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My Dual Opteron Build thread

In that case I'll absolutely take it. It'll end up in a nearly identical tower haha, but I'll put it to good use.
 
I passed up one of those HP dual Xeon workstation boards (XW6200) for the reason that the board is outsized and non-standard, as is the PSU.
I don't regret it.
 
The XW I had took a standard ATX PSU without issue. I have a single socket LGA2011 HP workstation board somewhere I have not experimented with(frankly I have enough single socket machines).
 
The dual CPU Xeon workstations took at utterly non-standard PSU, both in size and interface. While it takes what appears to be a standard ATX power connector, the pinout is anything but standard. I had to suss the thing out, as there's very little documentation. I've written about it here. Still have the PSU, but haven't figured out how to put it into a box, much less adapt the pinout. (e.g. "Power on" isn't activated by grounding a pin, but by applying +3.3V to one). Mine is the Compaq version.
 
I had a dell board like that. Gave up on it pretty quick.

My Opteron might not be as standard as I think. Its grown very finicky about posting. I've never actually gotten it to power by the power button but rather it turns itself on when power is applied. Not really a problem except often it refuses to do even that. The fans spin up. The fans spin down.

I have however gotten it all the way into Windows repeatedly.
 
So it seems I've had the front panel wired wrong this whole time. The power button works now. New graphics cards also arrived today, though I still haven't got an SLI bridge for them. This rig will be a lot more fun once I solve the noise problem.
 
Yeah those things were fun. Socket 604 I think? I kinda miss that machine. I had dual 3.2ghz chips in there, but only 3gb of RAM because of 32 bit limitations.


Meanwhile, in my opteron build, the brackets arrived literally AN HOUR after I dragged my bin of CPU coolers to the back of the garage. That's my luck for you.
 
Yeah those things were fun. Socket 604 I think? I kinda miss that machine. I had dual 3.2ghz chips in there, but only 3gb of RAM because of 32 bit limitations.

Xeons supported PAE, and up to 64 GB of RAM on 32 bit, you just had to pay Microsoft's extortion to use it with one of their server versions of Windows. Or use Linux.

I had an X5DPL-iGM with 12 GB of RAM and dual 3.2 GHz 604 Xeons. Linux utilized all 12 GB of RAM. Windows required Windows 2003 Datacenter to see all of it.
 
Wish I'd known that back then. I graduated to Server 2004 Datacenter Edition but the x64 version for my dual 771 build. Of course the socket 604 died sometime betwixt the two so it was kind of moot. Still, most XP games will run on server 2k3. It'd be interesting to try 32 bit datacenter edition on my dual opteron with 32gb of RAM and watch a game poo itself over that much memory.
 
Applications wouldn't know the difference unless they were large address aware.

PAE allows up to 64 GB of memory, but it has a limitation that no single process can use more than 4 GB at a time, but most 32 bit programs have a 2 or 3 GB memory limit due to not being large address aware. There is a patcher that can patch executables to make them LAA, but YMMV if it will work or not. It does benefit some late 32 bit games like Supreme Commander that have crashing issues due to running out of addressable memory, the game can run longer and with larger battles and not crash.
 
I wonder if that would help TA:Kingdoms? Large numbers of units on that game quickly lose all ability to path.
 
You can try and see what happens.

 
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