Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

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HFat
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by HFat » Mon Aug 29, 2011 12:36 pm

hatbrox wrote:the 1260L has an integrated GPU but 99.99999% of the MB in the world won't support it.
I was talking about the GPU on the Supermicro board, not the IGP.
hatbrox wrote:I don't recommend this card as it doesn't work properly when two AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 are installed on the system. What a shame for Supermicro. They don't even test that their own products work with each other.
they're trying to fix it, gave me a new BIOS that's not even publicly available but the combination of the MB and the HBA still doesn't work.
Interesting...
But you probably wouldn't want use this card in a small NAS.

hatbrox
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by hatbrox » Mon Aug 29, 2011 12:44 pm

I think the supermicro card is the best value for money if you want to add 8 hard drives in addition to your MB internal SATA ports.
Unless you plan to install you NAS with some un-supported linux distros and/or want hardware RAID, I don't know any better card.

Don't buy the first version though (ie: SAS not SAS2), it's a much larger card and it never work well. HDDs would often drop.
Last edited by hatbrox on Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

Smile
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Smile » Mon Aug 29, 2011 3:00 pm

Well I did read the specs, but since intel integrate GPU it' confusing for me.

piglover
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by piglover » Tue Aug 30, 2011 8:48 am

HFat wrote:I finally got a Supermicro X9SCM-F and it has a Matrox G200ew GPU (manufactured by Nuvoton). for a server that's more than enough.
I don't recommend this card as it doesn't work properly when two AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 are installed on the system. What a shame for Supermicro. They don't even test that their own products work with each other.
they're trying to fix it, gave me a new BIOS that's not even publicly available but the combination of the MB and the HBA still doesn't work.
That's a bit harsh on SuperMicro, don't you think? Every one of SuperMicro's reference systems would combine the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 with a SAS expander to get more than 8 drives. Using two of them in the same system is not a supported configuration. While it may be logical for you to try it, they do not test configurations that they do not sell. You'll find the same with any enterprise-class system manufacturer.

At least SuperMicro sells the pieces separately. You don't see that from very many other enterprise system manufacturers.

hatbrox
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by hatbrox » Wed Aug 31, 2011 2:25 pm

If putting 2 HBA is not a supported configuration (and where did you get this information from?) then I would like to be told before hand.
I read everything about this card on their website (and also for the MB) and I didn't see anything that indicate this incompatibility.

I'm a consumer, this is my 2nd home server and wanted to put extra money to get a solid system. I have spent countless days and money (different HDD brands, SAS cable, borrowed a different backplane...) to follow all instructions from Supermicro support.

After 3 weeks, they finally accepted my RMA. Since this card has a low availability in Europe (I waited 2 weeks to get mine) my server will probably be off line for another 3 weeks.

From your point of view, comfortably seated in chair in sunny California, I can understand you think it's harsh.

But here, in the Netherlands, it's been raining almost non-stop throughout the summer, I'm pissed off with the cards, my family is mad at me. On second though, I think I was too nice.

HFat
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by HFat » Wed Aug 31, 2011 8:17 pm

Weeks of downtime? And you wonder why that card isn't appropriate? What if it stopped working after your server went in "production"?
This kind of gear is fine in a server room. But I keep warning people who do not have that kind of budget about "enterprise" controllers, hardware RAID and large arrays in general.

Having a single server is a recipe for downtime. Having a single server with a lot of drives is even worse. If you're going to put that many drives into a server, you'd better have halfway decent testing procedures and a good local parts suppliers (or keep your own spare parts).
Having several cheap servers (they also come with ECC thanks to AMD and/or the used market) with cheap controllers or even no controllers at all (just the ports on the board) makes it affordable and convenient to keep spare parts and to replace them.
Nice, reliable server gear is great. But the parts situation has to come first. If you can't afford spares and you can't procure replacement parts quickly, you have a serious problem!

Discussing this in a thread about an expensive low-wattage Xeon is a bit weird by the way. Such controllers and the drives connected to them burn so much more power than you save compared with a regular Xeon...

Smile
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Smile » Thu Sep 01, 2011 1:54 pm

HFat wrote:Discussing this in a thread about an expensive low-wattage Xeon is a bit weird by the way. Such controllers and the drives connected to them burn so much more power than you save compared with a regular Xeon...
Unraid can spun down drives not in use, and it can distrubute your data so that for example you can dedicate single drive to only photos, another one to documents and music etc. You can have 1 or max 2 drives out of total 6 available spun up at any given time. So low wattage Xeon is very well appreciated and needed.

Smile
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Smile » Thu Sep 01, 2011 1:57 pm

HFat wrote:Nice, reliable server gear is great. But the parts situation has to come first. If you can't afford spares and you can't procure replacement parts quickly, you have a serious problem!
I agree with you on this one, but whats available on AMD market for us? I never built AMD stuff before, AMD E-350 does not support ECC RAM AFAIK. I know that some prefer HP microsever (if you can get it cheap), you would be able to buy 2 HP microservers or one xeon mini-itx system I read.

HFat
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by HFat » Thu Sep 01, 2011 3:05 pm

Special low-power CPU have limited benefits as such. HP Microservers are pretty expensive actually unless you want the whole package (the case with 4 drive racks under lock and key and so on). If you're building your own boxes, you can use the cheapest AMD desktop CPUs with boards which support ECC. One of them got a lot of attention here a while back. Underclock the CPU if need be (to bring the effective TDP down). That's not as efficient or full-featured as Intel server gear but a lot cheaper. Its not something I'd choose if I could afford better but if you want redundancy on the cheap and don't want to buy used, that's the way to go...

Compare the power consumption of regular and low-wattage Xeons and I think you'll find the difference is much less than the consumption of that Supermicro card alone.
If you spin down some drives (a state in which they do consume power), you might as well put them on a separate server and put that whole server into standby when you don't need its data.

Smile
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Smile » Fri Sep 02, 2011 3:33 am

Unless manufacturers get parts for free for AMD and need to buy them for Intel the board prices do reflect the construction reliability in the long term scenario. A server level board with outlast few other consumer grade boards, easily. So its a free choice quality or quantity (buy 2x amd boards for singe intel board).

But it's a shame that e-350 does not support ECC, would be low level platform that can do HD video playback without dedicated cards and low power usage.

HFat
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by HFat » Fri Sep 02, 2011 8:50 am

ECC isn't needed for video playback.
Smile wrote:prices do reflect the construction reliability in the long term scenario
A dogma not based on evidence.

Smile
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Smile » Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:13 pm

Just so 1220L benchmarks on http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... 40+2.20GHz

It's 3231 points when my dual xeon 3.8 is only 1384 and it renders HD videos OK :) :shock:
Who would need more powerfull CPU for NAS at 20W TDP

It seems to much power, and intel should release like 5W TDP or so :roll:

alexlist
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by alexlist » Mon Dec 05, 2011 6:20 am

hatbrox wrote:
Smile wrote:
hatbrox wrote:Got the CPU today.
indeed, most if not all retailer won't have this CPU in stock due to near-inexistant demand. they can get it order for you pretty quickly, thought.
What motherboard did you use? I'm looking forwart to build 6x HDD NAS enclosure with this CPU.
TYAN S5510 (S5510GM3NR) is nice :) no ?

Can undervolt this to take less power if needed?
Supermicro X9SCM-F
I don't know if it can undervolt but this Xeon is already a low power CPU.
Hi hatbrox,

sorry for adding to this thread after ~2 months... but I just stumbled across this thread because I want to use exactly the same MoBo/CPU combo you chose.

Let me say first that you have an excellent taste ;)

I'll most likely go for this case:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chas ... 0T-203.cfm

because it supports 2 2,5" hotswap HDDs, and I need to build this into my IKEA RAST based 19" rack ;)

What I'm wondering - what kinda heatsink (passive) should I use with this cpu? In my case, it should fit into this 1U 19" Rack, but I only found Intel reference heatsinks...

Anyway, I'm interested what other components (case, RAM, HDD) you chose and what your experience with your setup is after 2 months...

TIA for any hints...

Alex

Lucien
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Lucien » Sun Dec 25, 2011 9:02 pm

Sorry to bump up this thread as well.
murtoz wrote:
HFat wrote:It'd be nice if you had documentation or proof for the ECC support of the consumer dual-cores. That they take ECC RAM doesn't mean the controller makes use of it.
Agreed. I saw things like this, and then questioned specifically whether i3 + ecc memory would simply boot but not use ecc functionality, or whether it would actually detect and correct ECC errors. I was told it would correct ECC errors but unfortunately I cannot share my sources for this - although I trust them for technical accuracy. Added to this the S1200BT requires ECC memory, even with i3, otherwise it won't boot. From the tech specs: "Only ECC memory is supported on this platform."
I have yet to find a utility which can tell me whether ECC mode is enabled on a live running system. If you can point me to such a utility, I'd be more than happy to run it on a C200 series based board with Core i3 (quite curious myself to see whether what I was told is true!).
Bear in mind though I only received this confirmation for Core i3 21xx, not for the pentium you refered to.
Just done some more digging and ran into this, which is interesting even though it talks of mobile products.
I've been looking at building a small ECC capable FreeNAS box. After some looking around, I went with a Pentium G620 + S1200KP + 2x4GB unbuffered ECC RAM. The CPU choice was based on the understanding that it did in fact support ECC (IIRC, this was "confirmed" by a local sales rep to my supplier, but apparently the rep didn't want to commit too clearly on the matter).

I recently got the parts and put it together, and Memtest86+ apparently has some limited ability to read if the system is using ECC or not. In my case Memtest86+ reported ECC was off, and I could not turn it on. (There's also no RAM options in the motherboard BIOS.) After some digging around, I found that the Linux command line dmidecode can be used to report system properties, and on my system it reports:

Code: Select all

Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Although it also reports that L1, L2 and L3 cache do *not* use ECC. Some of the sample output from dmidecode that can be found on the internet indicates that higher end Intel CPUs have single bit ECC there.

I'm now a little stuck. For one, not only is the output from Memtest86+ and dmidecode contradictory, but I've also seen notes that their output shouldn't be taken as absolute fact. Also, there's the issue of whether the G620 (and i3s) actually perform error correction, or they simply "support" the usage of ECC RAM.

HFat
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by HFat » Mon Dec 26, 2011 4:52 am

Yeah, this is a vexing issue for people who are only building a few servers.
The only reliable test I've heard about involves shorting pins on a DIMM. Or you could use a marginal ECC RAM stick which regularly produces errors... if you had one.
That however does not tell you about CPU cache. Do you know of a study looking at error rates there?

Shouldn't unbufferred ECC RAM report single-bit ECC by the way? On some systems it does anyway and I thought that makes sense.

Lucien
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Re: Is the Intel Xeon E3-1260L available to buy?

Post by Lucien » Tue Dec 27, 2011 7:02 am

HFat wrote:Yeah, this is a vexing issue for people who are only building a few servers.
The only reliable test I've heard about involves shorting pins on a DIMM. Or you could use a marginal ECC RAM stick which regularly produces errors... if you had one.
That however does not tell you about CPU cache. Do you know of a study looking at error rates there?
Nope, and never even thought about it as an issue before...
HFat wrote:Shouldn't unbufferred ECC RAM report single-bit ECC by the way? On some systems it does anyway and I thought that makes sense.
No idea either. dmidecode also reported

Code: Select all

Total Width: 72 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
with respect to the memory. That would make an extra 1 bit for every byte if I'm reading that right. But again, that doesn't tell me if there's simply a parity bit added, or the 8 bits are encoded somehow to 9 bits. (Is that even possible?)

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