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My Ongoing Retro Rig Project - Xeon Prime

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First post, by m1919

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Hey all. This is my current main project "Xeon Prime", which actually spawned as an offshoot of a dual P3 build I had started a few months ago.

I came across an Intel MS440GX on ebay a while back, bundled with the processor brackets and a P2 450/1Mb Xeon and a terminator card. Naturally I wanted faster, so I purchased a pair of 700/1mb P3 Xeons on the assumption that the board would run them; there are other 440GX based boards that can handle up to 900Mhz Xeons without issue. I later found the board can only run up to 550Mhz Xeons. I flashed the latest Intel bios over the Gateway bios, but I was unable to get my 700s running properly.

I posted about this issue on the bios-mods forum, but they were unable to help, as the Intel bios is apparently impossible to open; it's a Phoenix bios but apparently this is a problem with Intel in general. This was an OEM board for Gateway and IBM, so I'm assuming there was some form of deal made with Intel to stop updates on this board past a certain point.

I did manage to get my hands on an Asus XG-DLS board that should be able to run my 700s and later 900s in the future, but it did not come with mounting brackets, so until I'm able to find some or fabricate my own, it'll be out of action. 😒

When I do get the Asus board running, I'm tempted to see if I can flash another company's bios onto this board and see if it'll actually run. I'm thinking Supermicro's S2DG* series bios would be most likely to work with this as they're 440GX based and appear to be fairly similar, save for the onboard SCSI controllers.

This was all mounted in an Antec NSK-4482B case originally, but the airflow was shit and when I finally stumbled on this aluminum Chenming server tower, I had to jump on it. It even came pre-drilled for mounting P3 Xeons. The odd thing about this is that the case was manufactured in 2004, well after the reign of the P3 Xeon ended.

Current specs are in my sig, but probably soon to change.

Forgive the mediocre photography, took these with my phone as I don't have a decent camera at the moment.

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Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 1 of 110, by GL1zdA

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Good it came with the brackets, many second hand slot motherboards are stripped of all retention mechanisms. Are the Xeons getting hot? I've never seen them sold boxed with fans, but I guess you are expectoed to provide proper airflow in the chassis to cool them.

What OS are you running on it?

Seeing the Antec, which is rebadged Chieftec Dragon on a retro PC reminds me, that I should replace my every day PC - it is still using a black Chieftec Dragon which I bought in 2003 😉

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Reply 2 of 110, by m1919

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GL1zdA wrote:

Good it came with the brackets, many second hand slot motherboards are stripped of all retention mechanisms. Are the Xeons getting hot? I've never seen them sold boxed with fans, but I guess you are expectoed to provide proper airflow in the chassis to cool them.

What OS are you running on it?

Seeing the Antec, which is rebadged Chieftec Dragon on a retro PC reminds me, that I should replace my every day PC - it is still using a black Chieftec Dragon which I bought in 2003 😉

I have no way of recording processor temperature on this board, but the Asus XG-DLS I'll be running in the future does have provisions for temperature monitoring. When this build was in my NSK-4482B, the heatsinks were almost burning to the touch after being under load for 10-15 minutes. In this case they run much cooler, simply because there's so much more natural, unobstructed airflow.

I'm currently using Windows 2000 Pro, but I plan on multi-booting with Ubuntu of some form, and maybe Windows 98SE as well, even though it won't utilize the second processor.

On the Antec and Chieftec cases, those as far as I know are actually either rebranded Chenming cases or were produced under license.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 3 of 110, by m1919

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Installed some additional cooling because my hard drives were running hotter than I would have liked. Also ghetto'd a dedicated cooling fan for the Xeons because they were running hot.

Added a fan controller I had lying around to hub all the wiring for most of the new fans together for a cleaner cabling job. The controller also has some temp sensors. I have two on the Xeons, one at the front of the case to monitor intake air temps and the last on the Obisian2 just because I had no idea where else to put the thing.

The external heatsink temp on the Xeons was showing 35C idle and 45-50C under heavy load, it's obviously not accurate since I didn't have enough wire length to secure them to the backplates, but the heatsinks are no longer burning hot to the touch. I would like to think they're probably actually running at around 50C which is 10 degrees cooler than the max operating temp.

I'm not sure how accurate the temp monitoring on the SCSI drives is, but the two 73GB drives I have were idling around 35C and were running at around 48-50C under prolonged heavy usage. They used to be a lot hotter.

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Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 4 of 110, by Tetrium

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That's a nice rig you have over there! Are the scsi drives loud btw?

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Reply 5 of 110, by m1919

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Tetrium wrote:

That's a nice rig you have over there! Are the scsi drives loud btw?

Not particularly. They blend in with the fans and with the front door closed it's not bad. I also have the ambient noise from my main rig in the background usually, so that probably masks the sound a bit as well.

The only thing that stands out above the fan noise are the read/write cycles from the SCSI drives.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 6 of 110, by m1919

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I tabletoped my ASUS XG-DLS earlier today. Booted right up with the 700/1mb Xeons I have. Now I can start planning how I'm going to go about building the brackets for this beast.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 8 of 110, by m1919

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luckybob wrote:

did you get those pictures of my xg-dls?

Yep, I saw them in the other thread a while back.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 9 of 110, by jmrydholm

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Darn you took my name. 😜 I'm changing the name of my beige Optiplex from "Gravis Prime" to Unicron. 🤣 kidding aside, awesome rig!

"The height of strategy, is to attack your opponent’s strategy” -Sun Tzu
“Make your fighting stance, your everyday stance and make your everyday stance, your fighting stance.” - Musashi
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Reply 10 of 110, by m1919

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Just scored a Freeway FW-6400GX/150/WS board. It's a slot-1/slot-2 uni-processor board that supports up to 150mhz FSB. Also got a P2 Xeon 450mhz ES with it and a couple sets of quad Xeon board brackets. 😁

The first pic is of the actual board I bought, got it off a gentleman on the 2CPU forums.

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Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 11 of 110, by Dant

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Absolutely amazing rigs! Personally, all I want to know is how you got that Obsidian2... *Drools*

Can't wait to see some game benchmarks, especially Quake 3 running in SMP mode.

Wonder how these Xeons stack up to the Tualatins... That will be an interesting comparison.

Reply 12 of 110, by m1919

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Dant wrote:

Absolutely amazing rigs! Personally, all I want to know is how you got that Obsidian2... *Drools*

Can't wait to see some game benchmarks, especially Quake 3 running in SMP mode.

Wonder how these Xeons stack up to the Tualatins... That will be an interesting comparison.

Not sure how well Quake 3 would do running in SMP, as far as I know, SMP mode only existed to aid in software rendering, otherwise it was pretty much useless when tried with a dedicated GPU. I think it was also removed in later versions of the game as well, so I'm not even sure the copy I have would even run in SMP.

I think the Freeway board might be able to handle running the 133mhz 1Ghz P3 Xeons, of which I have two. Not sure how it would stack up to a single Tualatin. We'll find out when I get the board. 😁

I got the Obsidian board off ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Quantum-OBSIDIAN2-SBi … 6#ht_720wt_1163

There's a dude selling them in the arcade section for pretty much dirt cheap considering what these boards are. If I were to sell one alone after this sale dries up, I'd get mundo bucks for the thing.

I'd grab another four just so I could build myself a ghetto Quantum3d setup, but I'll probably never get my hands on the rest of the required hardware to run them with 🤣.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 13 of 110, by Dant

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m1919 wrote:
Not sure how well Quake 3 would do running in SMP, as far as I know, SMP mode only existed to aid in software rendering, otherwi […]
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Dant wrote:

Absolutely amazing rigs! Personally, all I want to know is how you got that Obsidian2... *Drools*

Can't wait to see some game benchmarks, especially Quake 3 running in SMP mode.

Wonder how these Xeons stack up to the Tualatins... That will be an interesting comparison.

Not sure how well Quake 3 would do running in SMP, as far as I know, SMP mode only existed to aid in software rendering, otherwise it was pretty much useless when tried with a dedicated GPU. I think it was also removed in later versions of the game as well, so I'm not even sure the copy I have would even run in SMP.

I think the Freeway board might be able to handle running the 133mhz 1Ghz P3 Xeons, of which I have two. Not sure how it would stack up to a single Tualatin. We'll find out when I get the board. 😁

I got the Obsidian board off ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Quantum-OBSIDIAN2-SBi … 6#ht_720wt_1163

There's a dude selling them in the arcade section for pretty much dirt cheap considering what these boards are. If I were to sell one alone after this sale dries up, I'd get mundo bucks for the thing.

I'd grab another four just so I could build myself a ghetto Quantum3d setup, but I'll probably never get my hands on the rest of the required hardware to run them with 🤣.

You sir, are my hero. I'll need to get buying one of those, there's a P2B-D sitting here begging for some 3D acceleration.
G200s are great, but not for 3D, as is common knowledge here.

Do I see a massive forum-wide software mode Quake 3 benchmark comparison in Vogon's future? Seems like it would be a nice project.

I thought the P3 Xeons did not go beyond 933Mhz, but then again I never knew much about them.

Reply 14 of 110, by m1919

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Dant wrote:
You sir, are my hero. I'll need to get buying one of those, there's a P2B-D sitting here begging for some 3D acceleration. G200 […]
Show full quote
m1919 wrote:
Not sure how well Quake 3 would do running in SMP, as far as I know, SMP mode only existed to aid in software rendering, otherwi […]
Show full quote
Dant wrote:

Absolutely amazing rigs! Personally, all I want to know is how you got that Obsidian2... *Drools*

Can't wait to see some game benchmarks, especially Quake 3 running in SMP mode.

Wonder how these Xeons stack up to the Tualatins... That will be an interesting comparison.

Not sure how well Quake 3 would do running in SMP, as far as I know, SMP mode only existed to aid in software rendering, otherwise it was pretty much useless when tried with a dedicated GPU. I think it was also removed in later versions of the game as well, so I'm not even sure the copy I have would even run in SMP.

I think the Freeway board might be able to handle running the 133mhz 1Ghz P3 Xeons, of which I have two. Not sure how it would stack up to a single Tualatin. We'll find out when I get the board. 😁

I got the Obsidian board off ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Quantum-OBSIDIAN2-SBi … 6#ht_720wt_1163

There's a dude selling them in the arcade section for pretty much dirt cheap considering what these boards are. If I were to sell one alone after this sale dries up, I'd get mundo bucks for the thing.

I'd grab another four just so I could build myself a ghetto Quantum3d setup, but I'll probably never get my hands on the rest of the required hardware to run them with 🤣.

You sir, are my hero. I'll need to get buying one of those, there's a P2B-D sitting here begging for some 3D acceleration.
G200s are great, but not for 3D, as is common knowledge here.

Do I see a massive forum-wide software mode Quake 3 benchmark comparison in Vogon's future? Seems like it would be a nice project.

I thought the P3 Xeons did not go beyond 933Mhz, but then again I never knew much about them.

Always wiling to help out a fellow retro enthusiast. 😀

The large-cache P3 Xeons with the 100mhz FSB went up to 900mhz. The 133mhz FSB P3 Xeons went up to 1Ghz, but they are pretty much just Coppermines in a Xeon form factor. They only have 256kb of L2 cache.

I actually have a G200 sitting in a box with some other crap I have packed away for an upcoming move. I think I'll be dropping it into a dual P3 build I started a while ago based on a Tyan Tiger 100 (S1832D) board. Might pair it up with another Obsidian2 and a pair of 850mhz Coppermines, or I might go a different direction. Not sure yet.

Heh, I have so much oldskool hardware right now that I have no idea what to do with half of it.

Last edited by m1919 on 2012-08-14, 03:58. Edited 1 time in total.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 15 of 110, by Dant

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m1919 wrote:

Always wiling to help out a fellow retro enthusiast. 😀

The large-cache P3 Xeons with the 100mhz FSB went up to 900mhz. The 133mhz FSB P3 Xeons went up to 1Ghz, but they are pretty much just Coppermines in a Xeon form factor. They only have 256kb of L2 cache.

I actually have a G200 sitting in a box with some other crap I have packed away for an upcoming move. I think I'll be dropping it into a dual P3 build I started a while ago based on a Tyan Tiger 100 (S1832D) board. Might pair it up with another Obsidian2 and a pair of 850mhz Coppermines, or I might go a different direction. Not sure yet.

So those 1Ghz Xeons have basically no chance of benchmarking better than the Tualatins? Aw well, still would be nice to see where the higher cashe CPUs bench.

The Tyan Tiger's are pretty good boards, I don't have much experience with anything non-Asus from the time period, though.

Reply 16 of 110, by m1919

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Dant wrote:
m1919 wrote:

Always wiling to help out a fellow retro enthusiast. 😀

The large-cache P3 Xeons with the 100mhz FSB went up to 900mhz. The 133mhz FSB P3 Xeons went up to 1Ghz, but they are pretty much just Coppermines in a Xeon form factor. They only have 256kb of L2 cache.

I actually have a G200 sitting in a box with some other crap I have packed away for an upcoming move. I think I'll be dropping it into a dual P3 build I started a while ago based on a Tyan Tiger 100 (S1832D) board. Might pair it up with another Obsidian2 and a pair of 850mhz Coppermines, or I might go a different direction. Not sure yet.

So those 1Ghz Xeons have basically no chance of benchmarking better than the Tualatins? Aw well, still would be nice to see where the higher cashe CPUs bench.

The Tyan Tiger's are pretty good boards, I don't have much experience with anything non-Asus from the time period, though.

Pretty much. It's too bad the slot Xeons maxed out at 1Ghz.

Yeah. I bought mine for 30 bucks in as-is condition. Turns out the board was practically untouched, appeared to have been never used. Haven't run it much since I got it, but it appears solid.

I ran an Asus Socket 478 P4 board for a time and it was rock solid, though I hated the P4 with a passion. I suspect my XG-DLS board will be just as solid when I get it all set up.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 17 of 110, by Dant

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m1919 wrote:

Pretty much. It's too bad the slot Xeons maxed out at 1Ghz.

Yeah. I bought mine for 30 bucks in as-is condition. Turns out the board was practically untouched, appeared to have been never used. Haven't run it much since I got it, but it appears solid.

I ran an Asus Socket 478 P4 board for a time and it was rock solid, though I hated the P4 with a passion. I suspect my XG-DLS board will be just as solid when I get it all set up.

Hey, if it works well, it works.

Yes, not even Asus's old rock-solid engineering cannot overcome the mess that was Netburst!

Reply 18 of 110, by m1919

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Dant wrote:
m1919 wrote:

Pretty much. It's too bad the slot Xeons maxed out at 1Ghz.

Yeah. I bought mine for 30 bucks in as-is condition. Turns out the board was practically untouched, appeared to have been never used. Haven't run it much since I got it, but it appears solid.

I ran an Asus Socket 478 P4 board for a time and it was rock solid, though I hated the P4 with a passion. I suspect my XG-DLS board will be just as solid when I get it all set up.

Hey, if it works well, it works.

Yes, not even Asus's old rock-solid engineering cannot overcome the mess that was Netburst!

Would have been better off with a dual Opteron 940 build. I have a K8T Master2-FAR waiting for some parts, it's something I probably would have been running back in 2004 and probably up until 2008 if I had been born ten years earlier and had a job then. Was stuck with that horrible P4 though.

Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z

Reply 19 of 110, by m1919

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Beastly ram is beastly.

Pic I found on Hardwareluxx.de

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Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z