My Insane In The Brain Socket 939 SLI Sundae \ VOGONS

My Insane In The Brain Socket 939 SLI Sundae

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First post, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2014-04-30, 18:59

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I don't think I've bragged about my fastest Socket 939 system on VOGONS yet. So, here goes. 😀

I built this machine in February of 2007. I used it as my main computer until ~5 months ago, when I finally upgraded to something significantly faster--a Core i7 4930K at 4.3GHz.
The only upgrades I've made since 2007 are to the HDD and OS.

Specs:
Motherboard: Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
CPU: Opteron 185 dual-core. Overclocked to 3.0GHz at its standard voltage of 1.35v. At this frequency, CPU performance is almost as good as the C2D E6600.
Chipset: nForce4 SLI x16 (unlike the regular nf4 SLI, this one provides both graphics cards with a full 16 PCIe lanes)
Memory: 4GB dual channel DDR400, CL2.
Video: Two GeForce 8800GTS 640MB in SLI. G80-based.
Audio: Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatality (or something like that)
HDD: 1.5TB Seagate (7200/32MB)
Optical: Pioneer Blu-Ray drive
Case: Antec P182
Power: Corsair HX620
OS: Win7 x64

Benchmarks

3DMark01 under WinXP:

Yeah, Win7 totally sucks at 3DMark01. Makes me wonder what today's 75K-scoring rigs would hit under WinXP.

3DMark03:

3DMark05:

3DMark06:

3DMark Vantage:

94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!

Reply 1 of 11, by F2bnp

Posted on 2014-04-30, 19:35

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Now that's just beautiful...

Reply 2 of 11, by sgt76

Posted on 2014-05-01, 04:47

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Epic s939. Makes me want to post up my own previous main rig, an AM2+ system, built in 2009. I too upgraded to X79, in 2012 but its only an i7 3820.

Reply 3 of 11, by Mau1wurf1977

Posted on 2014-05-01, 05:15

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Very nice 😀

Good to see some newer items getting interest on Vogons.

What results do you get with stock settings?

My website with reviews, demos, drivers, tutorials and more...
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Reply 4 of 11, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2014-05-01, 16:48

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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:
Very nice 😀

Good to see some newer items getting interest on Vogons.

What results do you get with stock settings?

At stock settings (2.6GHz):

3DMark01 (XP): 38,779
(Win 7): 23,425

3DMark03: 50,670
3DMark05: 15,323
3DMark06: 10,882
3DMark Vantage: 11,014

94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!

Reply 5 of 11, by LunarG

Posted on 2014-05-02, 12:42

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Love that motherboard. I just put together a "spare parts" system for my mum (to replace an old laptop she's been using for simple gaming... solitaire, mahjong and such) using the same motherboard.
Always found that board to be very stable and to perform well. Mine had an Athlon 64 in it for a long time, but is now running an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (iirc) and 3GB ram.
Looks like a kick-ass system, although it's a bit on the modern side for me 😉

WinXP : PIII 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 73GB SCSI HDD, Matrox Parhelia, SB Audigy 2.
Win98se : K6-3+ 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, Voodoo 2, SW1000XG.
DOS6.22 : Intel DX4, 64MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD, Diamond Stealth64 DRAM, GUS 1MB, SB16.

Reply 6 of 11, by Living

Posted on 2014-05-04, 00:27

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that rig needs a SSD. Pure 939 pushed to the max

Reply 7 of 11, by Mystery

Posted on 2014-05-04, 06:35

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Awesome system! My puny So939 rig (X2 4400+, X1950XT, 2GB RAM) is shivering.

Yes, SSD, do it! Unless you want to use only authentic components. In that case get a couple of WD Raptors in a raid. But your storage hardware is significantly lacking compared to the GPU/CPU/RAM. 😉

::42::

Reply 8 of 11, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2014-05-05, 07:28

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The day I upgrade my main system to a 1 or 2TB SSD will be the day I put my current 256GB 840 Pro in the S939 system. 😀

94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!

Reply 9 of 11, by obobskivich

Posted on 2014-05-12, 15:26

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Mystery wrote:
Awesome system! My puny So939 rig (X2 4400+, X1950XT, 2GB RAM) is shivering.

Yes, SSD, do it! Unless you want to use only authentic components. In that case get a couple of WD Raptors in a raid. But your storage hardware is significantly lacking compared to the GPU/CPU/RAM. 😉

Technically I-RAM would be "period accurate" though... 😎

Very nice GeForce8 build regardless; interesting how 3D01 plays out on it (I thought my QuadSLI system doing 400+ FPS in Nature was bad...). Especially the fill-rate hit for Windows 7... 😲

Does this beastie still game? 😀

Reply 10 of 11, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2014-05-12, 17:54

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The fill rate is lower under Win7 because I had SLI disabled in order to increase the 3DMark01 score. SLI was enabled for all XP benchmarking.
SLI is kind of a sad story on this machine under Win7. A few older games and benchmarks--mainly D3D8 like 3DMark01--perform rather suckishly with SLI enabled. I think the 3GHz Opteron just lacks the CPU ponies to really take advantage of it under the heavier OS. It's not the cards or driver because when I tested the cards in my 4.3GHZ i7 machine, graphics performance pretty much doubled with SLI.

3DMark01 - WinXP:
SLI Enabled: 44,383
SLI Disabled: 40,734

3DMark01 - Win7:
SLI enabled: 24,646
SLI disabled: 26,490

Though now that I think about it, it may be the chipset driver that's bringing SLI performance down under Win7. Iirc, this machine did better with SLI under Vista, which had proper NF4 drivers. Win7, on the other hand, uses Microsoft-supplied chipset drivers.

94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!

Reply 11 of 11, by obobskivich

Posted on 2014-05-12, 18:35

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Standard Def Steve wrote:
The fill rate is lower under Win7 because I had SLI disabled in order to increase the 3DMark01 score. SLI was enabled for all XP […]
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The fill rate is lower under Win7 because I had SLI disabled in order to increase the 3DMark01 score. SLI was enabled for all XP benchmarking.
SLI is kind of a sad story on this machine under Win7. A few older games and benchmarks--mainly D3D8 like 3DMark01--perform rather suckishly with SLI enabled. I think the 3GHz Opteron just lacks the CPU ponies to really take advantage of it under the heavier OS. It's not the cards or driver because when I tested the cards in my 4.3GHZ i7 machine, graphics performance pretty much doubled with SLI.

3DMark01 - WinXP:
SLI Enabled: 44,383
SLI Disabled: 40,734

3DMark01 - Win7:
SLI enabled: 24,646
SLI disabled: 26,490

Though now that I think about it, it may be the chipset driver that's bringing SLI performance down under Win7. Iirc, this machine did better with SLI under Vista, which had proper NF4 drivers. Win7, on the other hand, uses Microsoft-supplied chipset drivers.

Yikes. Glad I stuck to XP for my older SLI box; thanks for confirming that choice with #s. 😊 And yeah, the lack of NF4 drivers for 7 was what had me worried - read just as many reports of BSODs, terrible performance, etc as I did about things working properly.

Still a very mean machine - the original 8800GTS cards are certainly one of those odd ducks that were never exceedingly popular, but provided very good performance nonetheless.

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