Cool, I'm currently doing exactly that. I've got an old WatchGuard XCS 170, which I'm turning into a Lakka "retrogaming emulation console". Already added a second HDD and inserted a faster CPU. The only PCI-E slot will be used for a sound card. Will post pictures later.

Most server boards have just shitty built in video (low end ATI) and no AGP or PCIE slots for video cards.

Supermicro and Tyan did make some good workstation dual socket boards with AGP pro or PCIE (some even SLI) and I have a few of them. One issue is those boards tend to be ATX-E so they won't fit in a normal cheap case. Some other good things about them is server RAM is dirt cheap and most boards have PCIX slots for SCSI and SATA cards (also dirt cheap).

Most of my dual socket boards are Athlon MP or Opteron based, but I also have some dual P2/P3 and even a dual P1 board.

Unknown_K wrote:

Most server boards have just shitty built in video (low end ATI) and no AGP or PCIE slots for video cards.

no most server boards have plenty of expansion.

Form factor concerns me zero. I can metalwork any housing i need.

I guess it depends how old you're talking. I used to use a Supermicro X7DCAL board with an Intel 5100 chipset and dual Core 2 based Harpertown processors and it worked fine for gaming and HTPC duties, but that was because it had one PCI-E 1.1 x16 slot. I had an older Gateway server years ago that was "neat", "huge" and "way too heavy for its own good" but even if I maxed it out with the best pair of Socket 603\604 CPUs I could find it only had PCI-X and PCI slots, which are useless for gaming.

Also... a lot of these systems tend to be insanely loud. I kept some of the fans from the old Gateway server... for some reason... not sure why. I'm more likely to accidentally lop a finger off while testing fans now... that's about it. 😀

it really depends on the platform and games you want to run, like the Athlon MP boards normally have chipsets with slower FSB and ram compared to the best motherboards you can use k7, also for newer games that could take good advantage of the dual CPU you start finding problems with lack of SSE2 and so on, and anyway, the CPUs connection is slow/high latency and the games made for dual core might not gain performance as much as you expect.

but you can certainly open interesting possibilities not being limited to the regular desktop stuff available at a certain time, also you had at times more workstation based stuff targeting gamers, the dual FX 74, and lga 771 skulltrail, there are probably a lot of other examples

Yes, MP boards might have used buffered DDR which was slower also.

A sweet MP setup that would probably have done you near a decade for relatively low outlay would have been the modded 1.3 Duron Morgans soon after they were out. Or at the time the alternative dual Tualatins would have been about the same.

This is the server system I'm currently working on:

I added the second HDD, a 512 MB USB DOM (for booting Lakka), and replaced the 1.6 GHz E1200 CPU with a 2.2 GHz E1500. On the first HDD, I'll install Win7 32-bit (for 16-bit compatibility), the second will be for games used with Lakka only.

Now I'm waiting for the PCI-E riser card so that I can install a sound card. 😁

Ah! I actually have a P4/Win XP system built with an extremely similar (maybe the same) SuperMicro motherboard... mine is a Socket 775 with P4 3GHz. It works for me; I put in a PCI nVidia FX5500 and use USB sound (Creative SoundBlaster MP3+). Plays 2000~2003 era games just great.

Avoid server hardware, unless super cheap. Go for workstation hardware. They have native PCIe slot for GPU (or AGP), so much better suited for most personal uses. However, beyond the 'cool' factor, its pretty useless in most practical scenarios.

For practical purposes, one would probably get better gaming performance with a dual core Haswell Celeron and H81 motherboard for around $40 USD. The money from power savings would probably pay off the difference from a dual 771 xeon workstation board in short time.

There's a computer recycler I visited just yesterday. They received several HP Z600/Z800 (dual 1366) workstations. I think they would've sold me one for around $150 USD (no graphics). Always be on lookout for those deals.

Well, this one was free, so...

Also, at least I am not planning to play any 3d games on it. It will be for 2d stuff only. Installed Win7 yesterday along with DOSBox and ScummVM. Everything works great, I did not even have to install a single driver. All the hardware is detected by Windows 7.

mine is a Socket 775 with P4 3GHz.

That one is 775 as well and also supports P4. It's a PDSBM-LN2+.

In theory the old argument 1 CPU (or even core) can focus on the OS and the other for gaming, rarely stands up. Mostly it still comes down to that raw speed.
Maybe things are changing now as more games start supporting multiple cores, but even then I wouldn't bet on it and were talking last 5 years only.

It's not to say servers make bad gaming PC's, I've done it, and will do it again. Its just they aren't efficient.
Workstations are probably better, but again moving to a single socket system the next generation up is probably better option.

But is it cool? HELL YES! and that's why were here right? dosbox plays games fine, yet a lot of us are still building dos only PC's

There was definitely a rough spot, late noughties, where you needed single core speed over about 2.5ghz, and 2ghz quads were struggling despite having theoretically 3x as much power required to run. However, if one of your cores was just enough to run game engine, it was advantageous to have your teamspeak etc running on other core(s)

So if you've got something like an 8 way PIII, you might find early things work good, and as long as a single core has enough oomph for a single task, it's all okay, then there's that sucky period, but just the other side of that if you find a few things that have lots of threads, the sort of thing that runs well on a PentiumD, then 8 way PIII might come into it's own again.... but it's a probably limited timespan where 8@1ghz PIII had enough stones to run something well threaded (That doesn't need SSE2 either) and it got too slow or unsupported again.

Has anyone managed to install Windows 98 or Me on a quad Xeon MP system?

What 8 way PIII? I've never heard of anything more than 6 CPU x86 (Tyan ??? And not PIII) o.0. Unless we are talking about a cluster rather than smp, in which case forget it.

Either way It's gonna be loud and power hungry I bet 😀.

meet my fantasy, or is it my power companies?
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/displ … mr_na-c00345576

Errius wrote:

Has anyone managed to install Windows 98 or Me on a quad Xeon MP system?

Why? There's no support for multi cpu/cores in 98 or Me anyway. It would be a real waste.

chinny22 wrote:

meet my fantasy, or is it my power companies?
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/displ … mr_na-c00345576

Well bugger me sideways and call me Sally o.0

Slot 2, at 100 fsb, so the best you can put in there is 900mhz iirc. 7U o.0 Gonna need a forklift to move that badboy 🤣

I would be interested to see what games would run on your quad Xeon MP system. As people have said trying to get a good GPU in there could be a big issue. I have seen PCIX to PCIE bridge cards but never got round to trying one. The standard PCI to PCIE work but they are a bit slow. It would be interesting to see how many games will actually run. These early CPUs lack Intel 64 and SSE3 so I suspect the key will be finding games old enough that don't require the newest extensions but new enough to use quad 4 cores. I suspect bus bandwidth may be an issue to and these early Xeons were rather slow in that department.

Server boards have no provisions for gaming video cards, workstation boards do. I have a Tyan S5372 server board with is a dual ZEON board with 2 quad core CPUs but no PCIE that will boot with video. I also have a workstation Gigabyte GA-3CESL dual socket F board with 2 dual 3ghz Opterons and 2 PCIE slots capable of SLI for older single slot cards.

Workstation boards are cool because multiple (cheap) CPUs can run more modern tasks and they tend to take quite a bit of cheap server RAM. The Gigabyte board I mentioned has 16 DDR2 RAM slots and I have 4 in use with DDR2-800 ECC REG 4GB sticks I paid $9 shipped for (so 64GB of RAM is possible for under $40). If I found a later Revision board I could use QUAD core CPUs as well. As stated by others you would be better off with a more modern single CPU board for gaming.