Used Xeon Workstation - convince me not to do it

[noenken]

I still haven't any idea what you mean so I'll just say ... "NO!" and leave it at that. :P

[NetBandit]

having more than 2 cpus can actually hinder work

I haven't seen anyone build a quad socket E7 monster yet, but I'd love to.

Also, if you have lets say 8 ram slots for the xeons, you will want to fill all of them so that you can actually get benefit from upped number of cores them selves

There is a slight benefit from having 2 memory ranks... maybe 10%-15%... but that shouldn't stop anyone from leaving RAM sockets open if they want. I have 4 single rank sticks per socket in my system so that I have room to upgrade in the future. Really, having a single rank isn't a negative, rathe, having 2 ranks is a bonus. That being said, having more than 2 ranks is actually a slight negative, but again, don't let that hold you back.

Then there is the whole thing about compatibility, remember to check your PSU actually has the cabling required by the motherboard and that the motherboard in question actually can be mounted into a normal case.

Yes. Dual socket boards are usually larger, in my case SSI-EEB. I wasn't able to run my power supply cables around the back through the cable management holes. However they reached around on the front side. But this is a characteristic of the systems and power supplies used. I spent a few more bucks on extension cables just so I could keep wiring neat. I don't think it's a big deal when building a system of this caliber.

Heat is another issue especially if you want to have 4 cpus, as a single xeon will output X ammount of heat at idle and having 4 of them will surprising everyone, quadruple the heat output. when running a render or calculation job, 2 x xeons can draw a nice 300W of power that gets turned into heat and with 4 your get 600w meaning your computer doubles as a hair dryer.

Yeah, so what. Most people are only going dual socket here. The 'big iron' E7 stuff isn't very popular, even in the enterprise. You need a larger Windows licenses, SQL server licenses, etc just to use the quad socket stuff. Nobody wants to pay for that so they get more cores instead. Only recently has M$ changed their pricing scheme to per core.

if you still want to build one, consider looking into this guide here

Like I said in my previous post, spending $400-600 on a motherboard just to run old Xeons seems like a waste. Just buy a whole used server. Upgrade the fans with something that won't be too loud, and spend the rest of the savings on RAM, or whatever.

[purkkaviritys]

Like I said in my previous post, spending $400-600 on a motherboard just to run old Xeons seems like a waste. Just buy a whole used server. Upgrade the fans with something that won't be too loud, and spend the rest of the savings on RAM, or whatever.

Sure, thats a turnkey solution for it and there is only a couple things that one should be aware of when buying server box:
The connectors in the psu might need some adapters and the fans on the motherboard might only take certain kinds and 3. the case can be weird sometimes.

and they all just come down to, do your research before you buy and I agree its the cheaper option in most cases, especially in the US.

[wendell]

truthfully, this is what I've done in the past to get a sweet deal. The "regular" dual socket used mobos on ebay are expensive as heck because there are so many cpus right now. the mobos should not cost that much... but dont underestimate a 4 core haswell.

I wish some company were around to do something crazy like figure out a way to stick two skylake 6700s on one motherboard. two 4 core cpus at 4ghz would best. a 4ghz skylake is about as fast as a single 8 core e5-2670, and considerably faster for tasks that dont multithread well.

it is all aobut the clock speed. I really, really like skylake xeons because of the h/w features for metatasking, even with only 4 cores, they are pretty zippy.