Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those?

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quest_for_silence
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Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those?

Post by quest_for_silence » Fri Sep 04, 2015 9:20 pm

Is there anyone who either used or salvaged one of the old (2008-2010 I guess) LGA771 Xeons?

Any experience about operating those 120W (TDP) quads, particularly with reference to cooling and power draw?

washu
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by washu » Sat Sep 05, 2015 6:24 am

I had lots of those Xeons at a previous workplace. Mostly in IBM X-series, but some Dell and HPs as well.

They are pretty much the same as Core 2s of the era, except often placed in height restricted rack cases. Think of the 120W versions as OCed Q6600s and that will give you a good idea of cooling requirements. If you can get them in a normal-ish case then cooling should not be an issue with decent tower coolers, assuming they will mount properly.

Power use is quite a bit higher than desktop Core 2s in most cases due to the chipset and RAM. Most 771 boards use FB-DIMMs which are hot and power hungry. Make sure you take cooling the RAM into account, FB-DIMMs need airflow. If you get one of the rarer boards with DDR2 support then it won't be so bad power wise, but they have more limited PCIe lanes.

I'd suggest avoiding 771 Xeons just because of the power usage of the MB and RAM. Unless you have a use case for the 771s, the 775 based Xeons will be pretty much the same as a Core 2 power wise. Socket 775 does limit you to one CPU. Also, unless you get a dual socket 8 core 771 setup with applications that can use 8 cores, a 775 chip of the same clock/cache/sse level will usually perform better. FB-DIMMs add a fair bit of latency.

quest_for_silence
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by quest_for_silence » Sat Sep 05, 2015 8:49 am

washu wrote:unless you get a dual socket 8 core 771 setup with applications that can use 8 cores, a 775 chip of the same clock/cache/sse level will usually perform better. FB-DIMMs add a fair bit of latency.

Well, washu, it's just an extremely low cost (20 bucks a pop), drop-in, last update for a venerable E8500: but from what I see the relevant power draw is really huge (and heat is terrible), particularly if overclocked!
IIRC my old 775 Xeon (X3360) wasn't that hot (even at 3.8GHz).

washu
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by washu » Sat Sep 05, 2015 11:53 am

quest_for_silence wrote:Well, washu, it's just an extremely low cost (20 bucks a pop), drop-in, last update for a venerable E8500: but from what I see the relevant power draw is really huge (and heat is terrible), particularly if overclocked!
IIRC my old 775 Xeon (X3360) wasn't that hot (even at 3.8GHz).
If you already have a E8500, why not look for either a high clocked Q9XXX, or if you can find it the X3380 is pretty much adding two cores with no drop in clock. Switching to a 771 chip would require the replacement of at least the MB and very likely the RAM.

The 771 CPUs alone aren't much hotter than the 775 versions. It's the rest of the system that adds all the heat and power draw.

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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by quest_for_silence » Sat Sep 05, 2015 11:25 pm

washu wrote:Switching to a 771 chip would require the replacement of at least the MB and very likely the RAM.

Well, no, luckily it's not mandatory: I talked briefly of drop-in replacement because actually it's possible to drop a 771 CPU inside a 775 mobo, with a minor mod (mostly, the socket plastic tabs and a sticker). I borrowed an X5460 E0 (120W) from a friend, and I can keep it for 20 bucks.

I performed some preliminary tests with it and it's a bit disappointing (it's about 60-70% of a Sandy Core i5, but going for such a more recent platform, on the other hand, will cost me around 200 bucks, not 20, talking of second hand equipment, in order to perform the same upgrade).

About heat/power, yes, in similar scenarios it shows off similar figures, with reference to an old Q6600. So, at stock speed/vid they have similar power draw (though I think the Q6600 G0 was a tad cooler), at around 4GHz also, but: at 4GHz the 6600 was running at a massive 67% overclocking over stock (with insanely voltages), while the X5460 sits at a mere +26% overclocking (with an apparently modest vcore) and, again, I recall the older 775s (though the insanely voltages) to run cooler than this thing. In between the mileage may vary (at 333 FSB, stock for the 771 but +25% for the 775, I guess the E0 Xeon has probably an advantage of 30-50W over the published Q6600 web figures).

Probably my disappointment lies in the fact that I was expecting that the Xeon's supposed higher efficiency would have scaled better in overclock scenarios (OC for the X5460, I mean).

quest_for_silence
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by quest_for_silence » Sun Sep 06, 2015 4:51 am

quest_for_silence wrote:it shows off similar figures, with reference to an old Q6600.

The friend who lends me the 771 told me that I recall totally wrong about the old 65nm quads: so it came here, with an X3220 (Q6600 G0: how many IT waste we collect over the years...).

Well, I was totally wrong: it's hotter than the 45nm X5460, period, I was wrong. At 352FSB (3167MHz, same speed of the X5460 stock) it's 18 degrees hotter, and it draws about 100W AC more on load (about 25W AC more on idle, +0.22V on vcore for the Q6600 G0).

Probably I forgot that reviewers like Anandtech (or KitGuru) are always a bit optimistic when it comes to overclocking and the likes... :twisted:

mosura
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by mosura » Thu Oct 22, 2015 11:31 pm

Tried upgrading from an E4400 to an L5430. The abit board wouldn't cooperate, not even with the latest (beta) bios. Thermal sensor shenanigans. It didn't like E8XXX chips either, so I settled on a $20 E6850. RIP abit. :(

quest_for_silence
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by quest_for_silence » Fri Oct 23, 2015 5:40 am

mosura wrote:The abit board wouldn't cooperate, not even with the latest (beta) bios.
Did you mod that BIOS?

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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by mosura » Fri Oct 23, 2015 11:16 pm

quest_for_silence wrote:Did you mod that BIOS?
I tried at least a couple BIOS revisions. I didn't perform any modifications myself.

What had been modified was the processor pcb, in order to fit the unit into an LGA 775 socket. Silly me, already knowing that problems with my particular motherboard had somewhat been documented, somewhere within a terribly large thread on overclock.net called "[MOD] LGA775 Support For LGA771 Xeon CPUs."

But I still tried anyway. :oops:

quest_for_silence
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Re: Old (2008-2010?) LGA771 Xeons: any experience with those

Post by quest_for_silence » Sat Oct 24, 2015 8:58 am

mosura wrote:
quest_for_silence wrote:Did you mod that BIOS?
I tried at least a couple BIOS revisions. I didn't perform any modifications myself.

I don't know whether your specific board has some incompatibility or not, but at any rate ANY LGA775 BIOS must be modified/updated with the appropriate microcode to run an LGA771 CPU.

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