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2P socket 771 Worth it?

K

KarsusTG

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Aug 27, 2010
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I have a couple 2P socket 771 workstations with 3.9GHz dual core chips in them. I have one folding right now for S&Gs and it only seems to be getting around 4k ppd. Did I bork the setup or is this about right for these chips? Is it even worth it to run them at all?
 
They would be nice desktops but for folding 4 cores only gets you so far. If I recall correctly when I folded on my 3.5GHz Q9300 last year I got about the same points as you are getting.
 
Are they Netburst or Core Xeons? Netbursts are not worth it.
If the boards support 5400-series CPU's you can get a pair of L5420's off Ebay for ~$20 each.
 
I'd definitely recommend getting a pair of quad's to put in your boards if you want to fold with them. It seems like the only real `4-core' systems that are worth folding with are all 32nm or newer (Sandy Bridge(-E) or Ivy Bridge).

I've got a pair of L5420's that get about 28k ppd (albeit overclocked to 3GHz), so they're definitely still worth it and are crazy cheap on eBay as bwang mentioned.
 
I just pulled them up, all of them are 5080 Xeons. Not really much I can do with them, but I do have 4 of these 2P systems. Not sure if the boards support L5420's. It's a dell Precision 690 proprietary board.

And you are right. They do make great desktops lol.
 
Yup, it looks like the Precision 690 is limited to running the 53xx series Xeons. They're nice chips and you can get quads, but they're not cheap like the 54xx chips are (for instance, I just looked up the highest end 3GHz X5365 quad and they're over $200 on ebay! Although there's an X5355 ending in ~10 minutes going for just over $23 at the moment!).
 
I tried buying quad CPU upgrades for both my 670 and 690 workstations.
The BIOS in both would absolutely not post (not even a beep) with the quads installed.
I did a little Dell blog research and most information led me to believe the systems have built-in BIOS limits for going above dual cores. Just my experience.
 
:facepalm:

Why does no one tell me these things... I threw out a bunch of 771 quads...

Um...So I recommend 2p 1366 as a minimum.
 
Ya, these are just computers that I dug out of a closet and brought back to life at work. I figured I might as well have them folding while they are not doing anything. I have one up and running smp now.

For my personal computer, I was debating on what to do. I am about to get out of the military and goto school, but my sig rig has got really long in the tooth. Since I will be doing a lot of compiling, audio and video compression, CAD, and things of that nature, I was debating on droping $4-6k on a 2P 2011 setup. I could fold with it and still use it as a computer for most games.
 
For you main rig you really might be better off an something like an i7-2600K overclocked a ton and a couple of SSDs to help speed along your cad and a/v work. One thing to remember currently about 2P 2011 setups - the chips aren't unlocked so you can't overclock them and the 2P xeons cost a ton more per mhz than the 1P xeons or consumer level chips.
 
tkam said:
For you main rig you really might be better off an something like an i7-2600K overclocked a ton and a couple of SSDs to help speed along your cad and a/v work. One thing to remember currently about 2P 2011 setups - the chips aren't unlocked so you can't overclock them and the 2P xeons cost a ton more per mhz than the 1P xeons or consumer level chips.
Click to expand...

They don't over clock but you can get pretty fast octocores pretty cheap if you go looking. You can get a nice rig based off 2.3-2.4ghz 8cores for about $3000 - you just have to like some spice in your mobo's cpu sockets
 
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Unfortunately it doesn't work like that, the E5-1xxx series chips are single socket chips only. For dual socket chips you need at least E5-2xxx series chips.
 
Damn I didnt realize that. Ah well, I will probably be starting a thread here in the DC forum on the build when it comes time to build it. It should be w/in the next two months. I might build a 2P 1366 rig before then, although it wont do much other than fold and do file server. Never hurts to have a 100K+ ppd file server lol.
 
KarsusTG said:
Damn I didnt realize that. Ah well, I will probably be starting a thread here in the DC forum on the build when it comes time to build it. It should be w/in the next two months. I might build a 2P 1366 rig before then, although it wont do much other than fold and do file server. Never hurts to have a 100K+ ppd file server lol.
Click to expand...

If you do build a 2p 1366 just bear in mind that you will need a pair of x5660's or better to complete bigadv units in time, x5650's are very borderline especially with the tpf variance that we have seen recently, secondly if you go for spicy chips x56xx series Xeon's have a TDP of 130w - some of their retail cousins only have a TDP of 95watts. for some boards thats a no-no, My board will run a retail x5675 quite happily but can't run a spciy one due to the TDP
 
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