The place I worked over the summer was going to throw out an old server but before they threw it out they offered it to me knowing I love computers. Its a socket 604 dual core xeon at 3.2 ghz, its upgradeable to two cpus and it has 8 slots for ram but I only have 2gb in there. It also has dual gigabit nics. After playing around with it I noticed the cpu usage is always around 20-30 idle and when i run something it shoots up to 100%.
I only really wanted to run game servers on it for some friends but after looking at the performance I might just sell it. My question is what should I do? Ive seen 4 and 6 core socket 604 xeons should I get two of those? (Sorry for the essay)
Well socket 604 is pretty damn old at this point, with performance being damn terrible.
The processor in there is likely a single core with hyper threading based on the Netburst architecture.
Depending on the board and the chipset, you may not be able to utilise all the DIMM slots anyways. For example the Dell 1850/2850 have 6 DIMM slots, however when using 4GB DIMMs, only 4 could be populated.
Personally I would not upgrade this it. Although if you can get a matching CPU and RAM on the cheap, I wouldn't say not to.
In regards to the high resource utilization at idle, what OS are you using. With older hardware to get the most out of it you are going to have to use linux distro.
It came with server 2003 so I was using that, the cpu's look to be around $10 on eBay.haha the heatsinks cost more. What Linux distro would you recommend? Oh I don't think I mentioned it but the server is called the gateway 9510
ahahaha typical for the heatsinks to cost more :P.
As I thought you can only use up to 16GB of RAM using 2GB DIMMs using PC2-5300 Registered. I advise if you want more memory to hunt down more memory, to pull a stick out and use the values that should be printed on it. Then you know it will be compatible.
For the CPU, the specs are printed on the underside EXAMPLE
If you are new to linux, Ubuntu is a good place to start. Has good repositories already installed and with the server edition you can install only what you need on initial setup.
Although it may not be lightest on resources, its certainly better than windows. You may also opt for Debian (which ubuntu is based on) however it takes a little more work initially.
Like the old Tower servers, they just seem to stretch on forever.
Thanks for the help zanginator! Now I have to go buy some DVDs to install a different os since the bios doesn't support USB.
No Problemo, best of luck.
