Author Topic: Using an 8-core server/workstation as a PC (Read 13195 times)

RevDisk · « **Reply #25 on:** March 01, 2013, 08:54:05 AM »

Quote from: zxcvbob on February 28, 2013, 10:29:03 PM

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.

HankB · « **Reply #26 on:** March 01, 2013, 08:58:06 AM »

Quote from: zxcvbob on November 18, 2012, 11:28:37 PM

. . . 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.

zxcvbob · « **Reply #27 on:** March 01, 2013, 09:05:56 AM »

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.

cordex · « **Reply #28 on:** March 01, 2013, 11:25:29 AM »

Quote from: zxcvbob on March 01, 2013, 09:05:56 AM

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?

zxcvbob · « **Reply #29 on:** March 01, 2013, 11:29:51 AM »

Quote from: cordex on March 01, 2013, 11:25:29 AM

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?

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #30 on:** March 01, 2013, 11:56:10 AM »

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.

GigaBuist · « **Reply #31 on:** March 02, 2013, 05:16:31 PM »

Quote from: RevDisk on March 01, 2013, 08:54:05 AM

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*

zxcvbob · « **Reply #32 on:** March 06, 2013, 03:00:19 PM »

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

GigaBuist · « **Reply #33 on:** March 06, 2013, 09:27:59 PM »

Quote from: zxcvbob on March 06, 2013, 03:00:19 PM

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.

KD5NRH · « **Reply #34 on:** March 06, 2013, 10:33:00 PM »

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.

zxcvbob · « **Reply #35 on:** March 06, 2013, 10:55:32 PM »

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?

zxcvbob · « **Reply #36 on:** March 12, 2013, 12:40:18 AM »

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.

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #37 on:** March 12, 2013, 09:21:44 AM »

It'll be interesting to see how the video card works in that tight 1U case, even with the ribbon cable connector.

AZRedhawk44 · « **Reply #38 on:** March 12, 2013, 10:38:23 AM »

That's messed up.

I had no idea you could run a 16x PCI-e card in an 8x mobo slot.

zxcvbob · « **Reply #39 on:** March 12, 2013, 11:25:18 AM »

Quote from: AZRedhawk44 on March 12, 2013, 10:38:23 AM

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 :)

zxcvbob · « **Reply #40 on:** March 26, 2013, 11:30:20 AM »

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.

mtnbkr · « **Reply #41 on:** March 26, 2013, 11:50:33 AM »

Both OSes should have a mechanism by which they can sync with NTP servers on the Internet.

Chris

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #42 on:** March 26, 2013, 11:53:55 AM »

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.

RevDisk · « **Reply #43 on:** March 26, 2013, 01:04:58 PM »

If CMOS doesn't fix it, backup any and all files. May be an indicator of unpleasant things.

zxcvbob · « **Reply #44 on:** March 27, 2013, 02:23:38 AM »

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.

Quote from: AZRedhawk44 on March 12, 2013, 10:38:23 AM

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?)

Quote

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.

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #45 on:** March 28, 2013, 01:43:53 PM »

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.

KD5NRH · « **Reply #46 on:** April 17, 2013, 10:31:56 PM »

Quote from: Gewehr98 on March 28, 2013, 01:43:53 PM

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.

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #47 on:** April 17, 2013, 10:54:24 PM »

Already doing that via my Linksys WRT54G-TM router and Tomato firmware.

zxcvbob · « **Reply #48 on:** April 17, 2013, 11:09:58 PM »

I was all ready to send the thing back, and it started working. Hasn't missed a beat in a couple of weeks.

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.

News:

Author Topic: Using an 8-core server/workstation as a PC (Read 13195 times)