With Skylake Out, It's Becoming Easier To Build A Cheap Haswell Xeon Linux System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: With Skylake Out, It's Becoming Easier To Build A Cheap Haswell Xeon Linux System

Now that Skylake Xeon processors are appearing at major Internet retailers in sufficient quantities (such as the recently reviewed Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5), prices on older-generation Xeon CPUs are falling further. With prices on DDR3, SSDs, and Haswell-compatible motherboards also continuing to fall, it's possible to build a sufficiently powerful yet cheap Haswell Xeon system.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22677

[Kano]

Is there any logic behind using a Xeon CPU on a desktop board? The Xeon branded CPUs are only needed for ECC support - maybe you get some i7 variants with lower speed a tiny bit cheaper but i would never buy that for this purpose, that's crazy.

[Michael]

Is there any logic behind using a Xeon CPU on a desktop board? The Xeon branded CPUs are only needed for ECC support - maybe you get some i7 variants with lower speed a tiny bit cheaper but i would never buy that for this purpose, that's crazy.

Because to get a similarly clocked CPU that's 4+HT, it would cost like $100+ USD more to get a Core i7 model, since I don't care about the integrated graphics in this case.

[hajj_3]

depends on how much performance you need from a server really. I bought a Dell Poweredge T20-9179 for £154 but dell has a £70 cashback offer on so i got it for £84 delivered. Pentium G3220 (haswell), 4GB DDR3 UDIMM (server ram), motherboard, case, proprietary psu, no optical drive or hdd. Bargain for a pretty quick modern server. It uses 31-33w on idle, i tested it with a power meter. Hopefully Dell will release a new poweredge server using skylake or the upcoming kaby lake.

[GreatEmerald]

depends on how much performance you need from a server really. I bought a Dell Poweredge T20-9179 for £154 but dell has a £70 cashback offer on so i got it for £84 delivered. Pentium G3220 (haswell), 4GB DDR3 UDIMM (server ram), motherboard, case, proprietary psu, no optical drive or hdd. Bargain for a pretty quick modern server. It uses 31-33w on idle, i tested it with a power meter. Hopefully Dell will release a new poweredge server using skylake or the upcoming kaby lake.

Yeap. These days you can also just use a NUC as a server, they're powerful enough too, and save quite a bit of space.

[smartalgorithm]

Thank you so much !!! I love your post like this when you can buy a good hardware with a good price

[DanL]

I'm curious why KMS wasn't working with the 4550. I had a passively-cooled variant (from Gigabyte?) that worked just fine with the radeon driver for at least 5 years until my recent GPU upgrade.

[kaidenshi]

"This motherboard works fine under Linux, my only complaint is there's only a single fan header on the motherboard (for the CPU heatsink)."

In the photo right above this statement, there's a SYS_FAN connector right next to the front USB connector. Did you perhaps mean "only a single fan header besides the one for the CPU heatsink"?

[Kano]

@DanL

Basically the onboard gfx beats the HD 4550 easly for video accelleration. But if KMS does not work check:

cat /proc/cmdline

And look for "nomodeset" or so, it can be be a config file in there too:

grep radeon /etc/modprobe.d/*

with a blacklist - happens if you used fglrx with the same install.

[Michael]

I'm curious why KMS wasn't working with the 4550. I had a passively-cooled variant (from Gigabyte?) that worked just fine with the radeon driver for at least 5 years until my recent GPU upgrade.

It would stop sending a monitor signal.