What to do with 40C/80T?

R

radi4fun

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 5, 2009
Messages
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I’ve got a pair of Intel Gold 6248 Cascade Lake Xeon’s just sitting here with bunch of 32/64GB sticks of DDR4 ram. Is there anything fun/interesting I can do with these guys? I haven’t built a desktop using server CPU’s since the X99 day when it was easy to pop in a Xeon cpu in mainstream motherboards.

Heck I even have a single intel platinum 8280 cpu but I can’t seem to find any mainstream boards that support these Xeons. Am I missing something here/not looking at the right platform? I remember the Xeon LGA2011-3 were the same size as normal consumer grade CPU’s so it was easy swap. These Xeons that I’m holding are massive and have some weight to them. Anything fun I can do like Fold@home using raw CPU power or that’s no longer useful? I doubt these would be good to even do any sort of mining either.

At these point they seem like heavy paperweight. I’m not even sure if these are actually worth anything just like x99 that are dirt cheap now days. What would you do if you had these in your possession? Buy a cheap server motherboard and do what with them?
 
Open task manager and count the number of cores.
If there are any missing you get to play the game of deadlock standoff with Intel.
 
Esxi box. I'm currently using a 3900x on my desktop (after I killed my 10c 10t es x99 rig) and it's fantastic to be able to spin up a variety of os while still maintaining a powerful desktop vm using gpu pass through. I've had 4 people game off the one rig as a random use case.

Ive always gone with the dual Xeon desktop in the past as the loss in single core is just as meaningless to me as 40+ cores is to other people.

My 64c 256t phi 7230 servers are not near as practical. Those are only used for CPU mining or whenever I find a workload I feel can actually spin up the whole processor.


The 3900x is a nice balance for me. As the single core performance is good, its under a slight overclock ad esxi power managment isn't great and I always seem to have a excess of resources for anything in trying to run. Idk if you get the same balance with scalable xeons. It may we worth going with sp4 or consumer am4 chips instead.
 
You could run Distributing Computing projects.
They will take as many threads as you have.

Dont foget to join team our team.
 
radi4fun said:
Heck I even have a single intel platinum 8280 cpu but I can’t seem to find any mainstream boards that support these Xeons. Am I missing something here/not looking at the right platform?
Click to expand...
After Broadwell, Intel decided it was bad to have Xeons able to run in the same boards as desktops so they all either run different sockets (like what you have) or are locked to server chipsets (Xeon-E/W). There are a couple "mainstream" boards that will run those chips, they are stupid expensive ($1500+), didn't function well in reviews, and are primarily designed to OC the W-3175X.

You'll need to pick up a server or workstation C62x chipset board to run them, but it still won't be cheap. Think $450 for a basic single socket board and the desktop quality DP Asus C621E Sage is about $700.

radi4fun said:
I’m not even sure if these are actually worth anything just like x99 that are dirt cheap now days.
Click to expand...
Mail them to me and I'll DC the heck out of them :D
 
24,000 passmark * 2 is still not nothing, but considering a simple 5950x will give you about the same (46k) on a single chip and that with a really nice x570 motherboard will be what around $750 USD, depending by how many is the bunch of ram I am not sure I would spend too much make them run if there is no motherboard dual socket at reasonable price around, specially that because of the 50% higher single thread and density the 5950x can be use for other things has well.

What would you do if you had these in your possession? Buy a cheap server motherboard and do what with them?

Not sure, I would at high price but would I have said server already running maybe I would try to make distcc or other distribution build work, maybe convert a plex library into better modern codec to use the unused power against space used depending on how costly it would be power wise.
 
Throw them in a server - but I do that a LOT. Pick up the Sage DP board.
 
Grebuloner said:
After Broadwell, Intel decided it was bad to have Xeons able to run in the same boards as desktops so they all either run different sockets (like what you have) or are locked to server chipsets (Xeon-E/W). There are a couple "mainstream" boards that will run those chips, they are stupid expensive ($1500+), didn't function well in reviews, and are primarily designed to OC the W-3175X.

You'll need to pick up a server or workstation C62x chipset board to run them, but it still won't be cheap. Think $450 for a basic single socket board and the desktop quality DP Asus C621E Sage is about $700.


Mail them to me and I'll DC the heck out of them :D
Click to expand...

This isn't completely right The OC boards are also C62x chipsets and the EVGA can be had for under 900 at multiple places. Supermicro cranked out a "workstation" board for them as well that's a "workstation" in the same sense that ASUS slaps worksation on a lot of desktop boards. It's quasi workstation and quasi desktop. It's sub 700 bucks.

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813183699
 
I have a Xeon W-2133 sitting on my desk. I looked at maybe creating a system around it...nope! I'll stick with my X99 for now.
 
radi4fun said:
I’ve got a pair of Intel Gold 6248 Cascade Lake Xeon’s just sitting here with bunch of 32/64GB sticks of DDR4 ram. Is there anything fun/interesting I can do with these guys? I haven’t built a desktop using server CPU’s since the X99 day when it was easy to pop in a Xeon cpu in mainstream motherboards.

Heck I even have a single intel platinum 8280 cpu but I can’t seem to find any mainstream boards that support these Xeons. Am I missing something here/not looking at the right platform? I remember the Xeon LGA2011-3 were the same size as normal consumer grade CPU’s so it was easy swap. These Xeons that I’m holding are massive and have some weight to them. Anything fun I can do like Fold@home using raw CPU power or that’s no longer useful? I doubt these would be good to even do any sort of mining either.

At these point they seem like heavy paperweight. I’m not even sure if these are actually worth anything just like x99 that are dirt cheap now days. What would you do if you had these in your possession? Buy a cheap server motherboard and do what with them?
Click to expand...

Send the paper weights to me. I have lots of paper to hold down...

You'll need a workstation or server board for those xeons. They are a whole different socket than anything in the mainstream today (Socket 3647). You might try finding a barebones workstation off lease with no cpu for reasonable cost.

Then yes, put them to work on Distributed Computing tasks for fun and no profit. Build a crazy media server. That's what I've done with my X99 and TR boards.
 
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