Old Xeon's proc's

[DragonDude]

So a friend of mine came across an old Dell in storage. It has a decent 1.5GB of memory RDRAM and such. It also has a dual core Intel Xeon 2.8GHz socket 603. I'm pretty sure it would be a "Prestonia" or a "Gallatin" processor if wiki is telling the truth. Anyway my question is this Dell any good? I mean, a 2.8GHz Dual Xeon CPU's from 2002 cant really do much could it? If anything at all, i can just turn this Dell into a freeNAS box or something.

Thanks for any response guys.

 

[Blue Fox]

It isn't dual core. I would throw it away honestly. Get yourself an Atom system instead. It will be faster and the power savings will pay for itself quickly.

 

[DragonDude]

Ah ok. That would probably be a better idea. thanks for the response.

I think it is dual core though. I see two heatsinks inside. I found that this is a server type of PC too, a Precision 530. But ill just throw it away as you suggested, heh. The GFX card fan sounds like its going out anyway. . .

 

[/dev/null]

The atom will NOT be faster than a xeon 2.8 single core. The atom will only eat 5-10% of the power of the xeon system, however....

The xeon from that age is probably equivalent to to a pentium 4 (netburst based).

 

[BinarySynapse]

Ah ok. That would probably be a better idea. thanks for the response.

I think it is dual core though. I see two heatsinks inside. I found that this is a server type of PC too, a Precision 530. But ill just throw it away as you suggested, heh. The GFX card fan sounds like its going out anyway. . .

it's dual processor system, but the processors themselves are single core. Dual core means having two complete processing units in the same physical package (the part that goes in the socket)

It would make a decent system for typical office and web use, and maybe some minor server work as well. Keep it around have some fun with it.


One thing to note, Dell used non-compliant power supplies back in that day. Whether or not your system even uses an ATX-like power supply or not, I don't know. But keep that in mind if you go swapping parts around.

 

[staticlag]

I'd sell it on craigslist, it probably will cost you $15-$20 a month to run it in electricity with how inefficient the early designs were.

(I have one of those PS, its a 100lb Dell paperweight that I harvested for the SCSI drives and NICs) Case is nice though, might re-tool it to accept completely new internals if I get some time.

 

[DragonDude]

Yeah i might as well keep it for awhile. I installed freeNAS on it to try it out, and it seems to do very well. There's an option in the BIOS to disable the second processor so it shouldn't be as bad (but yes i know, a lot more heat/expense even still). It even has a SCSI interface, though i doubt ill use it.

Anyway, thanks for the responses.