VOGONS


First post, by PeteUK

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Hi All,

Since she's out for a respray, and I've taken some pics, I thought I'd share them. Just to give you an idea, this was a yellowy/brown/beige colour before it had 1.5L of "appliance white" slung at it 😎

=== Specs ===
Intel SC5000 Chassis
Dual 350w Hotswap PSU
Intel SBT2 Server Board
2x Pentium 3 Xeon 933Mhz
4Gb PC133 ECC Reg Ram
2x 5-Bay Intel Hotswap Modules
2x Intel SRCU31 SCSI Raid Cards
CD-Rom Drive
Floppy Drive

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Reply 3 of 18, by PeteUK

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Currently having new fans fitted and being SATA converted!

And yes, those Xeons run without any heatsinks, as they require a certain type which I haven't had the inclination to find 🤣 😁

Reply 4 of 18, by luckybob

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I am just about ready to resurrect my XG-DLS system, care to benchmark yours? I want to see how my REAL xeons fare against the fake 133mhz fsb versions. I'll be using windows 2000 with my pair of 900/2m/100 procs.

Care for a little fun?

(do an overclocked and normal clocked score if you can)

Reply 6 of 18, by luckybob

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well, lets go the route of HWBOT and lets fill in the blanks:

http://hwbot.org/browseHardwareProcessors.do? … SubFamilyId=140

it looks like there are NO rankings for a 933mhz setup, but if you look at the benchmarks for the 900mhz that should give you an idea of what to shoot for.

And all the benchmarks are available on that site so it should be easy.

And "just for fun" throw your best video card in you dualie and fire up 3dmark2001se.

Reply 8 of 18, by luckybob

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So I FINALLY got around to getting my XG-DLS system up and running today. there was 2 things holding me back. Well 3. but the 3rd isn't of any real significance.

#1. cooling.
#2. temp monitoring.

So for #1, the "plan" was to find a pair of slot 2 heatsinks with fans built in. Well after several months of looking, I haven't found a pair that I liked so I jury-rigged a 80mm fan to each one. Not optimal, but functional.

#2 was a bit harder. But the motherboard has 2 headers for temp sensors. and there are no temp sensors on the processor. I used this website as a guide: http://tipperlinne.com/cputemp.htm

What I did was to disassemble the processor entirely. So I planted the sensor right next to the core, BEFORE it gets to the heat-spreader. It seems to work. the bios reports a temperature of about 95F and I can believe that.

#3, I wanted to get 4x 512mb pc133 ecc dimms. Well my money situation at the moment has no allotment for "Discretionary spending" so that is going to have to wait. I will have to "get by" with 4x 256mb dimms from a dell server.

Right now I'm running the latest memtest, supposedly it is dual cpu compatible! But before that I did run a speedtest, just for giggles:

xgdls.th.jpgxgdls2.th.jpg

It seems to run perfectly stable at 1ghz. the above picture is with ECC ON. Strangely, if you look at the 2nd picture, turning ECC OFF makes NO difference in performance. So, that means either ECC has no negative performance hits for the 440GX chipset, OR the ECC function is permanently off or on. HMM.

Tomorrow, I plan to toss win2000 on it and run a few benchmarks for you. then I'm going to blow that away and install smoothwall on it and replace my router that seems to not work properly anymore. Its a test.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 9 of 18, by 7cjbill2

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I started to do something like this in wanting an old workstation, but ran into too many problems finding stuff for it. I've got the 900Mhz Xeon's and C440GX board, and Parhelia 256 (for my V2290b), but I never could find the CPU brackets for it and I was already well on my way with the dual 800 P3 workstation. 😒 Looks nice, something just like I would have wanted to build up!

Will pay $$$ for:

caching ISA I/O-IDE controller

PM me for my list of trade-ables...

Reply 10 of 18, by luckybob

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7cjbill2 wrote:

I started to do something like this in wanting an old workstation, but ran into too many problems finding stuff for it. I've got the 900Mhz Xeon's and C440GX board, and Parhelia 256 (for my V2290b), but I never could find the CPU brackets for it and I was already well on my way with the dual 800 P3 workstation. 😒 Looks nice, something just like I would have wanted to build up!

I was lucky to get the xg-dls with the brackets and supports. Speaking of which, I have a spare set of cpu brackets off an INTEL/gateway board. It will support TWO processors, but they need to be spaced rather close together. the board looks like this: http://www.baber.com/baber/411/intel_gateway.htm

If you need it let me know.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 11 of 18, by 7cjbill2

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Dang! That's a nice board! Would much rather have that than the C440GX I've got. My C440GX board has a support that mounts a couple of 40mm fans, I believe (or 60mm, can't remember now). Is that board the same? My IBM Xeons have passive heatsinks but no fans, so I think the fan bracket is probably a good idea in my case. The XG-DLS is also N-I-C-E! I'd jump on one if I could find one in the $100 range! 😀

Will pay $$$ for:

caching ISA I/O-IDE controller

PM me for my list of trade-ables...

Reply 12 of 18, by luckybob

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there was one on ebay for like 2 years that cost like $50, but it didn't have the brackets. then one day a 2nd appeared WITH the brackets for $100 + s&h and I bought it 3 hours after it was posted. yea. the cpu mounts for the xg-dls screw into a plate under the board that covers the ENTIRE board.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 13 of 18, by GL1zdA

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XG-DLS. Probably the best 440GX board out there and it has normal ATX size. There was a time when I wanted it really badly. But then I saw the SGI Visual Workstation 540 with its 4 Xeons and everything changed 😉

getquake.gif | InfoWorld/PC Magazine Indices

Reply 14 of 18, by cdoublejj

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i bet a system like that would run xp like a champ with enough ram. grant it your talking moderate web surfing at most and some classic gaming but, still yester year's super computers are today's daily drivers. 😜

Reply 15 of 18, by feipoa

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Memory bandwidth at 8218 MB/s? That doesn't seem right.

Here's what I get for,

Dual-PIII-850/100 - Dell Precision Workstation 410 w/1GB ECC RAM
Speedsys Score: 961
Memory Bandwidth: 668 MB/s
L1: 3200 MB/s
L2: 1800 MB/s
RAM: 334 MB/s

Dual-PIII-1400/133 - Intel SAI2 Server w/2GB ECC RAM (accepts up to 4 GB)
Speedsys Score: 1603
Memory Bandwidth: 1000 MB/s
L1: 5247 MB/s
L2: 2999 MB/s
RAM: 413 MB/s

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 17 of 18, by luckybob

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keep in mind, mine are overclocked from 900mhz to 1ghz. (almost exactly 12% truth be told)

I tend to ignore what in the box in the top left, and just go with what the readings are in the bottom right. I find it rather scary that a pair of 1.4 tualatins have no better memory speed than a pc100 system. But the cache speeds are impressive. Its exactly what I would expect my system to run with.

MAYBE the 440GX chipset has some sort of dual-channel memory config. I've always known the 440 series to be Intel's pride and glory...

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 18 of 18, by feipoa

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I was a bit thrown off by the RAM speed as well, though this BIOS has no control over any of the timings.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.