As an update

I installed a radeon 9250 and a soundcard into the quad socket server just to test if the machine was capable of supporting such cards and it seems that it does , gave rally sport challenge and need for speed a try and they seem to play well

so I purchased a pci to pci-e adapter (unfortunately not the 100$ pci-x to pci-e adapter) and will give it a try with some better gpu's.

main goal will be to see if this machine can run crysis which it seems like it will be able to do quite well. we'll see and maybe i'll make a new thread about it.

I've added an Asus Xonar DGX sound card to my server project today. Great card. 😀

Now for some emulators. 😎

Hardware is done, so I re-added the cover. Since the top had scratches, I added some carbon foil. 😉

Any sexier and you'd probably get banned for posting porn 😁

Yep, looks quite awesome. Who cares about the slow 3d graphics anyway. 😁

emosun wrote:

so I purchased a pci to pci-e adapter (unfortunately not the 100$ pci-x to pci-e adapter) and will give it a try with some better gpu's.

I will be very interested in knowing how that goes. Hopefully it will work as well as the regular PCI to PCIe only much faster. I would love to try one with a M.2 adapter for fast SSD interface as well.

As someone who has used server hardware as their main system for 15 years now, I want to chime in, dispel some myths, etc.

STOP RAISING PRICES!!!!

I buy server hardware that is just getting decommissioned for gaming. Basically only from supermicro. Tyan was great up until the P4 era and have really fallen into obscurity. Still fine boards.

REGISTERED ram is slower than regular. ECC is also slower. However ECC can be disabled in the vast majority of SM boards. This matters less and less after DDR1. It's practically non existent in ddr3.

Dangit, now y'all got me looking serious at a $50 Poweredge 2950 that can theoretically take 2 3Ghz quad core xeons plus has 8x PCIe which you can mod for decent graphics....

derSammler wrote:

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.

I wanted to build a big old multiboot monster with every popular OS and then some. The only thing that wouldn't go was Windows 9x.

W98SE wouldn't install at all. WME installed (after much hassle) but was unusable due to strange glitches I never solved.

ETA: I think I figured out the problem. It apparently only affects certain HP machines. See this page (untested)

Virtualisation would be fun, one OS on each core... DOS 6.22, Windows 95 OSR 2.5, Windows 98SE, BEOS, OS/2 Warp, AROS, Minix, freeBSD, NetBSD, OS/9, Linux, Nextstep, CPM/86, Netware... damn, gonna need a quad CPU quad core system...

Edit: and forgot ReactOS and Android x86

Some are pretty ok with it, I set up a super Micro Dual 771 board with an 8x PCIe slot with dual 3.0 quad core xeons and paired it with a GTX 750 Ti for a friends budget build it does fantastic, only crap shoot was finding the the ram, it had to be FB DIMMS.

this is the quad xeon mp I'm working on that'll get the pci-e upgrade

I turned quite easily a Hp M310 G5 server into a Pc, all I had to do was to buy a Xonar PCI-E sound card and to cut the end of the 8x PCI-E slot in order to be able to fit a 16x video card. Sadly HP had the funky idea to put in the bios some restrictions so any video card inserted in the 8x slot runs at 1x (probably except 1-2 HP branded video cards that would be useless for gaming anyway).

The only major problem is that the damn thing adjuts it's fans A LOT with the temperature of the intake air. In summer at 30 degrees celsius it sounded like it was about to take off, with the cpu fan at 3800rpm, despite the cpu idling at 35 degrees or so. Now, with 20-21 degree celsius room temperature, it's damn quiet for a server. All this was with fan control at the lowest setting in bios. It appears that there is some sort f management software suite that has to be booted from a flash drive and that may or may not have moreoptions for fans adjustment.

This being said the damn thing performs quite well in Win 7 with games that have lower requirements and the power consumption is quite reasonable. I'm not sure why most companies basically throw these things away instead of doing these small modifications and donating them to orphanages or other social institutions...

Servers are notoriously noisy. I have a similar problem with a server I'm currently using as a desktop. It has 3.60 GHz CPUs but most of the time I run them throttled down to 2.80 GHz because of the terrible noise the fans make when CPU utilization is high.

Errius wrote:

Servers are notoriously noisy.

whats with all these people complaining about server noise? put it in a different room then

Like a nascar driver complaining that his race car is loud.

or get a better case and cooling. Its not hard to cool a server.

Or just get some delta PFC's and your system will sound like a NASCAR stock car as the fans rev up and down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqc72EOuteU

Or if you like the jet engine sound you could get a 99w delta THA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dcj7tB4NCk

Errius wrote:

Servers are notoriously noisy.

No, they are not. Fan speed is completely controllable. I've set mine to "Quiet (workstation)". There's even a super-quiet mode. This applies to most servers. They are only noisy when switched on, as fan speed always starts at highest speed.

TANSTAAFL. Low noise = low CPU power. This machine (a ProLiant G3) runs nice and quiet in low power mode, but you lose nearly a quarter CPU speed.

chinny22 wrote:

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

Here you go! https://www.ebay.com/itm/152732118789

If had room and a thick wallet and maybe a empty head i would buy it in an instant 😊 Hmm...

Errius wrote:

TANSTAAFL. Low noise = low CPU power. This machine (a ProLiant G3) runs nice and quiet in low power mode, but you lose nearly a quarter CPU speed.

And because of this you turn that into a general statement? Fan control doesn't affect CPU speed, it just changes the threshold for slow/medium/fast fan speed. In quiet mode, the CPU runs hotter, but that's it. Overheat margin will change, too, but that's not important if no longer used as s server anyway.