i have the processors (4x 900/2m) and ram (16gb).
I thought I had a case for the big bastard, but i dont. I do have a ePay saved search, and occasionally I see some candidates
- VCF South West - June 14 - 16, Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas
- VCF West - Aug 2 - 3, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA
- VCF Midwest - Sept 7 - 8 2024, Schaumburg, IL
- VCF SoCal - Mid February 2025, Location TBD, Southern CA
- VCF East - April 2025, Infoage Museum, Wall NJ
-
Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
You know what seems to be extra rare? Pentium II and III Xeons.
- Thread starter hunterjwizzard
- Start date
i have the processors (4x 900/2m) and ram (16gb).
I thought I had a case for the big bastard, but i dont. I do have a ePay saved search, and occasionally I see some candidates
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Supermicro made some great american made boards.
hunterjwizzard
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2020
- Messages
- 785
Love Supermicro. I used their boards for years, but they don't seem to make workstation boards these days.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Honestly I dont remember them after the Pentium 2/3 era. So I guess they saw the writing on the wall and moved to specialized boards only.
lowen
Veteran Member
I have several newer Supermicro boards (newer than Pentium III, that is) starting with a dual Socket 604 Netburst Xeon with a pair of 2.8GHz space heaters in it.
$dayjob is still running a 48-drive slot (2.5" drives, all SSD) Supermicro rack mount chassis with an X9QR7-TF board loaded with four six core midrange Xeons and 256GB of RAM. There is a workstation version of the chassis as I recall, and the TF board has plenty of PCIe lanes to drive whatever video you'd like. In the case of this particular unit, it was donated ($dayjob is a nonprofit) as intermittently functional; I traced it to a pinched power switch wire that was intermittently shutting the machine down. Inside were 22 960GB Samsung PM853 SATA SSDs and an nVidia GTX1070, since the Supermicro chassis had more than enough PCIe power connectors and triple 740W power supplies; perfect workstation material for its day. It's running Proxmox these days, and the GTX1070 was repurposed.
Dell Precision is the standard in multi socket workstations, though, but I don't know of anything bigger than dual Socket in them.
Maximum PC built a quad socket workstation PC once, didn't they? Can't find the reference right off, though.
$dayjob is still running a 48-drive slot (2.5" drives, all SSD) Supermicro rack mount chassis with an X9QR7-TF board loaded with four six core midrange Xeons and 256GB of RAM. There is a workstation version of the chassis as I recall, and the TF board has plenty of PCIe lanes to drive whatever video you'd like. In the case of this particular unit, it was donated ($dayjob is a nonprofit) as intermittently functional; I traced it to a pinched power switch wire that was intermittently shutting the machine down. Inside were 22 960GB Samsung PM853 SATA SSDs and an nVidia GTX1070, since the Supermicro chassis had more than enough PCIe power connectors and triple 740W power supplies; perfect workstation material for its day. It's running Proxmox these days, and the GTX1070 was repurposed.
Dell Precision is the standard in multi socket workstations, though, but I don't know of anything bigger than dual Socket in them.
Maximum PC built a quad socket workstation PC once, didn't they? Can't find the reference right off, though.
I have one of their earliest boards, a socket 5 VIP board.
I also recently upgraded my garage PC to this xeon board: https://www.ebay.com/itm/305232515563
95% of what they do is whole-server racks. but they also still make the standard E-ATX boards at a bit of a premium.
Now TYAN was big up until the pentium 3 area and are kinda obscure now.
Tyan made some interesting dual Athlon MP and Opteron boards plus some XEON stuff. I think they also make IBM Power8 boards which I have never run across. Around 2007 they were purchased by Mitac and are pretty much just a contract manufacturer anymore, so you won't see them competing with retail board makers.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
I wasnt implying supermicro vanished after the p3 era. I was stating they moved from desktop boards to server boards. I dont consider xeons a desktop system even though i run one as my primary computer.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Still have a Supermicro 2xP3 Slot 1 440GX board sitting on the shelf here somewhere.
hunterjwizzard
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2020
- Messages
- 785
Gotta love dual PIIIs.
They exist, but its a very niche market. I once knew of a company that made quad socket submergence cooled workstations. I haven't spoken with anyone who did anything that CPU-intensive recently, but back when dual and quad core CPUs first started to emerge, I knew a guy who had one. He designed yachts for a living and ran VERY cpu-intensive hydrodynamic modeling software. He was complaining at the time about how commercial machines that could do what he needed costs $40-50,000. Then Tyan introduced a quad-socket board with a daughter board that added 4 additional sockets.
So this guy bought up one of those and eight of the new-fangled 6-core Opterons, and built a machine with 8 sockets and 48 cores, fitting in a big-ish ATX case, for less than $5k all-in. Doesn't sound like a whole lot now but at the time this was obscene.
NeXT
Veteran Member
I do. Something about China slipped in an extra IC somewhere that was about the size of a grain of rice and allowed the CCP to backdoor into any Supermicro installation on the planet.
The claims were never proven as they were never able to provide evidence of a board containing the extra component. Supermicro sued them to the moon and back.
lowen
Veteran Member
Xeons have been used in Dell Precision workstations for years. 530MT, 650, 670, 690, T7400, T7500, T7610 are a few of the ones I've personally worked with. The 530MT had RAMbus RDRAM with strange RAM riser boards, even.
But they haven't ever been as popular as regular PCs, of course.
There are even Dell Precision laptops with Xeon chips. Single socket Xeons in LGA775 in the Core2 era were available; I have one in a donated generic black tower PC at $dayjob; it was essentially a slightly beefed up Core2 Quad 6600. But that's not vintage, just Xeon.
Last edited:
lowen
Veteran Member
The dual Socket 8 board that I used as the base for a radio station's streaming server was a Supermicro. Solid board.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Yes I am very aware of that. But again.. as you quoted my post you know i said I,was talking about Xeons of the p2 p3 era.
Noone was putting those in desktops unless they had stupid money to burn.
lowen
Veteran Member
Saturday for grins and giggles I powered up my IBM eServer x series 330 1RU server (dual PIII-S 1.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Debian Linux) and ran it for a bit. Need a rare PCI-X GPU, though, for best performance. Fastest 32-bit PCI GPU is pretty slow for workstation purposes.
But I do servers for a living, and I'm as comfortable using that Supermicro X9QR7-TF as I would be using any other PC motherboard, even the old Biostars, Gigabytes, and others. I really like some of the server board features, though.
Perhaps I've seen some niche stuff, but I've seen quite a few Precision workstations, along with some Intel S5000X dual Socket Xeon boards (a dozen of those at current $dayjob in the Intel chassis built for that series board). These can handle PCIe GPUs with no problem; for workstations you'll likely get a Quadro or a FirePro instead of a GeForce or Radeon.
At $dayjob my one Windows XP 64-bit experience was with a Dell Precision 690 with high-end dual Xeons, 4x 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID 5, a big ATI FirePro GPU with dual 24-inch monitors, and 32GB of RAM, ECC FBDIMMS of course. Used for astronomical photographic plate scanning and data reduction. >$10,000 workstation, grant-funded.
Last edited:
lowen
Veteran Member
Indeed. Precision workstations are definitely costly new. The 530MT is the earliest one I have direct experience with, but the 620 and 610 are of the vintage mentioned in this thread. And scientific users were spending stupid money to buy them; still are, for that matter.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
I am familiar with the precisions.. as I worked for Dell for 5 years. They are pretty good. I have more experience with HPs Z400, z800 etc line as we used them extensively in the physics department at the Hospital I worked at.
I wonder if it was an attempt at market manipulation. I remember that the share price dropped like 50% on the news. After I unbent the needle on my bullshitometer, I bought in. I could buy myself a pretty damn nice Threadripper workstation on the gains.
