. The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server. We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative. :)
I've seen few things in IT that make more noise starting up than a full chassis of blade servers. We have several in my workplace and when just one of the chassis reboots they make more noise than the 50 odd 1 or 2 U high servers on the other racks combined. I've had folks a good 15 feet away outside the server room complain about the din.
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How many blades were in your server? The noise is cumulative...
For $165 I'm still tempted to get one just to play with, but at this point I will wait around and they will sell-out. I don't have a lot of patience for "loud fan".
Yup, sold out.
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How many blades were in your server? The noise is cumulative...
For $165 I'm still tempted to get one just to play with, but at this point I will wait around and they will sell-out. I don't have a lot of patience for "loud fan".
http://www.servermonkey.com/
They will sell you fully working servers for reasonable rates. The U is the standard unit of measurement with servers. 1 or 2 U's is pretty common for regular servers. Blade server chassis tend to be minimum of 3U, and can be up to a full rack (48U usually).
Not really useful for most home users. They make very small home servers that work very well.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052
That would be perfect for "random physical box" server at a small data center or home office.
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They have them in stock again, =) along with some even cheaper ones (same basic specs for $149.) What happens if install Windows XP Pro on a box with too many processor cores? I have an old laptop with a dead display running XP Pro, and I could pull the HDD out and use it for install media and use its license key -- basically transfer the license to the server.
if I recall correctly XPP supports 2 physical sockets with 2 cores each. Not sure about hyperthreading on top of that, but I think these are 4-core w/o hyperthreading. Guessing it would run 4 cores (2 each socket) and ignore the other 4.
Then when (if) I get that working I can make it dual-boot Linux and see if that can get all 8 cores running.
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They have them in stock again, =) along with some even cheaper ones (same basic specs for $149.) What happens if install Windows XP Pro on a box with too many processor cores? I have an old laptop with a dead display running XP Pro, and I could pull the HDD out and use it for install media and use its license key -- basically transfer the license to the server.
if I recall correctly XPP supports 2 physical sockets with 2 cores each. Not sure about hyperthreading on top of that, but I think these are 4-core w/o hyperthreading. Guessing it would run 4 cores (2 each socket) and ignore the other 4.
Then when (if) I get that working I can make it dual-boot Linux and see if that can get all 8 cores running.
Does it have a sticker on the case? If so, it's an OEM license and cannot be transferred. XP isn't processor limited, but good luck with drivers. It can be done. I've done things that crazy before. But it's really annoying. You'd probably just want to buy a copy of Win 7, and you'll be able to get away using Server 2008 drivers. May need to do some trickery, but it's do-able.
XP Pro has a 2 proc limit, but no core limit.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888732
Linux will run just fine. Seriously? If you don't want to stab yourself in the throat with a fork, install some virtualization product on it. XEN, ESXi, whatever. Install Windows in a VM.
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. . . And it would be nice to have something powerful enough for games like TF2 and Civ-5 (that's the main reason the ES1000 video card sucks)
I'm not remotely the computer expert that some earlier posters are, but for a gaming rig, it may be difficult to upgrade the graphics card to current standards - most are now using PCIe 3.0, and if the motherboard doesn't support this standard, you'll still have a graphics bottleneck.
I recently upgraded my 6 1/2 year old Dell from a GS7900 graphics card to a GT430, which is itself several years old. It DOES work (this PCI2 card is backwards compatible to the PCI1 socket) but benchmarks show only about a 10% improvement, rather than the 100% improvement the card itself is supposedly capable of.
The card was free, and it has HDMI output, which is what I needed for the HDTV I'm using as a monitor, but no graphics card will make my old computer into a high performance gaming machine unless I replace a lot more than the graphics card itself.
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I've given up on the gaming requirement. My main computer is a 5 years old laptop w/ the original battery, and it wasn't a high-end laptop when I bought it (Intel T2370 @1.73GHz, upgraded to 3GB of RAM). So I'll probably be replacing it in a year or two anyway when the battery or something else expensive goes out; I can do gaming on the new laptop.
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I can do gaming on the new laptop.
I've never gotten into laptop gaming much. The price/performance ratio has always scared me off. Has this changed recently?
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I've never gotten into laptop gaming much. The price/performance ratio has always scared me off. Has this changed recently?
No idea. DD says her new (I think it was a refurb) i7 laptop plays Steampowered and Civ3 games just fine.
BTW, if I get one of those mini servers before they sell out again, I probably can't upgrade the video card because it'll be power-supply limited -- unless I pull one of the processors, and what's the fun of that?
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The power hungry video cards present a problem not just to servers (which were never really intended for them...) but also desktops and workstations.
It gets even worse if you try to run more than one video card.
I've had to hold off on upgrading my Radeon HD6870 to something better, because I'm afraid my 850 watt power supply may not be able to feed it and the dual quad-cores in the case. =(
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Does it have a sticker on the case? If so, it's an OEM license and cannot be transferred.
I just did that will a Dell OEM license the the other day. The Dell PC has been dead for 1-2 years, put the product key into a barebones XP build and it worked fine. I've re-used those old Dell XP keys in VMs too.
Technically it works. Might not be kosher with Microsoft though. *shrug*
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I just ordered one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/121076430286
Planning to add a cheap USB sound adapter, and bring the 4 internal USB headers out so it will have 6 instead of 2 USB 2.0 ports. I also ordered a PCI-E 8x to 16x riser cable http://www.ebay.com/itm/300796356820 with intentions of someday adding a relatively-low-powered graphics card, like a Radeon HD 5450. Don't know if that will even work, but if I can borrow a card it's worth a try.
My pastor is a computer geek and his boys upgrade their computers and game consoles all the time, so there's a good chance he has some kind of PCI-E card in his junkbox that I can test with.
I should easily be able to get $160 worth of frustration out of this project :lol:
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Planning to add a cheap USB sound adapter
I did that to a Sun server. I play music on it through a VM that runs in VirtualBox. Initially I was pretty worried that the server hardware wouldn't keep up to a "real time" thing like playing music, especially through a VM, but it does work. The only issue I had was when I had the VBox add-in out of sync with my VBox version. That caused some "clicky-pops" as I called them but nobody else listening to the music really noticed them.
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Wonder how ugly it would be to toss one of these in a closet with Xubuntu on it to remotely use Sketchup under Wine for some of my larger modelling projects.
Usually, the 2.6GHz laptop does fine, but now that I'm having to model several ISDs and a good chunk of the local university for different solar projects, it's getting slow.
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One thing I do that might actually be able to use a lot of horsepower is video format conversion. (don't know if the tools I use are multithreaded) Converting a full-length movie from MP2 to MP4 can take a couple of hours on my 5 y.o. laptop. Also importing and exporting hour-long MP3's into Audacity so I can edit them takes longer than I'd like, and I do that quite a bit.
But if I *really* wanted a PC for doing actual workstation stuff, I'd buy (or build) a desktop with a single high-end i7 processor. They aren't that expensive. But what would be the fun in that?
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The system came today. I can't figure out how to get the cover open, although I haven't tried very hard. It would not boot Windows from my USB CDROM (bad media?) but it would boot from a USB flash drive, so I installed Debian with the xcfe desktop. Had to install it twice because I didn't realize why fsck failed the first time. Hardware real time clock was slow by more than 24 hours. Second time it failed I found the problem, set the clock in the BIOS and tried again. Came up just fine.
I also installed the Boinc client and am running the IBM's World Community Grid project to let it stretch its legs. It is running 8 tasks at once like it's supposed to, so Linux must recognize all the processors. I ran the boinc benchmark and it came up 1728 floating point MIPS and 9479 integer MIPS per processor. I don't know if those are good numbers or not.
The fan is obnoxiously loud, but not as bad as I expected. It seems to be a 2-speed fan, and I have it in "workstation mode" which I guess is supposed to be quieter. Boinc has been running with the preferences set to allow it to use 100% of all the processors for a half an hour now, and the fan hasn't kicked in to high speed yet.
I found a Sapphire Radeon 5450 graphics card on sale last week for $35 with a $15 rebate and I couldn't pass that up. That's a good price even if the rebate turns out to be a scam. It's not here yet, but I'm not ready to install any options anyway (did I mention I can't get the cover open?). I also ordered a $2 USB sound adapter -- how bad can it be for $2 -- and some USB motherboard cables from dx.com
I also need to hook up a USB wifi adapter and see if it can use it (I have several already) I don't have a proper Ethernet cable running to that location so I have a long one strung across the room and under a door. Major trip hazard.
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It'll be interesting to see how the video card works in that tight 1U case, even with the ribbon cable connector.
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(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2Ft%2FPCI-E-Express-16X-to-8X-Riser-Card-Adapter-Flexible-Extender-Extension-Cable-USA-%2F00%2Fs%2FNjAwWDYwMA%3D%3D%2F%24%28KGrHqVHJF%21E%2B%28636eh1BQe8r%28pjsw%7E%7E60_3.JPG&hash=fd035f5edd85533adb09c3e69061694de6e4bccd)
That's messed up.
I had no idea you could run a 16x PCI-e card in an 8x mobo slot.
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(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2Ft%2FPCI-E-Express-16X-to-8X-Riser-Card-Adapter-Flexible-Extender-Extension-Cable-USA-%2F00%2Fs%2FNjAwWDYwMA%3D%3D%2F%24%28KGrHqVHJF%21E%2B%28636eh1BQe8r%28pjsw%7E%7E60_3.JPG&hash=fd035f5edd85533adb09c3e69061694de6e4bccd)
That's messed up.
I had no idea you could run a 16x PCI-e card in an 8x mobo slot.
I don't know that you can... but it's plausible. I should find out in about a week :)
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Latest saga: the real-time clock is losing time. Not sure if the system clock in Linux is losing time too, but Windows clock is losing several hours a day, and when I reboot (whether it was previously running windows or linux) the RTC in the BIOS is way behind. That's why I get a file system error on the initial boot after installing Linux (file system timestamp is in the future, referenced to the RTC) until I go set the BIOS clock again and run fsck.
Hopefully a new CMOS battery takes care of it. Otherwise I guess I'll find a time sync agent for each OS that I can run once an hour.
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Both OSes should have a mechanism by which they can sync with NTP servers on the Internet.
Chris
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Hope the CMOS battery fixes it.
I had an IBM IntelliStation M-Pro 6850 go crazy with the internal clock, just before it died for good.
Of course, I was running Xeon processors that IBM never rated for the system, so I probably overstressed something on the motherboard. =(
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If CMOS doesn't fix it, backup any and all files. May be an indicator of unpleasant things.
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The old CMOS battery tested 3.0V. I replaced it with a new battery @ 3.3V and it didn't make any difference. The seller says I can return it; that seems kind of silly just for the clock...
The Windows system clock is a different (microsoft) problem. I'm running all the processors at 100% capacity and it misses timer interrupts until the clock gets off enough that it gets confused. Couple of easy fixes for that: don't use Windows, or install a NTP client that will sync frequently with an Internet time server. Also I didn't have the driver installed for the Intel chipset; don't know if that contributes to the problems or not, but I've installed it now. And the RTC still doesn't work.
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2Ft%2FPCI-E-Express-16X-to-8X-Riser-Card-Adapter-Flexible-Extender-Extension-Cable-USA-%2F00%2Fs%2FNjAwWDYwMA%3D%3D%2F%24%28KGrHqVHJF%21E%2B%28636eh1BQe8r%28pjsw%7E%7E60_3.JPG&hash=fd035f5edd85533adb09c3e69061694de6e4bccd)
That's messed up.
I had no idea you could run a 16x PCI-e card in an 8x mobo slot.
Surprisingly, it works just fine, I tried it tonight. But there's not enough room in the chassis for the card; the heatsink faces down and just touches the motherboard. :( I took the top cover off and put some paper on top of the cooling baffle (as an insulator) and have the card sitting loose up there. I could make a new top for the case out of Masonite with a slot for the ribbon cable and just sit the card on top. Maybe use some duct tape to hold it ;) It would look spiffy. I need to download Steam to see what kind of frame rate it'll do -- the card could be confused and throttled all the way back to 33MHz PCI -- but when I ran DXDIAG the 3D cubes spun pretty fast (does that mean anything?)
If CMOS doesn't fix it, backup any and all files. May be an indicator of unpleasant things.
There's nothing on this system that I care about.
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I would return the server. It sounds like a motherboard problem.
When the on-board RTC goes tango-uniform, you're on (no pun intended) borrowed time.
It'll start messing up time-date stamps on files, and if it drifts too much the web time update utility won't even sync.
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It'll start messing up time-date stamps on files, and if it drifts too much the web time update utility won't even sync.
Where's your sense of adventure? Grab an old P233 or similar, set up a barebones Linux distro on it, and run an NTP server for your local network, syncing to an outside one twice a day. Then you can sync to your local one every minute if you want to.
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Already doing that via my Linksys WRT54G-TM router and Tomato firmware. ;)
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I was all ready to send the thing back, and it started working. Hasn't missed a beat in a couple of weeks. :facepalm:
I did reinstall Windows and installed the chipset drivers right away this time -- but I'm pretty sure I was having RTC problems in Linux too, and that's working great now also.
The fan makes a nice white noise generator, only really bothersome when I watch TV. It may get annoying when I try to play games but I'm not there yet.
I added a 2nd hard drive; put windows on one and linux on the other.